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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Has pornography become a public health crisis?

How Kübler-Ross’s stage model of dealing with loss can help grieving clients heal.

Sometimes there’s no need for a detailed assessment of a client’s entire life history and their family relationships, especially when the desired outcome is changing an automatic habit like nose-picking.

Susan Cain, the bestselling author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, believes that our world has been ruled by extroverts long enough.

Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants 

An young woman with autism celebrates a very special night.