You get into your car and you’re not sure whether you locked the house. So, you go back and check. After the 10th time, you're now running very late, again, and you drive away, still obsessing over the idea of intruders in your house.
This type of scenario is all too familiar for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental health issue that affects between 2 and 3 million American adults. While OCD manifests itself in different ways and with different degrees, what each of those who has OCD can attest is that the condition has a way of hijacking your life.
At the Institute for Advanced Psychiatry, Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team have one goal — to provide our patients with the tools and treatments they need to break free from mental health issues like OCD.
So, if you’re feeling trapped by your OCD, read on to learn how we can help.
When the layperson thinks of OCD, they might think of obsessive hand washing or making sure that items line up around the house. These simplistic views have some truth to them, but they fall very short of painting the full picture.
When you have OCD, the outward behaviors are manifestations of an even bigger turmoil in the brain where intrusive and obsessive thoughts create negative and inescapable thought patterns.
For example, if we were to go back to the scenario we describe above about checking that the house is locked, this behavior only comes on the heels of a flood of thoughts. These thoughts convince you that the worst is going to happen — intruders will break in and steal everything — and compel you to take steps to avoid this outcome.
Ultimately, OCD can control both your thoughts and your actions and you can end up devoting a big chunk of your life catering to the mental health disorder.
The standard approach for OCD involves a combination of therapies that might include:
While we embrace these modalities and have found them to be effective, they don’t work for everyone, which is why we offer alternatives like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
With this innovative and noninvasive treatment, we deliver magnetic impulses to certain areas of your brain to encourage healthier neural pathways. More specifically to OCD, our goal through TMS is to suppress obsessive and intrusive thoughts, and this will, in turn, help control your outward behaviors.
As for the effectiveness of TMS, the International OCD Foundation reports that between 45% and 55% of patients experience reduced OCD symptoms after undergoing TMS therapy for at least a month.
Whether as a standalone treatment or as part of a broader program, we believe that TMS can play an invaluable role in helping you reclaim your life in the face of OCD.
If you’d like to explore whether TMS therapy might hold the key to reducing the control that OCD has over your life, we invite you to contact us at one of our offices in Granbury or Fort Worth, Texas, to set up a consultation.
