Professional

In the face of a perceived threat, your body often activates a fight-or-flight response. Heart in your throat. Butterflies in your stomach.

Parents of children with OCD are often not aware of how they can contribute to their child's behavior, or more specifically, how they unintentionally support the OCD through accommodating behaviors. This blog post explores the role of family accommodations in childhood OCD and provide strategies to help parents better support their child. 

Many of the themes common to OCD have a taboo or forbidden nature to them, making asking for help from treatment providers an anxiety-inducing experience.  Clinicians can be helpful by bringing voice to this issue, acknowledging and validating that anxiety is a natural part of asking for help. 

Although primary care physicians and other non-specialists in mental health feel comfortable managing less complicated anxiety-related disorders, OCD is a more complex diagnosis and ideally should be managed by a psychiatrist.  Before initiating medication, the psychiatrist will first do a thorough assessment to ensure that the diagnosis of OCD is accurate, and to determine the presence of coexisting conditions that may complicate the treatment.

Intensive programs for OCD can serve as a bridge between different levels of care, specifically as a step-up from weekly outpatient therapy or as a step-down from partial hospitalization/residential programs.

As we are experiencing heat domes across the planet, there is emerging evidence from recent publications that heat, among effects on many other human activities, can also have profound effects on mental health. - Martin Paulus, PhD

There can be confusion when differentiating between body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and eating disorders (EDs). They both involve pre-occupying appearance-related thoughts and repetitive behaviours, but are treated differently.

According to the DSM 5, Body focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) are classified as obsessive–compulsive related disorders. But the question remains, how do we treat BFRBs?