OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER A GUIDE FOR PATIENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES

Table of Contents

1. OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER A GUIDE FOR PATIENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES
2. WHAT IS OCD?
   1. Examples of OCD
   2. What happens In OCD?
   3. How does someone develop OCD
   4. Why do the problems continue and get worse?
   5. Making sense of OCD
3. THE TREATMENT OF OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER
   1. Treatment
   2. Assessing the problems
   3. What happens In treatment
   4. Some Important points about treatment
   5. How can you get the best out of treatment?
4. ADVICE FOR FAMILY AND FRIENDS
   1. Advice
   2. How can you maintain improvement?

Making sense of OCD

Let us try to bring together what we have learned about so far. If we look at it from the point of view of the sufferer, we can see that OCD is not as 'crazy' as it sometimes seems. Having unpleasant thoughts is very common, but some people become very frightened by them. If you have an idea that something terrible will happen unless you do something, it seems perfectly sensible to try to prevent it. However, the action you take to prevent disaster actually strengthens the original idea and so you get into a vicious circle. The fears get worse and worse, and the preventive action comes to rule your life. In the next part of this manual, we shall talk about what can be done about this.