Analysis of a Cleaning/Contamination Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Case
This case paper is about Lucinda, a 20-year old single female, who suffers from the Cleaning/Contamination Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) condition since she was very young. She is characterized by intrusive thoughts, images, and/or impulses that cause distress (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors that are performed to neutralize these intrusions (Coles, Schofield & Pietrefesa, 2006), i.e. her repetitive cleaning and washing behaviors. Her anxiety became so excessive that it interfered with her daily life. She perceived that some undesirable object(s), in this case the germs, were still on the things that she will come in contact with, even after she had repeatedly washing and/or cleaning them. Her anxiety further degraded both her social and occupational functioning, which resulted in considerable impacts to herself, her friends and family. In additions, her anxiety also caused her not be able to function to her fullest potential academically and to socialize with her friends and family as much as she wanted to.
Lucinda is currently pursuing her degree in business at a local university. She has been attending the university for the past two-and-a-half years, and yet she is still at her sophomore year. She has earned just 26 credit hours towards her business degree. While attending the school, she also works part-time at the help-desk in one of the university labs.
Lucinda lives in a small apartment off-campus. She has been frequently late for classes and missed multiple class periods each semester. She has been experiencing a lot of stress trying to keep up with her class work and considering dropping 1 to 2 courses this semester. ...
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Regina is presenting symptoms that would best meet the criteria for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, based on the DSM-IV-TR. Her obsessions consist of recurrent and persistent thoughts and impulses that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and inappropriate and cause marked anxiety or distress. The thoughts and impulses are not simply excessive worries about real-life problems. She is showing repetitive behaviors that meet the compulsion criteria by her need to clean her apartment every morning and to clean her desk each day before class in order to relieve her feelings of anxiety. Regina has recognized that her anxiety about germs and the amount of time she spen...
Baer, Lee. "Personality Disorders in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder." In Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: Practical Management. 3rd edition. Edited by Michael Jenike and others. St. Louis: Mosby, 1998.
Frequent cleaning and washing are the most common and recognized symptoms in the obsessive-compulsive cleanliness disorder. People who have OCD are trying, by way of extreme cleaning acts or avoiding touch things directly, to avoid harm, illness and contamination: for example, they avoid touching door knobs without a napkin, and engage in extreme hand washing. It is also common to see people with OCD have raw skin, avoiding shaking hands, ...
Panic disorders and agoraphobia are caused by separation anxiety, mainly separation from parents, early in life. This happens in children who were taught to intervene in separation from a parenting figure by throwing tantrums. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is seen as a fixation in the mind at the primary stage of psychosexual development. The fact that compulsive behavior rituals often involve cleanliness shows that there is mental fixation during a period of mastering unclean bowel movements.
In the book "The boy who couldn't stop washing" by Judith L. Rapoport, M.D., the narrator, Rapoport, deals with hundreds of mentally disturbed children and adults who suffer of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Rapoport describes the intricacies of the disease and its treatments as well as the fact that the cause is unknown but there are many probable theories. Victims of this horrible disease are plagued with overwhelming thoughts of insecurity that tear apart their lives and haunt them, increasingly, over their lifetimes. Rapoport while learning about OCD, herself, learned how to treat each one with many different psychological perspectives including: biological, behavioral, and psychodynamic contributions. A story on ABC's 20/20 about OCD brought Rapoport's new study on the disease to the light, resulting in thousands of calls to her office daily from desperate OCD sufferers.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is placed on the lowest level of spectrum of the effects of personality disorders and mental illnesses. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, is a...
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a disorder which causes people to develop an anxiety when certain obsessions or compulsions are not fulfilled. OCD can affect both children and adults with more than half of all adults with OCD stating that they experienced signs as a child. People living with OCD display many obvious signs such as opening and closing a door fifty times because they have to do it “just right”. Others exhibit extreme cleanliness and will wash their hands or take showers as often as they can because they constantly feel dirty. OCD devastates people’s social lives as they are fixated and obsessed with perfection that can take forever to achieve. However people living with OCD are often found to have an above average intelligence and typically excel at school due to their detail oriented mindset, cautious planning and patience. OCD can be caused by many different factors such as genetics or the ever changing world a...
Obsessive compulsive disorder is a psychological disorder with symptoms of obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions, such as cleaning, checking, and counting. OCD is linked to other disorders such as attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) and experiential avoidance disorder (EA). OCD and ADHD have similar effects in children being that they both lead to procrastination when trying to complete simple tasks. People with OCD and EA both have consistent negative thoughts but the same treatments can be used for both. The neurobiological link between OCD and ADHD says “Obsessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are two of the most common neuropsychiatric diseases in pediatric populations. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies suggest that partly similar executive functions are affected in both disorders” (Brem et al. 175). OCD and ADHD are very common especially in children and they both have similar effects. People with obsessive compulsive disorder put themselves through a lot more ...
