OCD & Related Disorders

Specialized Diagnostic Assessment, Treatment, and Professional Consultation around OCD and Exposure and Ritual Prevention

Whether you have a diagnosis of OCD, you’re suspicious that you might, or you’re a therapist looking to improve their skills working with OCD, we’re here to help.

At Brown Psychological OCD is a specialty area in which we are formally trained and have invested incredible amounts of post-training effort in reading, consultation, and clinical work. This is not an issue we work with occasionally, it is a major area of focus. If you have OCD you will receive the gold-standard treatment, which is ERP or Ex/RP (Exposure and Response Prevention). Crys is able to provide professional consultation to therapists on this topic.

We also treat the OCD related conditions of Body Focused Repetitive Behaviors with Habit Reversal Training.

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OCD is incredibly variable and there are dozens of symptoms, some of them quite common and others much less so. It would be impossible to list all the types of OCD we have worked with here, but the list below includes some of the types of symptoms we have experience with.

  • Sexual Obsessions (intrusive unwanted sexual thoughts about people you aren’t attracted to, your sexual orientation, incest, or pedophilia)

  • Harm Obsessions (intrusive unwanted thoughts about harming yourself or others, or being responsible for something terrible happening, such as a house fire or an accidental car accident)

  • Intrusive images, words, sounds, or music

  • Fear of doing something embarrassing like writing something terrible in an e-mail

  • Relationship OCD

  • Existential OCD (anxiety provoking thoughts about existence, death, the nature of reality, or the afterlife)

  • Contamination (preoccupations with dirt, germs, bodily secretions, environmental contaminants, cleansers, animals, insects, etc.) and fear of getting yourself or others sick by being contaminated.

  • Emotional Contamination (fears that contact with a person/place/item will contaminate oneself or cause bad luck)

  • Scrupulosity (religious and moral obsessions)

  • Mental rituals like praying, counting, reviewing situations over and over etc.

  • Ritualized eating behaviors

  • Sensorimotor OCD (awareness of body processes like blinking or swallowing)

  • Symmetry, exactness or completeness OCD (obsessions about having things in the right place or order, “just right”, or completely finished)

  • Hoarding behaviors (anxiety about throwing things away)

  • Checking of many kinds, including checking locks, appliances, checking for harm you may have caused, checking your body or appearance, checking for mistakes, etc.

  • Repeating certain behaviors, urges to touch, tap, or rub things, re-reading, re-writing etc.

  • Reassurance seeking or the need to ask, tell, or confess things to others

  • Fear of losing things and superstitious fears or behaviors