Introduction to the Review
Clinical Psychology is the diagnoses, assessment, prevention and treatments of psychological diseases. Individuals who specialize in this field are called psychotherapists and are involved in a number of jobs like psychotherapy of clients, functioning of public administration programs and carrying out research projects.
Lots of clinical psychologists have done extensive research on the diagnoses and treatments of hundreds of mental illnesses. Amongst them, the most prominent psychological disorder is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on which a huge amount of research is done to find the most convenient and successful strategies to solve it. It is one of the anxiety disorders in which a person shows recurrent behavior in continuation when he or she is stressed out. He or she becomes associated with compulsion and obsessions that start to harm him physically, socially or financially. OCD is found in a lot of people nowadays, and the cause of this problem is still unknown.
Psychologists, psychiatrists or other licensed medical practitioners diagnose OCD in an individual. An OCD patient will have repetitive thoughts, desires or illustrations that cause him or her to feel uncontrollably worried. The severity of the OCD in a patient is determined by tools such as Y-BOCS (Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale) and CGI-S (Clinical Global Impression-Scale).
Y-BOCS is a scale devised by a well-known psychologist, Wayne Goodman. It is not only used to check the severity of the OCD in a patient, but it is also used to check the level of improvement. On this scale, the symptoms are rated from 0 (no symptom) to 4 (extreme symptom). Afterwards are added together to show the impact of OCD on a patient.
There are two types of CGI-S scales. One measures the severity of the mental disorder in the patient and the other measures the improvement in the illness of the patient. Both scales have 7 points; from 1 (normal) to 7 (extreme).
Treatment:
The first line treatment for OCD is Cognitive behavioral therapy combined with exposure/response prevention in which the patient is taught to control compulsions by thinking, feeling and behaving differently. Besides that, there are other behavioral therapies as well that help the OCD patients.
Medication:
Apart from therapy, OCD patients may also need medicines prescribed by doctors. Most common medications to treat OCD are anti-depression pills in nature.
‘Defining Clinical Severity in Pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder’ is a clinical psychology research in which the researchers have tried to explain proper quantitative method to determine the severity of OCD in children ranging from 4 years old to 18 years old. No doubt, CYBOCS is the most successful scale to determine the severity of OCD in patients, but it is not so on individual basis. Apart from that, the treatments assigned after finding the severity of this mental disorder is based on previous experiences rather than on quantitative results.
Through this research, investigators and clinicians will have three ways to compare OCD symptom severity scores. The research laid out the calculations of obsession, compulsion and obsession-compulsion symptoms through standard deviations and means. Interpretation of each symptom rating is also given to assist the users. Another way adopted to differentiate between the OCD signs scores is to show the difference between differing age and sex. In the last, the researchers have showed connection between CYBOCS and CGI-S for better evaluation of the symptoms scores. According to the empirical data given in this research, a right amount of treatment or medication will be prescribed to the young OCD patients that will speed up the curative process.
The research was carried out by interviewing of 815 children who were diagnosed with OCD. The interviews were conducted by licensed clinical psychologists and a number of other mental disorders like anxiety, ADHD and depression, was also found in the interviewees. This study on Pediatric Obsessive Compulsive Disorder patients is a cross-sectional study because data is collected through interviews from a sample that represents the large population which is the young OCD patients in United States of America. Moreover, the data tells the severity of the condition, which is the main objective of cross-sectional research.
Conclusion
Although this empirical research helps in deciding the correct treatment method to cure OCD; however, it does not indicate the effects of different types of symptoms in young OCD patients. CYBOCS and CGI-Severity scales give a general consensus on OCD patients. This study has categorized the patients into sexual orientation and age. However, it has not categorized children on the basis of every symptom. Therefore, this study has few chances of being inaccurate because patients hide few of the symptoms especially if they are related to sexual or religious desires. The OCD children need to be further divided into categories related to every kind of OCD symptom, so that the empirical data extracted from this kind of research is more precise.
References
Lewin, A. B., Piacentini, J., Nadai, A. S., Jones, A. M., Peris, T. S., Geffken, G. R., . . . Storch, E. A. (2013). Defining Clinical Severity in Pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. American Psychological Association, 1-7.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. (n.d.). Retrieved from National Institute of Mental Health: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd/index.shtml#part6