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) can be defined as having repetitive, unwanted, urges and thoughts that raise the need for excessive amounts of time or energy spent on the unwanted urges. OCD typically involved ritualistic like tendencies that result in two types of characteristics, obsessions and compulsions. Obsession can be characterized by the actions and thoughts that intrude one’s mind. As well as the uncontrollable and irrational impulses one must face with OCD. Compulsions can be defined as the act of doing excessive things related to behaviors. People feel the need to act on these compulsions for the sole purposes of releasing the anxiety they feel by the compulsive and reoccurring thoughts. In essence,...
For a person to be diagnosed with OCD, they need to have both an obsession and a compulsion. An obsession is best defined as recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges or images that are experienced during the disturbance as intrusive and unwanted. While compulsions are defined by: repetitive behaviours such as hand washing, ordering, checking in which the person feels they feel strongly compelled to perform in response to their obsession The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM–5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The most empirically sound method of treatment is called Exposure response prevention (Himle & Franklin, 2009). This will be the psychological method of treatment discussed.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a type of anxiety disorder that can be best characterized by the recurrent or disturbing thoughts that are labeled as obsessions. Sometime these obsessions can take on the form of intrusive images or the unwanted impulses. The compulsions can come from the repetitive or ritualized behaviors that a person feels driven to perform on a daily basis. The majority of people with the diagnosis of OCD can have both obsessions and compulsions, but most of the times about 20% have obsessions alone while 10% may have the compulsions alone (Goodman M.D., 2013) . Common types that have been illustrated in individual’s diagnoses with OCD can be characterized with concerns of contamination, safety or harm to themselves, unwanted acts of aggression, the unacceptable sexual or religious thoughts, and the need for symmetry or exactness. While some of the most common compulsion can be characterized as excessive cleaning, checking, ordering, and arranging rituals or the counting and repeating routines activities that are done sometimes on a daily basis multiple times in a day.
One of the most widely spread disorders across the country these days is obsessive compulsive disorder, or otherwise known as OCD. All types and ages of people can develop OCD, and it can play a large role in how you go about your daily life, and the daily stresses that you run into. Obsessive compulsive disorder falls in with the category of anxiety disorders, and is characterized by persistent routines and obsessions which often results in compulsive rituals done on a daily basis. Some common factors of having OCD is the need to arrange things, compulsive acts of hand washing, and even counting. (Canadian Mental Health Association, 2014, p. 1) There are many symptoms that can fall into the category of being classified as OCD. Some people have both obsessions and compulsions, but also some may only experience one factor. (L.Robinson, 2014, p.2) Some symptoms that can be classified as signs of obsessive thoughts include: fear of germs, violent thoughts or images, fear of harm, superstitions, and symmetry. Although these are only just a few, there are plenty of symptoms most involving the action of being afraid of something. Some signs of compulsive behavior can result in excessive double checking of things, counting, repetition of words, organization of things, and even hoarding. I find it ironic that two people of a completely different mindset of what a home should look like, could both have the same disease. For instance, one person can be a hoarder living in a cluttered house, and one person could be living in the most pristinely cleaned home. Although OCD may seem harmless and in some cases even an advantage to one’s lifestyle of not becoming helpless and lazy, there are many risk factors that come with it as well. Obsessive ...
undiagnosed. Patients obsessively wash, check something or hoard things to relieve themselves of an overwhelming anxiety, and are fully aware their behavior is abnormal. This research studies a 23-year-old married woman who sought treatment for a severe washing and cleaning problem and how the patient was treated. I will discuss how the patient was diagnosed, and treated with a form of cognitive behavioral psychotherapy or CBT (exposure and response treatment) and what medications can be used for treatment.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a disease that a lot of people suffer with in society especially young adults. While it is not a disease that is deadly, it does affect the victim in every day aspects of their life and can ultimately control their lives. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is defined by the National Institute of Mental Health as, “… a common, chronic and long-lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions) that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over”. The thoughts that individuals have when suffering through Obsessive Compulsive Disorder cannot be restrained and really can disturb the individual. Thoughts or actions that people may have can range from worrying about daily occurrences, such as washing their hands, to having thoughts of harming people that are close to them. People tend to have these reoccurring compulsions because they believe by doing them or thinking them, they will either prevent something bad from happening or because it eliminates stress that they have. This disease can last a lifetime and can be very detrimental and disabling to how one lives their lives. Individuals can start to see signs of OCD in either late adolescence or even early adulthood and everyone is susceptible. When it comes to classifying this incurable disease, there is much debate on whether or not it a type of anxiety (Abramowitz, Taylor, & McKay, 2009). It is important to be able to understand this mental disorder since so many people are diagnosed with it. While there are treatments for OCD, there are no cures yet. Treatments could range anywhere from taking prescribed medication to just going to therapy and counseling fo...