Obsessive compulsive disorder

Chemical Imbalance

Changes in the neurochemical’s serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate are probably present in people with OCD. In fact, many people feel better when they take medicines like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are antidepressants. Also, research on both animals and people seems to show that OCD symptoms are at least partly caused by changes in different neurochemicals. But it's not always clear how much these neurochemical changes cause OCD symptoms or if they happen because of OCD symptoms. Also, new studies have shown that OCD is not just caused by chemical imbalances, but is more likely caused by changes in the structure and function of the brain as well as changes in neurochemicals. New neuroimaging research has shown that some parts of the brain of people with OCD work differently than the same parts of the brain of people without OCD. This finding still doesn't fully explain how the difference in how the brain works can lead to OCD.

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  Psychological Theories
  

Other research has revealed that there may be a number of other factors that could play a role in the onset of OCD, including behavioural, cognitive, and environmental factors. For example, according to the Learning Theory, OCD symptoms are a result of a person developing learned negative thoughts and behaviour patterns, towards previously neutral situations which can result from life experiences.

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  Behavioural Theories
  

In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers reported that behaviour therapy helped two people with chronic obsessional neurosis, which was an early form of what is now known as obsessive-compulsive disorder. This was followed by a series of successful case reports. Later, this research suggested that ritualistic behaviours were a way that people had learned to avoid something. These researchers elegantly specified the behavioural theory of OCD, that behavioural treatment of OCD is based on the hypothesis that obsessional thoughts have through conditioning, become associated with anxiety that has failed to extinguish.
People with anxiety have learned to avoid situations by doing things like obsessive checking and washing, which keeps the anxiety from going away. This leads directly to the behavioural treatment called ERP, in which the person is: (a) exposed to stimuli that trigger the obsessional response, and (b) helped to stop the avoidance and escape (compulsive) responses.
An important contribution to the development of ERP was the observation that the occurrence of obsessions leads to an increase in anxiety, and that the compulsions lead to its subsequent attenuation. When the compulsions were delayed or prevented, people with OCD experienced a spontaneous decay in anxiety and the urges to perform compulsions. Continued practice led to the extinction of anxiety. These early theories and experiments about behaviour laid the groundwork for later cognitive-behavioural theories and treatments.

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