Grant: Operating Grant

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a serious and often severe anxiety disorder affecting over 650,000 Canadians. According to the World Health Organization, it is the 10th leading cause of disability worldwide. Compulsive checking, where an individual repeatedly checks to make sure that something and/or someone is safe, is one of the most common symptoms of OCD, and can lead people to spend hours a day checking and re-checking people and/or objects in their homes, workplaces and beyond. Although there are effective psychological treatments for compulsive checking, they are difficult for people, because patients are asked to face their worst fears repeatedly until their anxiety declines. The challenging nature of this treatment leads many to refuse it outright, or to drop out of the treatment before it has had a chance to be effective. We have designed a new easier treatment for compulsive checking which places emphasis on how people think, rather than on what they do; we believe that this new emphasis should make the treatment more acceptable to those who need it. This new cognitive-behavioural treatment for extreme doubt and compulsive checking follows directly from our previous research on compulsive checking in OCD, and targets people's faulty beliefs about how responsible they think they are, about their memories, and about the dangers that they perceive. This grant will fund a first look at how well this treatment works, and at how acceptable it is. It is our hope that the proposed research will lead to a published treatment manual which therapists across the country and beyond can access and use with their clients and patients. Also, we hope that the current proposal will lead in three year's time to a future grant application to fund a more thorough examination of the effectiveness and acceptability of the new treatment for compulsive checking and extreme doubt.