Adult Treatment Planner
27: Obsessive-Compulsive
SNOMED Terms
- Obsessive compulsive personality disorder
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Goals
- Reduce the frequency, intensity, and duration of obsessions.
- Reduce time involved with or interference from obsessions and compulsions.
- Function daily at a consistent level with minimal interference from obsessions and compulsions.
- Resolve key life conflicts and the emotional stress that fuels obsessive-compulsive behavior patterns.
- Let go of key thoughts, beliefs, and past life events in order to maximize time free from obsessions and
compulsions.
Behavioral Definitions
- Intrusive, recurrent, and unwanted thoughts, images, or impulses that distress and/or interfere with the
client's daily routine, job performance, or social relationships.
- Failed attempts to ignore or control these thoughts or impulses or neutralize them with other thoughts and
actions.
- Recognition that obsessive thoughts are a product of his/her own mind.
- Repetitive and/or excessive mental or behavioral actions are done to neutralize or prevent discomfort or
some dreaded outcome.
- Recognition of repetitive behaviors as excessive and unreasonable.
Diagnoses
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
- Anxiety Disorder NOS
- Major Depressive Disorder
- Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder
Objectives and Interventions
- Describe the history and nature of obsessions and compulsions.
- Establish rapport with the client toward building a therapeutic alliance.
- Assess the client's frequency, intensity, duration, and history of obsessions and compulsions (e.g.,
The Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for the DSM-IV by DiNardo, Brown, and Barlow).
- Complete psychological tests designed to assess and track the nature and severity of obsessions and
compulsions.
- Administer a measure of OCD to further assess its depth and breadth (e.g., The Yale-Brown
Obsessive-Compulsive Scale by Goodman and colleagues, 1989a, 1989b).
- Cooperate with an evaluation by a physician for psychotropic medication.
- Arrange for an evaluation for a prescription of psychotropic medications (e.g., serotonergic
medications).
- Monitor the client for prescription compliance, side effects, and overall effectiveness of the
medication; consult with the prescribing physician at regular intervals.
- Participate in small group exposure and ritual prevention therapy for obsessions and compulsions.
- Enroll the client in intensive (e.g., daily) or nonintensive (e.g., weekly) small (closed
enrollment) group exposure and ritual prevention therapy for OCD (see Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
by Foa and Franklin).
- Verbalize an understanding of the rationale for treatment of OCD.
- Assign the client to read psychoeducational chapters of books or treatment manuals on the rationale
for exposure and ritual prevention therapy and/or cognitive restructuring for OCD (e.g., Mastery of
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Kozak and Foa; Stop Obsessing by Foa and Wilson).
- Discuss how treatment serves as an arena to desensitize learned fear, reality test obsessional fears
and underlying beliefs, and build confidence in managing fears without compulsions (see Mastery of
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Kozak and Foa).
- Identify and replace biased, fearful self-talk and beliefs.
- Explore the client's schema and self-talk that mediate his/her obsessional fears and compulsive
behavior, and assist him/her in generating thoughts that correct for the biases (see Mastery of
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Kozak and Foa; Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Salkovskis and
Kirk).
- Undergo repeated imaginal exposure to feared external and/or internal cues.
- Assess the nature of any external cues (e.g., persons, objects, situations) and internal cues
(thoughts, images, impulses) that precipitate the client's obsessions and compulsions.
- Direct and assist the client in construction of a hierarchy of feared internal and external fear
cues.
- Select initial imaginal exposures to the internal and/or external OCD cues that have a high
likelihood of being a successful experience for the client: do cognitive restructuring within and
after the exposure (see Mastery of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Kozak and Foa; Treatment of
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by McGinn and Sanderson).
- Complete homework assignments involving in vivo exposure to feared external and/or internal cues.
- Assign the client a homework exercise in which he/she repeats the exposure to the internal and/or
external OCD cues using restructured cognitions between sessions and records responses (or assign
"Reducing the Strength of Compulsive Behaviors" in Adult Psychotherapy Homework Planner, 2nd ed. by
Jongsma); review during next session, reinforcing success and providing corrective feedback toward
improvement (see Mastery of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Kozak and Foa).
- Implement relapse prevention strategies for managing possible future anxiety symptoms.
- Discuss with the client the distinction between a lapse and relapse, associating a lapse with an
initial and reversible return of symptoms, fear, or urges to avoid and relapse with the decision to
return to fearful and avoidant patterns.
- Identify and rehearse with the client the management of future situations or circumstances in which
lapses could occur.
- Instruct the client to routinely use strategies learned in therapy (e.g., continued exposure to
previously feared external or internal cues that arise) to prevent relapse into obsessive-compulsive
patterns.
- Schedule periodic "maintenance" sessions to help the client maintain therapeutic gains and adjust to
life without OCD (see Hiss, Foa, and Kozak, 1994, for a description of relapse prevention strategies
for OCD).
- Implement the use of the thought-stopping technique to reduce the frequency of obsessive thoughts.
- Teach the client to interrupt obsessive thoughts using the thought-stopping technique of shouting
STOP to himself/herself silently while picturing a red traffic signal and then thinking about a
calming scene.
- Assign the client to implement the thought-stopping technique on a daily basis between sessions (or
assign "Making Use of the Thought-Stopping Technique" in Adult Psychotherapy Homework Planner, 2nd
ed. by Jongsma); review implementation, reinforcing success and redirecting for failure.
- Identify key life conflicts that raise anxiety.
- Explore the client's life circumstances to help identify key unresolved conflicts.
- Read with the client the fable "The Friendly Forest" or "Round in Circles" from Friedman's Fables
(Friedman), and then process using discussion questions.
- Assign the client to read or read to him/her the story "The Little Clock That Couldn't Tell Time" or
"The Little Centipede Who Didn't Know How to Walk" from Stories for the Third Ear (Wallas); process
the stories as they are applied to the client's current life.
- Verbalize and clarify feelings connected to key life conflicts.
- Encourage, support, and assist the client in identifying and expressing feelings related to key
unresolved life issues.
- Implement the Ericksonian task designed to interfere with OCD.
- Develop and assign an Ericksonian task (e.g., if obsessed with a loss, give the client the task to
visit, send a card, or bring flowers to someone who has lost someone) to the client that is centered
around the obsession or compulsion and assess the results with the client.
- Engage in a strategic ordeal to overcome OCD impulses.
- Create and sell a strategic ordeal that offers a guaranteed cure to the client for the obsession or
compulsion. (Note that Haley emphasizes that the "cure" offers an intervention to achieve a goal and
is not a promise to cure the client at the beginning of the therapy. See Ordeal Therapy by Haley.)
- Develop and implement a daily ritual that interrupts the current pattern of compulsions.
- Help the client create and implement a ritual (e.g., find a job that the client finds necessary but
very unpleasant, and have him/her do this job each time he/she finds thoughts becoming obsessive);
follow up with the client on the outcome of its implementation and make necessary adjustments.
Index