July/August 2016

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  • July/August 2016 Cover

  • OCD

    Is There Any Way to Turn It Off?

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Editor's Note

Rich Simon

Today, with all the presumed advances therapists have made in reducing mental suffering from previously untreatable conditions, is there a solution, a cure, a fix for OCD? As with so many difficult emotional conditions, the answer is far from simple, not least because OCD appears to bear a strong genetic component. Still, we have more knowledge about how to recognize it, and how to distinguish it from other conditions that it often mimics, including PTSD, depression, and even psychosis. More importantly, many specialists working with OCD employ some variation on what two authors for this issue, Martin Seif and Sally Winston, call “upside-down therapy,” an approach that seems to break, or at least bend, the rules of what many of us have been taught is good clinical practice.

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An illustration of two faces, one upside-down

Upside-Down Psychotherapy

Breaking the Rules with Our OCD Clients

Martin Seif & Sally Winston

It’s now clear that much of what therapists do for people suffering from OCD actually worsens the problem. Providing empathic reassurance, rational disputation, and coping skills to manage anxiety only serves to refuel the obsession. So how do you avoid the dead end of co-compulsing with your clients? Read More
Learning to Manage the OCD Bully

Learning to Manage the OCD Bully

A Therapeutic Odyssey

Diane Cole

An OCD sufferer describes the frustrating stops and starts and misdirections of her circuitous search for help in escaping the maze of her family of origin and the deep-seated tropes in her own brain. Read More
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OCD and Children

It’s a Family Affair

Lynn Lyons

OCD in children can operate like a kind of cult leader, demanding acceptance of an extreme view of a perilous reality and offering solutions that can’t be resisted, no matter how absurd they may sound. Given the overwhelming fear and worry the condition generates, falling in line with the cult leader can seem like the best strategy—except that it doesn’t work. Read More

Extra Feature

Life, Death, and a Good Cigar

Life, Death, and a Good Cigar

Freud Chose to Face the End on His Own Terms

Katie Roiphe

For most of us, death is a subject hovering in the shadows of our lives, willfully ignored until it’s suddenly standing rudely before us, the world’s worst party crasher. But the supremely self-willed Sigmund Freud began preparing for death many decades before the actual event, determined not to be cowed by it. For him, anything less would’ve been a blot on psychoanalysis. Read More

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