Mr. Bahr, founder of the St. Louis OCD Support group discusses his process of identifying and utilizing a system of support for his son who was diagnosed at an early age with OCD. This process involved educating himself and his family, educating the public, and guiding families and clients to seek information, and treatment resources within their communities.
Discussion in this training focuses on Ms. Tarter’s experience of OCD. This experience involves a repetitive cycle of overwhelming obsessions that causes great anxiety and elicits her attempts to decrease this anxiety through the use of rituals that are only briefly satisfying in decreasing the anxiety. Ms Tarter explains that there is no cure for OCD and iterates the idea that folks must learn how to cope with the illness through techniques such as controlled breathing, the use of coping statements, tactile strategies and finally, medication.
OCD is characterized by the experience of obsessions and compulsions that greatly affect the quality of an individual’s life. Obsessions are thoughts, feelings, and urges that result in great discomfort. Compulsions are the strategies that people use to decrease or neutralize discomfort experienced by the obsessions. In order to meet the criteria for a diagnosis of OCD, a person must spend 1 hour a day in either mental or behavioral ritual or the obsession must cause great distress and/or it must cause significant problems in their life. Furthermore, OCD has an impact of the individual’s family and other systems of support.In this video, Mr. Mitchell describes Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and identifies the criteria for its diagnosis. In addition, Mr. Mitchell describes how OCD is manifested in behavior and identifies treatment options for the disorder. Further discussion centers on how family and other support systems are affected by the person with OCD.
