OCD is a Brain Disorder ? So You Can't Do Much About It?

[Daniel E.]

an excerpt from the myMCT self-help manual for OCD

Hardly a week passes in which there are no new findings published in scientific journals about brain changes in OCD. The correlations between the brain and OCD have been a source of relief for some patients ("it‘s not me – it‘s my OCD“) while others let themselves become resigned due to the false belief that OCD involves an irreparable dysfunction – as in a defective car.

The brain is the record of its use: If we are sad or cheerful, this leads to changes in the current circulation of the brain. Long-term influences lead to more intensive brain changes. For example, consistent practice of an instrument enlarges the areas of the brain that are responsible for the corresponding fine motor skills. Drug consumption can also lead to brain changes. Such processes are usually possible to change and can be reversed. The brain is quite forgiving… and also forgets a great deal. This is unfortunate on the one hand (e.g. school knowledge and abilities) but it can also be fortunate in other instances (even bad memories often disappear over time).

Some of the brain changes that are found in OCD tend to be minor and do not clearly speak for irreversible defects. Some researchers do not even find any differences with healthy brains. On the other hand, the probability of finding small deviations in hundreds of thousands of tiny regions in the brain are very high. The reproducibility for many of these findings is quite low. We currently do not know precisely whether the reported changes are produced by the symptoms (meaning that they are a consequence and not a cause) or whether they existed previously!

Even if these changes had already existed beforehand: In comparison to a computer in which the software can hardly influence the hardware, thinking also changes the brain. This has frequently been demonstrated. In a study by the working group of Lewis Baxter (Los Angeles), it was already demonstrated more than 20 years ago that psychotherapy for OCD leads to similar changes in the brain as taking medications! After reading this book, your brain will no longer be exactly the same as before.

 

[Daniel E.]

Second edition:

MyMCT_May_2012.pdf

More info:

UKE - Klinik und Poliklinik f?r Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie

The intention of myMCT is to impart knowledge and coping strategies for thinking traps typical of OCD. Thinking traps are unhelpful ways of collecting and making sense of certain information (e.g. attending to potentially dangerous aspects in the environment rather than to neutral features, thinking that everything must be perfect, or feeling overly responsible for others). They can play a role in causing OCD and its progression. However, not everything that looks like OCD is actually OCD. It is important to distinguish between an inaccurate and unhelpful thinking pattern that contributes to OCD, and habits and behavior that appear compulsive but are appropriate in a certain context and do not produce any psychological strain (e.g., "obsessiveness" in pilots or surgeons when practicing their profession, but not in their personal lives).

This training program is divided into a number of units with each unit covering a particular type of thinking trap or distortion. In addition, accompanying or secondary problems, like depression and low self-esteem, are addressed in the final unit as well as common fears of OCD patients (e.g., to suffer from schizophrenia or a severe brain lesion). Although the book is written for people with OCD, some units may also be helpful for people with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)...

The focus of the second edition of the myMCT has maintained the same: Metacognition (= thinking about thinking). The book encourages people with OCD to reflect on their thinking, particularly on those thinking styles or distortions, which contribute to the development and maintenance of OCD. The Metacognitive Training aims to help detecting such "thinking traps" and offers numerous practical examples and exercises how to defuse these traps, in order to acquire a more helpful way of thinking...