What differentiates people with obsessive compulsive disorder from those who dont have OCD?

Living with mental disorders is extremely challenging, especially when it comes to obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Despite the similarities in their names, they do not share many similarities. In this video we are going to explore the differences. OCD is ruled by intrusive thoughts called, obsessions that cause anxiety and force the person to perform compulsions for relief. OCPD is ruled by perfectionism and detail.

Unlike individuals with OCD, people with OCPD are not self-aware and can hurt the people around them. Their relationships are more susceptible, and they face more issues in the workplace. Nonetheless, people suffering from both disorders can benefits from a variety of treatments. To learn more about OCD and OCPD please check out the resources provided below.

This video contains information about mental health that may be sensitive to some viewers. This video is not a substitute for professional advice and is created for informational purposes. Please speak with a qualified mental health expert if you feel you need medical advice.

Dean McKay, PhD, an expert in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), says he has never seen two people with the condition who had exactly the same constellation of symptoms.

"There's vast variation," says McKay, a psychology professor at Fordham University, New York, New York, and a fellow in APA divisions 5, 12 and 29. All that variety makes the condition tricky to treat. "It's challenging to keep thinking of ways to approach the problem," says McKay.

He works with OCD and anxiety disorders as a researcher, heading up Fordham's Compulsive, Obsessive and Anxiety Program (COAP) laboratory, and he has a small clinical practice in White Plains, New York, where his patients run the gamut in terms of age — OCD frequently begins in childhood or adolescence. He also teaches graduate and undergraduate students at Fordham.

Anybody who keeps a neat desk or is unfailingly punctual gets ribbed for having OCD, but McKay says there's nothing fun about the disorder, which is characterized by persistent, uncontrollable thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions). What differentiates OCD from normal quirky behavior is whether it's causing the individual emotional distress and the extent to which it interferes with normal life, for example, "Do you avoid contact with people to keep from having your stuff messed up?" McKay says.

OCD is a serious mental health issue that affects about 1-2% of the population, a chronic condition that can cut deeply into an individual's happiness, work and social functioning. Despite the array of symptoms the condition can present, OCD does break out into a few subtypes — obsessive feelings of being contaminated, which the individual may counter with compulsive washing or cleaning; an obsession with symmetry and order, with compulsions of arranging and counting; and intense thoughts of harming oneself or others, or religious or sexual obsessions, with checking compulsions.

The good news is that OCD can often be treated, though some types are easier than others, McKay says. The treatment that produces the best outcomes is cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), specifically a type called exposure response prevention (ERP), in which the patient leans into thoughts, images, objects or circumstances that are likely to trigger her obsessions, while choosing not to give in to the resulting compulsions, McKay says. The benefit of that approach, simply put, is that the patient can see that nothing bad happens as a result. At first, the patient does these "exposures" with a therapist, but eventually is able to do them alone. "Usually the therapist will suggest some more modest between-sessions exercises for the client to practice right away," McKay says.

"It's challenging to keep thinking about different ways to approach this problem, using this one procedure (ERP) that looks so simple and sounds really easy, but in execution is actually pretty complicated," he says. That's because the condition is so varied, and every treatment is bespoke.

McKay says that people with OCD frequently don't get the treatment they need. The condition is often misdiagnosed, perhaps construed as anxiety. Sufferers may first seek help from medical doctors, who are unlikely to be familiar with the condition's range of symptoms.

Some mental health professionals who can recognize OCD try to treat the condition without using ERP, McKay says, perhaps because implementing it can make the patient more anxious in the short term. ERP isn't always the appropriate therapy, but when it is, other therapies are not likely to help, and can actually do more harm than good, McKay says. Patients may lose hope for getting better, decide therapy has nothing to offer them, or even wind up with worse symptoms than they started out with.

"Just as with any other intervention, you're asking people to do some things that are hard; change is hard," he says. McKay is a proponent of using interventions that have been tested in randomized controlled trials, but he says he finds himself promoting the evidence-based ERP approach to therapists who are reluctant to use it as, ultimately, the compassionate course. While ERP may be hard to witness in the early stages, if it's done properly and appropriately, "the sufferer feels relief rather quickly."

McKay says he takes heart in the fact that "the network of people who practice effective therapy for OCD is growing," and that patients are finding those practitioners. Social media networks are helping to get the word out, and not only to patients. "On Twitter, there is this network of therapists who exchange ideas about how to think about treatment and how to make exposure more pleasant for clients. That network is growing," he says, disseminating information about how to treat OCD effectively. Telehealth options are promising as well.

Why OCD afflicts the people it does, and the significance of the ways in which it manifests itself, are among the research topics McKay pursues in his lab. "There are some genetic effects that have been found, but they're not as profound as we might have anticipated," he says.

One recent project involved pinning down some of the characteristics of misophonia, a debilitating condition notable for the extreme aversive reactions to specific sounds (and visual reminders of them) that sufferers experience. The disorder has some associations with OCD. McKay says, "We're just coming to understand it."

Anxiety typically rides along with OCD, but over his career of working with and studying these conditions, McKay has become interested in other emotions, like disgust, which "for good reason has evolved to protect us" from certain kinds of danger. "Disgust is a profoundly important emotion that most clinicians overlook when assessing factors that lead to avoidance in individuals with anxiety disorders. I believe, and emerging evidence supports this, that disgust plays a role in many other conditions as well," he says.

A Long Island, New York, native, McKay still lives there. He went to Hofstra University in Hempstead for college, and all the way through graduate school to his PhD. He's been at Fordham for 23 years, a core faculty member in the clinical graduate program.

McKay first thought of working with OCD during an internship in graduate school, when colleagues noticed he had a knack for creating the vivid imagery that can help someone with OCD confront his fears. He stayed with the work because he enjoys it.

"I have a genuine passion for it," he says. "I like teaching, passing this on to the next generation of therapists, and I find the research endlessly fascinating."

What is the main difference between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder OCD and obsessive compulsive personality disorder OCPD )? Quizlet?

Which of the following is one of the criteria that distinguish abnormal behavior?

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