OCD Awareness Week: We Need New Solutions, More Conversations

ATLANTA, Oct. 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- During OCD Awareness Week, nView Health is calling for the use of new technologies and engaging in more conversations to better support individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which affects more than 2 million adults and children in the United States. OCD Awareness Week 2021 takes place October 10–16.

"OCD affects about 1–2 percent of the population at any given time," says Dr. Eric Storch, professor and McIngvale Presidential Endowed Chair at the Baylor College of Medicine and co-author of several world-renowned clinical measurements for OCD. "It is a debilitating, psychiatric condition. If you don't treat OCD effectively, this condition persists and often gets worse. It can bring about other comorbid psychiatric problems and even suicidality."

The most often used tools to help providers identify patients needing OCD therapies are the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS© versions I and II) and Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (CYBOCS© versions I and II) which are designed to help assess the presence of obsessions and compulsions as well as the severity of those symptoms.

"Across virtually every important OCD study, the YBOCS has been the gold standard — the measure that's been used to assess the symptom presence and the severity of those symptoms," says Dr. Storch. "However, there are some challenges to the YBOCS that have been widely reported and largely concern how to assess a patient's resistance to their obsessions."

Challenges with the YBOCS motivated Dr. Storch, in collaboration with the original developers of the YBOCS, Drs. Wayne Goodman, Steven Rasmussen, and Lawrence Price, to develop the YBOCS II. "It addresses some of the shortcomings while still allowing us to calculate a patient's original YBOCS score," Dr. Storch says. "With the YBOCS II, we replace the resistance to obsessions item with one that characterizes the time intervals that someone had an obsession, which we refer to as the 'obsession-free interval."

The YBOCS II also revised the scoring mechanism to help more sensitively detect patient changes and give more clear direction on how to quantify and integrate active avoidance within the YBOCS severity ratings.

In addition to using the most current assessment solutions, Dr. Storch encourages those providing services to individuals with OCD to engage in meaningful discussions during OCD Awareness Week. "Conversations should concern how we provide evidence-based treatment for OCD," he says. "If we don't measure or evaluate treatments, how do we know they work?"

nView Health, the premier provider of evidence-based behavioral health assessment solutions, is the worldwide exclusive licensee for both versions of the YBOCS and CYBOCS as well as the Florida Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (FOCI©) and Children's Florida Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (CFOCI©).

"nView is honored to work with Drs. Goodman and Storch to advance the important work they are doing to help patients with OCD obtain an accurate assessment and the best possible treatment so these individuals can lead a full and productive life," says Dr. Thomas Young, founder and chief medical officer of nView Health. "nView will soon launch a comprehensive app to make the YBOCS II and CYBOCS II assessments readily available digitally."

For more from Drs. Storch and Young on the importance of OCD awareness, read the nView blog post "OCD Awareness Week: We Need New Solutions, More Conversations."

About nView Health
nView Health is the premier provider of evidence-based software and solutions used by research organizations and healthcare professionals around the world to help them identify, treat, and monitor mental health disorders, a critical requirement for measurement-based care. nView is the worldwide exclusive licensee for a broad array of behavioral health screening solutions, structured interviews, and postdiagnosis severity measurement scales to monitor patient outcomes. To learn more, visit nview.com or follow nView Health on LinkedIn.

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SOURCE nView Health