What do you think are some common misconceptions about OCD? What would your answer be to those misconceptions?

S.K.

The main misconceptions that come to my mind are that people with obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) are "crazy" and/or can only be helped by medication. Or that there is no help available for them at all, so they're doomed to suffer.

In reality, OCD is treatable, with especially good results shown by behavior therapy and psychotherapy. While symptoms of OCD can remit with anti- obsessional medication (such as Anafranil, Luvox, or the antidepressants Prozac, Zoloft or Paxil, which appear to have anti-obsessional effects), medication alone doesn't seem to "cure" the condition, and symptoms often reappear once medication is discontinued. The benefits of psychological therapy (by which I mean behavior therapy as well as psychotherapy), however, appear to last after such therapy ends.

Research on the brain activity associated with OCD has shown that both medication and psychological therapy without medication have similar effects on the brains of people with OCD ... but again, the effects of psychological treatment persisted, while the effects of medication tended to disappear when the drug(s) were discontinued. That, in my opinion, is pretty powerful proof that psychological or non-drug treatments can cause changes in the brain associated with symptom remission.

Some obsessions or compulsions associated with OCD seem "crazy," and a person with OCD thus may seem in some ways out of touch with reality, but people with OCD aren't psychotic in the sense that people with florid schizophrenia or extreme manic states might be. I also suspect that some people who saw the movie As Good As It Gets, in which Jack Nicholson played a character with OCD, might have left the theater assuming everyone with OCD is an obnoxious jerk. But that's not true -- not all people with OCD engage in the kind of rude behavior Nicholson's character exhibited. Nicholson's character just happened to be an obnoxious jerk who had OCD.