Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by intrusive and recurrent obsessions and compulsions that are severe enough to be time consuming or cause significant distress and impairment. Obsessions may consist of thoughts, images, or impulses (e.g., thoughts about contamination or about harming others); compulsions are ritualistic behaviours (e.g., repetitive washing, checking, or counting) that the individual performs to reduce anxiety caused by the obsession. OCD is a common anxiety disorder, with a lifetime prevalence of 2.5%. It has also been established that subclinical intrusive thoughts often have similar content and form to obsessions in clinically diagnosed OCD. The gold standard psychological treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention (ERP). The essence of ERP is for patients to expose themselves to feared situations without performing their compulsions, until they have learned to tolerate the situation with little anxiety or fear. Despite clear empirical support for the efficacy of ERP, however, estimates of refusal of treatment or dropout due to fear or inability to tolerate the exposures range from 10-40%. This suggests the utility of exploring ways of improving distress tolerance for those with OCD or intrusive thoughts. This project will investigate the effects of mindfulness on intrusive thoughts. Individuals who have high levels of intrusive thoughts will keep thought diaries for 2 weeks while practicing either mindfulness or distraction strategies in relation to their intrusive thoughts. A control group will not practice any strategy at all. The overall goal is to provide a better understanding of the strategies that have the greatest ameliorative effect on the process and symptoms of intrusive thoughts. This information can be used to inform treatment of OCD that is most tolerable to patients and most effective.