Outline and explain some theories and treatments of Obsessive-compulsive disorder.
... have been carried out to examine if involving the partner had any effect on the treatment, if the treatment would have a positive effect on the marriage or if the original quality of the marriage would have any effect on the OCD treatment, which fail to show any connection between marital relationship and the effects of treatment for OCD. The behavioural treatments have varied effectiveness. The most common is to exposure and response prevention. The individual is exposed to a situation which would usually cause the compulsive act to occur, but is not allowed to act. It has proved to be effective, although sometimes hospitalisation is required to prevent the patient from giving in and carrying out the act, but even although it is one of the most effective treatments for OCD, it still does not completely guarantee success. Psychologists have looked at how this treatment affected 20 individuals with chronic OCD two years after the treatment had ended and could still see improvement in 15 of the cases. Another study by Marks et al took groups of obsessive-compulsives and compared those treated with response prevention and exposure, to the other group treated with response prevention and relaxation techniques. While the relaxation techniques had no effect, 75% of those treated with the response prevention and exposure showed much improvement after 15 sessions and continued to show improvement 2 years later. There have been other studies that have looked at the effects of treatment with either exposure or response prevention alone, and which have found that both together is far more effective than each alone. Exposure is more effective at reducing obsessions, but response prevention is better at helping with compulsions, and there is greater relapse when only using one treatment. Normal people experience thoughts that are similar to obsessions, the difference is they are able to cope with them better and stop them from becoming out of hand. It appears that these thoughts can be tolerated by normal individuals in a way that OCD sufferers cannot. The thoughts affect the sufferer so much that instead of ignoring the thoughts as a normal individual might, they would try to suppress the thoughts. This only causes the sufferer to think of the thought even more as illustrated in a study in which one group of students was asked to inhibit thoughts of a white bear. Trying not to think of the white bear did not prevent thoughts of it, and also the subjects who tried to inhibit the thoughts had more subsequent thoughts of the white bear. This way of looking at the disorder as part of the sufferers mind rather than as controlled by the environment is the cognitive view whose therapy is often tied to behavioural therapy. Some psychologist’s claim that OCD sufferers overestimate the chance of something bad happening, leading to attempts to avoid what they see as potentially dangerous situations. The feeling of being out of control here is crucial, and a sense of being responsible for what happens even when this is just not the case. Often sufferers also believe that just thinking about something bad will lead to the action, such as harming others, and so they develop the symptoms in an attempt to stop these thoughts from coming true. Psychologists wanted to test two hypotheses using cognitive tasks. The first was that OCD sufferers cannot always remember if they have carried out a task, therefore they repeat it over and over again, and the second was that they were not always able to tell the difference between imagination and reality, that is they were unsure if they had just imagined doing something, therefore they repeated the action to be on the safe side. The results provided support for the first hypothesis but no conclusions could be drawn in the second. This suggests that there could be some kind of memory deficit contributing to OCD. There is also the view of some psychologists who point out that anxiety is much higher and more distressing when a person feels that they are not in control of their life and what happens in it. One of the treatments is called thought stopping. This involves a patient signalling when they think an obsessive thought, at which point the therapist will interrupt the thought by shouting stop. Eventually the idea is that the patients will learn to do this mentally by themselves, and therefore be able to prevent the obsessive thought from taking hold. There is very little evidence to support this however, which is the case for most of the therapies that try to reduce obsessions rather than compulsions. Another Cognitive therapy is particularly useful when the obsession is something, which is not easy to expose the patient to, such as some kind of social problem, and it is called cognitive rehearsal where that patient can mentally run through the situation and take different approaches to it. The psychoanalytic theory goes back to Freud and views OCD’s as symptoms of overly harsh toilet training, which make the person fixated at the anal stage, and incapable of controlling urges....