A review of Overcoming obsessive thoughts.

Abstract

Roughly, six million Americans are afflicted with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). As clinicians are well aware that OCD is often an extremely serious and emotionally crippling disease. Overcoming Obsessive Thoughts by Christine Purdon and David A. Clark is a book designed to assist the sufferers of OCD overcome their obsessions and compulsions by having the reader participate in various activities that, the authors recommend, span a six to eight week period. Their approach is based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focusing on exposure plus response prevention and how to change one's thoughts about their obsessions while not engaging in any neutralizing acts. Exposure and response prevention is the treatment of choice for OCD (Huppert & Roth, 2003; Abramowitz & Kalsy, 2001) with large clinically significant outcomes (Abramowitz, 1998). The treatment of OCD with behavioral methods has been found to be a well-established treatment (Task Force on Promotion and Dissemination of Psychological Procedures, 1995). Several-self help manuals based on CBT already exist; however, this book makes a very coherent argument as to why it is the compulsive strategies people with develop for coping with obsessive thoughts are counterproductive. Acceptance of thinking behavior is a form of response prevention and can facilitate therapeutic exposure. In addition, the book is very reader friendly. To help the reader establish a sense of normalcy, the authors assure the reader that obsessive thoughts are a part of every person's lives however; the difference lies in the interpretations of those thoughts by the person experiencing them. For example, the authors talk about the case of Neema who has a thought of swerving into the next lane of traffic and reacts by telling herself that she is not the type of person who do such a thing as compared to Ravi who has the same thought and decides not to continue to drive and thinks himself to be a murderous person at heart. In fact, Ravi will go to extremes to avoid the possibility of his acting out his thought. The book lays out several activities in which the reader can do to help them overcome their OCD and provides several examples for illustration purposes. The activities require nothing more than a notebook and the time invested in taking control of ones OCD. In the notebook, the reader is often requested to items such as characteristics of obsessions, compulsions, and control strategies on a numerical scale or a scale indicating most discomfort or least discomfort. The book is easy to read and follow with two chapters dedicated to specific types of obsessions and compulsions: ones of harm, violence and sex, and ones of a religious nature. This book begins, after giving the reader background information on OCD by having the reader complete a symptom profile of their obsessive compulsive thoughts in order to prepare the reader to better be able to understand and complete the exercises in this book. This is broken down into two steps: identifying the behavioral component and the cognitive component. Both components require the reader to complete two exercises that do not take up too much time. This profiling is a necessary step as it helps the reader identify the behavioral and cognitive aspects of their OCD and in helping the reader to identify the most troubling obsessions first. This is an important task, since the reader is looking for relief of OCD symptoms, it necessary to begin with the most troubling obsessions. The reader is introduced to an explanation of obsessive compulsive cycle that occurs when one begins to experience the obsessive thought and the hypersensitivity that occurs due to the initiation of the neutralizing, compulsion, or avoidance tactics and how this cycle can continue unless one is willing to change their thought patterns about the obsession. The heart of the book is geared to learning the skills to combat OCD. …