About this course

Learning Objectives

• Identify the shared loop of trigger, obsessional doubt, anxiety, and compulsion that underlies OCD, including covert presentations such as mental rituals and reassurance-seeking.
• Describe the inhibitory-learning model of exposure and response prevention and apply it to building a graded exposure ladder that includes covert compulsions.
• Explain how inference-based CBT locates the start of the obsessional sequence in a faulty inference, and list the reasoning devices OCD uses to make imagined doubt feel real.
• Describe how acceptance and commitment therapy reframes the relationship among intrusive thoughts, feelings, and valued action, and apply committed-action planning to small value-based steps.
• Summarize first-line medication strategy for OCD, including SSRI relative ranges and adequate trial duration, and identify an underdosed or too-brief medication trial.
• Distinguish a slip from a relapse and outline a relapse-prevention plan, including how to recognize gradual-drift slip patterns.

Learning Levels

• Introductory
• Intermediate

Course Instructor(s)

• 

  Weston Ferrer, MD

  Board-Certified Psychiatrist

  Weston Ferrer, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist (American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology) who is also board-certified in Clinical Informatics. He has over a decade of post-training experience across outpatient OCD specialty care, academic, emergency, and community psychiatry, and served on the University of California, San Francisco psychiatry faculty full time from 2014 to 2022, including roles as Associate Program Director of the residency and Executive Director of Quality and Informatics. He runs Anxiety Relief Clinic, a group telehealth practice focused on OCD and anxiety, is trained in exposure and response prevention (ERP) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and is the founder of Conicia, which develops the self-guided OCD program this course is built on.

Disclosure

References

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