To learn more, and to register, go to ocd2014.org.
Cases of hoarding that create public health and safety risks need a community-level response. Over 120 hoarding task forces, coalitions, and working groups have formed in communities throughout the US and abroad. This session provides an opportunity for members representing a range of human service disciplines to learn about promising practice models and how to implement them in communities large and small, urban and rural. Leaders of successful community case management, peer led and treatment model programs will providestep by step guidance for replicating programs in this interactive workshop.
*Additional registration fee: $125 for all professionals / $100 for IOCDF Student/Trainee Members.
The clinical significance of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) has long been recognized. According to the World Health Organization, OCD is among the 10 most disabling medical conditions. Other disorders that share some similarities with OCD have gained greater recognition in recent years and are now grouped together in one DSM-5 diagnostic category called Obsessive-Compulsive & Related Disorders.
This training program is designed to provide clinicians an overview of the nature and treatment of the various subtypes of OCD and related disorders such as body dysmorphic disorder, hoarding disorder, hair pulling disorder (Trichotillomania), and skin picking disorder (Excoriation). Topics to be covered include clinical features and diagnosis, current assessment methods, review of evidence-based treatments (e.g., exposure and response prevention), adjunctive therapies, and family issues. The program will include lecture, slides, and case illustrations.
*Additional registration fee: $125 for all professionals / $100 for IOCDF Student/Trainee Members.
This lecture will focus on transcultural adaptation of assessment and treatment of health anxiety/ hypochondriasis. The speakers draw on their significant clinical and research expertise to provide a cognitive behavioral conceptualisation of this disorder and examples of ways to implement treatment. We will address the limitation and strengths of CBT when working across cultures. The lecture will conclude by presenting ways to account for cultural factors when assessing and treating patients with health anxiety/hypochondriasis.
Medical applications of marijuana have been highlighted in the news recently, particularly given its legalization in several jurisdictions and decriminalization in others. Advocates for the use of marijuana in the treatment of OCD have applauded these changes, though the scientific perspective regarding the benefits of marijuana for OCD raises serious questions about safety and efficacy. Accordingly, this panel will discuss the limitations and potential merits of marijuana usage in OCD.
Emotional contamination is a form of OCD in which the client fears contact with a place, person, or thing associated with some undesirable emotional or physical characteristic. Compulsions include washing and cleaning rituals, avoiding words, objects, people, or places related to the feared person, place, or thing. Exposure and response prevention is extremely useful and will be demonstrated through case studies illustrating variations in how emotional contamination presents itself, and is effectively treated.
Every family can have trouble parenting a child with OCD — distress, disrupted functioning, and accommodation are the norm. This workshop will provide clinicians with strategies to help families support exposure therapy in the most effective way. We’ll review strategies for disengaging from accommodation, neutralizing heated emotions, and problem-solving during difficult and/or unexpected OCD episodes. Strategies for managing parental stress and responding to issues that come up around medication will also be discussed.
Families frequently have difficulty locating qualified professionals to assess, diagnose, and treat PANDAS/ PANS. Comprehensive assessment and treatment for PANDAS/PANS requires the efforts of several qualified professionals, including medical and psychological providers. Practical suggestions for improving cross- discipline collaboration for PANDAS/PANS will be presented, based on extensive clinical experience. These suggestions will include ways to clear barriers, set up innovative ways of communication, and highlighting the importance of patient-focused care.
In this lecture, first-line medication treatments for OCD, including answers to questions such as “Is there
a best SSRI for OCD?” and “Is Clomipramine better than SSRI’s?,” will be discussed. We will also address approaching patients who don’t respond to initial SSRI treatment, including discussion of common reasons for medication resistantance, how to determine whether initial medication should be switched or augmented, and augmentation strategies. Novel treatments currently being studied will be reviewed, and myths about medication treatment for OCD will also be discussed.
In this clinically-oriented workshop we will cover new strategies derived from an “inhibitory learning approach.” We will discuss using fear tolerance to teach patients to manage their anxiety regardless
of habituation, as well as combining exposure media during ERP to deepen extinction learning. We will demonstrate how to help patients consolidate learning using linguistic processing, and present alternatives to the traditional hierarchy to enhance outcomes. Finally, we will explain the importance of expanding intervals between sessions and practicing exposure in multiple contexts.
