Ninewells Hospital & Medical School, Dundee, DD1 9SY

Compulsions, rituals, and repetitive behaviours

People often assume that if you have compulsions (or other ritualised behaviour) then you must have OCD. However, this isn't automatically the case since rituals and compulsions occur in other conditions, usually those associated with anxiety. This blog explores what we know about compulsions in Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) versus …

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Obsessions, ruminations, worries, and other intrusive thoughts

This post should be read alongside the post on compulsive behaviour and rituals. It is aimed at helping clinicians to differentiate between different types of 'intrusive' thought and to assist the diagnostic process. It covers the types of intrusive thoughts that can occur, and tries to summarise the key features of each. It is written …

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tDCS as a treatment for depression

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) is a type of neuromodulation that was developed decades ago but has generated more interest in recent years. We discuss the evidence for tDCS for depression, and cover the outcomes from some recent studies. Introduction What is Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) for depression? tDCS is the application of a …

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Behavioural modification (pacing) for OCD

This post is a summary of a poster that was presented at the EABCT conference in 2021. We talk about behavioural modification approaches for ritualised behaviour in OCD and other disorders. The full reference is as follows: Buick, R., Cockburn, C. & Christmas, D. (2021) Applying a transdiagnostic approach to treating ritualised behaviour in specialised …

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Blog

Blog posts (most recent first) Compulsions, rituals, and repetitive behaviours David Christmas Blog People often assume that if you have compulsions (or other ritualised behaviour) then you must have OCD. However, this isn't automatically the case since rituals and compulsions occur in other conditions, usually those associated with anxiety. This blog explores what we know...

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Antipsychotic augmentation in OCD: optimal doses

We discuss the issue of higher-than-needed doses of antipsychotic medication for augmentation in OCD. This can cause side effects. We briefly review the evidence to support the use of Risperidone in treating OCD and look at typical doses. We go on to make some recommendations for optimum doses of Risperidone. Background In the last year,...

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Novel treatments for depression: psilocybin

There has been a lot of interest in psilocybin as a treatment for several mental disorders, but the evidence is only emerging. In this blog we cover a recent study looking at psilocybin as a treatment for depression (Davis et al, 2020) and discuss what the implications for patient treatment might be. What is psilocybin? Psilocybin...

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