Write an article based on this "Suggest that your loved one get a diagnosis. Encourage your loved one to see a therapist. Look into exposure and response prevention treatment. Suggest medication for your loved one."
Getting an official diagnosis can help your loved one deal with the disorder and begin to treat it. Start with the person's physician, who will perform a complete physical, lab tests, and a psychological evaluation. Having obsessive thoughts or exhibiting compulsive behaviors doesn't mean you have OCD. To have this disorder, you need to be in a state of distress where the thoughts and compulsions interfere with your life. To be diagnosed with OCD, there must be a presence of obsessions or compulsions or both. The following are signs that must be met for a professional diagnosis: Obsessions include thoughts or urges that never go away. They are also unwelcome and intrude on everyday life. These obsessions can cause significant distress. Compulsions are behaviors or thoughts that an individual repeats over and over. This can include compulsions such as hand-washing or counting. The individual feels that he or she must comply with certain rigid rules that are self-imposed. These compulsions are enacted in order to reduce anxiety or in hopes of preventing something from happening. Typically the compulsions are unreasonable and ineffective at actually reducing anxiety or prevention. Obsessions and compulsions are usually performed more than one hour per day or otherwise intrude on daily functioning. OCD is a very complex condition, and it is one that often requires professional help in the form of therapy and medications. It is important to encourage your loved one to seek help for their OCD from a therapist. One method of therapy that can be very helpful in treating OCD is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). A therapist will use this method to help individuals change how the perceived risks and challenge the reality of their fears. CBT helps people with OCD examine their perceptions of potential risk which influence their obsessions, to build a more realistic perception of their fear. Additionally, CBT helps to examine the individual's interpretation of their intrusive thoughts, because it is often the amount of importance they place on these thoughts and how they interpret them that causes anxiety. CBT has been shown to be helpful to 75% of clients with OCD. One portion of cognitive behavioral therapy can help reduce ritual behavior and come up alternative behaviors when exposed to the fear's image, thought, or situation. This portion of CBT is called Exposure Response Prevention. This type of treatment gradually exposes the individual to what he fears or obsesses over while refraining from acting on compulsions. During this process, the individual learns to cope with and manage their anxiety until it eventually does not induce anxiety at all. Medications used to treat OCD include different types of antidepressants such as SSRIs, which help to increase the available amount of serotonin in the brain in order to reduce anxiety.