Click here to view the slides for this presentation.
The primary task of the strategic therapist is to motivate the client to adopt a new therapeutic frame of reference. This workshop will discuss the three phases of the model, and the treatment protocol that directs the entire therapy process. The primary goal is to induce clients to voluntarily, purposely, and aggressively seek out and embrace uncertainty and anxiety as their ticket out of suffering. This workshop will define that treatment process and illustrate each stage with professionally-videotaped segments of therapist interaction with an OCD client during the initial session of treatment.
Click here to view the slides from this presentation.
Being able to understand, verbalize, and distinguish felt experiences is a key component of psychological interventions. This plenary session will review research in clinical, social, and health psychology that offers insights into the transdiagnostic adaptive value of putting feelings into words. The ability to precisely describe and differentiate emotions has been shown to alter the association between negative emotions and emotion regulation difficulties. These findings shed light on how negative emotions and stressful experiences can be transformed by how people label and distinguish what they are feeling. Implications for the study of emotions and emotion regulation, and psychological treatment will be discussed.
Welcome Remarks
Denise Egan Stack, LMHC
Master of Ceremonies
Jeff Bell
Awards Presentation
Patricia Perkins IOCDF Service Award- Wendy Mueller
IOCDF Outstanding Career Achievement Award- Steven Rasmussen, MD
Keynote Address
Ethan S. Smith
This is the story of Ethan S. Smith - writer, director, actor, producer, and life long OCD sufferer. Join Ethan as he passionately, humorously, and kindly shares his journey from being bedridden in his parents’ guest room, to living across the country making it in Hollywood. Live through Ethan as he shows you incredible personal video from his most vulnerable and darkest hours to his most triumphant return to life. Ethan’s singular goal is to not only tell you his story, but also to impart the knowledge, lessons, and skills he learned along the way so that you, too, may have your own Hollywood ending.
Fear of loss of impulse control (FLI) is a specific presentation of OCD, where the focus of the obsession is
the idea that one will do something out of character; often violent, sexual, and/or illegal, or at the very least embarrassing, even though there is absolutely no desire on the part of the person to do these things. This workshop will focus on the assessment of this OCD subset, and how therapists can design appropriate ERP interventions to treat this particular manifestation of the disorder. Time will be spent on how to help family members better respond to their OCD-afflicted FLI family member. Multiple case examples will be illustrated.
Click here to view the slides from this presentation.
Imaginal exposures allow patients to confront feared obsessional catastrophes through the use of a detailed narrative. Situations especially appropriate for imaginal exposures are those in which the patient fears he may change in a fundamental way, cause a distal catastrophe, when the result of failing to do a ritual is far in the future, or when an in vivo exposure cannot be simulated. In this workshop, we explain when to use imaginal exposure versus in vivo, key elements of an effective imaginal exposure, and what to do when your imaginal exposures do not work. A large part of this workshop will be dedicated to Q&A.
Newer clinicians come to this conference hoping to acquire strategies they can take home to help with current cases, to understand previous cases, or to get useful practice information. Unfortunately, they
don’t often have opportunities to meet the more senior clinicians who possess information that can only be acquired through years of direct experience. This will be an opportunity to meet and network with eight very experienced clinicians in a less formal setting. Conversation can take place one-on-one, in small groups that may form, etc. The overall goal will be to answer questions that often go unanswered.
The “ruminative response style” involves repetitive, cyclic, and persistent thinking in response to one’s negative affect. Ruminative responses specific to OCD may include negative self-talk following a difficult exposure, brooding following a relapse, or excessive analysis of symptoms/treatment. To date, little attention has been paid to the role of rumination in OCD, despite growing evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of numerous psychiatric disorders, including OCD. In this workshop, I will discuss four treatment-resistant case examples reflecting an instance where the patient’s ruminative response style played a critical role in the development, maintenance, and treatment of their OCD.
