Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy
Clinical researcher Dr. Kieron O'Connor (content in French) and his team of psychologists at the Fernand-Seguin Research Centre offer a therapy which has been proven to be effective in reducing obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
Seventy percent of people who completed this form of therapy reported a significant improvement in their condition, regardless of the type of OCD they were suffering from.
The therapy is offered as part of a clinical research program. Our studies evaluate the efficacy of cognitive and behavioural treatments on OCD and related problems.
Clinical problems covered by the study:
- All types of obsessions and compulsions, with or without rituals
- Obsession with a strong level of conviction (e.g., body dysmorphic disorder)
Consult the following pages to learn about our programs for disorders related to OCD:
What the Clinical Research Program Involves
The therapy includes:
- 20 one-on-one meetings per week, which take place at a fixed time between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays at the Fernand-Seguin Research Centre
- one follow-up phone call per month for six months
In addition to the time spent in therapy, there are:
- five meetings with different members of the team over a one-year period: four meetings with a psychologist-evaluator (to evaluate therapy) and one meeting with a neuropsychologist (to explore neuropsychological processes)
- numerous multiple-choice questionnaires to be completed during therapy and one year of follow-up
* Together, the various measures allow us to analyze patients’ development over the course of treatment.
Each completed questionnaire is an important source of additional information that helps us to enrich our understanding of this area.
Specialized Therapy for OCD
Experts agree on the use of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) to treat OCD. As the name suggests, CBT is a therapy that treats both cognition (i.e., thinking) and behaviour. In other words, the therapist works to modify the patient’s way of interpreting situations and behaving. Thoughts and behaviour are important factors in explaining OCD.
How is OCD viewed in CBT?
People who suffer from OCD commonly have difficulty separating their obsessive thoughts and behaviour from the rest of their personality. For these individuals, everything that they are (their values, desires, skills and faults) and do (thinking and acting) is influenced by OCD. However, it has been clearly shown that OCD is a behaviour (or habit) problem, not a personality problem.
Obsession keeps affected people in a state of alertness. They perform compulsions with the goal of reducing anxiety. It has been proven, however, that compulsions maintain the anxiety and, in so doing, cause the problem to persist.
What does the therapist do?
Psychologists using a cognitive-behavioural approach encourage affected individuals to recognize and understand their obsessions. They work to modify their behaviour and way of seeing things by using self-observation and cognitive restructuring exercises.
Putting these exercises into practice helps to reduce anxiety, along with the gradual acquisition of new techniques.
This approach considers the therapeutic process as a form of learning: one learns to develop new forms of behaviour by practising them.