If you were ever wondering what was the most popular treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), wonder no longer. It’s not psychotherapy. And it’s not some medication developed specifically for OCD.
Nope, it’s good ‘ole antidepressants.
Treatment options for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are currently dominated by antidepressants, and this trend is expected to continue for the next seven to eight years.
That is, unless drugmakers step up their future research to develop new, more effective treatments, according to a new report by business intelligence company GlobalData.
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Interesting article. In my son’s case, he took an antidepressant which most likely helped him get in good enough condition to tackle Exposure Response Prevention Therapy. He was eventually weaned off drugs and, for him, the ERP Therapy is what helped most. He worked hard, and his OCD, which was once severe, has been classified as mild for quite some time.
Antidepressants will remain the main treatment for OCD as long as A) GP’s are the ones predominantly doing the diagnosis, B) it is more financially lucrative to prescribe them then actually cure OCD, and C) the general public doesn’t understand what causes OCD (and they are allowed to blame it on uncontrollable factors such as genetics or chemicals). I might add a D) that it will continue as long as we raise children in a world where 50% of the marriages end in divorce, 70% of the children of mothers under 30 are cared for by the single mothers, and we throw our children in that “Lord Of The Flies” environment of daycare then public school by the time they reach 12 weeks old.
OCD is a Pavlovian trigger gone haywire. When an individual has suffered such insecurity in their lives that they must keep returning to something that they did that once gave them pleasure to get the chemical release in their brains to give them satisfaction. We don’t call obesity OCD, nor do we call alcoholism OCD. We don’t say that an athlete or musician that achieves greatness by practicing the same thing for 15 to 20 hours a day has OCD. Even on a more basic level, I have rarely heard to “Skinner’s” rats had OCD, but they did. When we do something that fulfills one of our basic needs our brain is rewarded with a warm and fuzzy satisfied feeling. People with OCD have a hard time attaining OR are overly addicted to that feeling. So give them a drug that artificially supplies that feeling and you remedy the problem, but you don’t fix it. Fixing it would require identifying why the natural need exists and emotionally/ psychologically exercising that function like a diver expands his ability to breath under water.
I think this article highlighted an important point that medication is only effective for as long as you continue taking it because it reduces the symtomatology and mainly the anxiety. However, an important question in the field of psychology has been, “Is that enough? and “Are the root causes that trigger obsessions and compulsions” dealt with?” If medication cannot respond to these two questions, it means that the patient has to become a lifelong dependent on medication, which has its adverse effects. Another alternative, as the previous reader had pointed out, is to seek specialized cognitive behavior therapy in conjunction with exposure and response prevention (ERP) to target patients’ maladaptive thinking behavioral patterns for long-term benefits.
Dr. Chow,
Good points. However, another question needs addressed. Are the side affects worse on the quality of life then remedy. It is unlikely that we would push a drug with the precaution, “Here this will cure your mild acne, but 2 out of every 10 people we give it to become partially paralyzed.” Yet it is nothing to say to a patient that has mild emotional disorders, “here take this pills they will take away your anxiety/ depression/ OCD/ ect.. Oh, but should a manic episode ensue, you may very well throw away everything that makes you who you are, start a new addiction, end up in jail, loose your job, divorce your spouse for an internet lover, or even go on a shooting spree. We think this only happens to 2 in 100 people, but we don’t want to study it out of fear of what we may find. However, these outcomes sure look a lot like patients who have suffered brain damage to their PFC.” With psychotropic drugs the affect isn’t on the patient alone.
When it comes to AD’s another issues is that we have yet come to terms with the function of depression and anxiety. It seems they are natural defense mechanism for the human psyche.. So if removing or diminishing them, then haven’t we remedied one problem while exposing the patient to a whole slew of other problems? We wouldn’t prescribe a pill that completely numbs the pain response and send them on their way. Yet I have observed more then one person who should have been going through the stages of grief, and consciously aware of it, but were unable to feel those emotions while on AD’s. If it was just “here are the symptoms, treat it with this” we could have a computer be a doctor now. It is those nuances of the sum result of the treatment that our doctors are supposed to be trained for.