Word: ocd
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...MATTER HOW OR WHEN THE DISORDER hits, the first step in striking back is usually comparatively short-term behavioral therapy, using a technique known as exposure and response prevention (ERP), in which OCD sufferers don't try to avoid their particular source of anxiety but actually seek it out. Eventually, emotional nerve endings grow desensitized to the stimulus. The point is to tough it out until that happens...
...Obsessive Compulsive Foundation convention in Atlanta last summer, Grayson, the Pennsylvania-based clinical psychologist, gave those in attendance who had OCD a quick taste of ERP. Inviting the ones in the audience with dirt and germ anxieties to come forward, he instructed them to sit beside him on the ballroom carpet. Then he told them to touch the carpet and bring their fingers to their lips. Left to themselves, most would have refused or, if they went along, would have then found the nearest bathroom and spent long minutes--perhaps long hours--scrubbing. Instead, they sat with Grayson...
Last year investigators from the University of Chicago and the University of Washington studied a group of 144 children-- 71% of whom were boys--who had tics or OCD. All the kids, it turned out, were more than twice as likely as others to have had a strep infection in the previous three months. For those with Tourette's symptoms, the strep incidence was a whopping 13 times as great...
...tics and OCD are probably the result of an autoimmune response, in which the body begins attacking its own healthy tissue. Blood tests of kids with strep-related tics and OCD have turned up antibodies hostile to neural tissue, particularly in the brain's caudate nucleus and putamen, regions associated with reinforcement learning. "There certainly seems to be an epidemiological relationship there," says Dr. Cathy Budman, associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at New York University, "but what it means needs to be further investigated...
Such tactical jujitsu works for all manner of OCD, though it's not always easy to find a doctor skilled at administering it. Patients obsessed about their sexual orientation, who become intolerably anxious if they so much as notice an attractive member of the same sex, are assigned to do just that: flip through magazines for scantily clad same-sex models. People plagued by what's known as relationship substantiation, who become consumed by inconsequential defects in a partner, are encouraged to seek out those flaws and even exaggerate them in their mind...