According to the latest research, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) are both effective treatments for OCD; however, not everyone achieves complete symptom reduction. Our clinical experience suggests that complementary elements of ACT and ERP can be combined to improve upon each modality. We have developed an “Acceptance-Based ERP” program, the goal of which is to enhance compliance and outcome in comparison to treatment as usual. This workshop will teach clinicians about the commonalities between ACT and ERP, as well as how they can be synthesized. We will present numerous case examples and conduct role plays illustrating how to implement acceptance-based ERP.
Click here to view the slides from this presentation.
This workshop will familarize clinicians with the use of the Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics (CBIT) across the lifespan. CBIT is an evidence-based treatment that combines habit reversal therapy
(HRT) with a functional intervention designed to address environmental factors that trigger tics and the consequences that maintain them. The main focus will be familiarizing attendees with CBIT through the use of case material and participant role plays. Current medications for treating tics across the lifespan will also be reviewed and guidelines for using CBIT and medication, alone or in combination, will be discussed.
Pediatric OCD responds to both cognitive-behavior therapy and medication, with much of the research focusing on children with few additional diagnoses or complications. However, in everyday practice there are many considerations that lead to poorer treatment response. This panel will discuss methods for addressing the major factors that contribute to poorer outcomes. Topics will include comorbid presentations, complex/atypical symptoms, violent and sexual thoughts, treatment noncompliance, and barriers to effective parental involvement in treatment. Presenters will discuss the application of ERP, as well as additional augmentation strategies.
This workshop will review the rationale, clinical strategies, and professional and financial management policies of taking CBT/ERP outside the office. Case examples will be used to illustrate a variety of home/ community-based applications, and we will discuss the types of preparation necessary for considering, planning, and implementing out-of-office work. Ample time will be allowed for participant questions and sharing of experiences, for purposes of problem solving and offering support to professionals and patients seeking to offer or utilize such services.
The aim of this panel is to expand conceptualizing and treating complex OCD symptoms with ERP by incorporating learning theory principles more systematically. The major domains to be discussed are: comorbid presentations, complex and atypical symptoms, context-based conditioning, and augmenting ERP using functional analysis.
Several different fears can arise around food that are related to disordered eating and/or OCD. The issues to be addressed in this workshop include body-image disturbance, fear of vomiting, fear of choking, fear of being poisoned, and magical thinking with regard to food. We will outline the differences and nuances of diagnosing OC spectrum vs. eating disorder spectrum disorders, and how the treatment unfolds. Case examples and treatment plans will be discussed in detail integrating the perspectives of both ACT and ERP to help clinicians and treatment providers better work with these clients who struggle with food-related OCD and/or eating disorders.
Body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), such as trichotillomania and skin picking, receive limited exposure in professional and public domains and are lacking in trained clinicians. Comorbidity is commonplace, and some individuals with these disorders have little or no access to effective treatment that could provide symptom relief and improved quality of life. While there have been some new directions in the augmentation of CBT and novel pharmacologic interventions, not all clinicians are knowledgeable about them. This presentation will provide an overview of all empirically-supported CBT and psychopharmacologic interventions for BFRBs.
An integral part of teenage development is to become more independent and autonomous - the same holds true for teens with OCD. However, developmentally appropriate behaviors can sometimes be difficult for therapists to distinguish from maladaptive or OCD behaviors. Case examples and attendee contribution will illustrate the process of how steps toward independence may interact with and exacerbate OCD symptoms. This panel will provide strategies for therapists to recognize and respond to special teen issues in a more adaptive manner. Attendees will acquire tools to support positive steps towards overcoming OCD symptoms, and strategies to assist family members in effectively redirecting problematic behavior.
Click here to view the slides from this presentation.
This workshop will focus on novel ways to augment ERP treatment for pediatric OCD, specifically focusing on adventure therapy (AT) strategies. The presenters will discuss ways that they have successfully integrated ERP principles into an AT framework. The purpose of the workshop will be to demonstrate key AT concepts and methods via experiential exercises, and to inspire therapists to use these strategies as an adjunct to ERP treatment for OCD. This approach will also be discussed within the larger context of research on novel ways to augment and enhance evidence-based treatments for OCD.
In this workshop, a panel of clinicians experienced in treating scrupulosity will answer questions from the audience. To start things off, the moderator will provide an overview of scrupulosity and its treatment, and panelists will briefly describe their approaches to the scrupulous patient. Attendee Q&A will follow.
