Tag: YBOCS

Episode 139. Is there a test for OCD? Hang on, you’re about to find out.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right in to today’s episode.

We have our first Zoom hangout coming up next week. This is where we let individuals on our email list submit questions for me to do a q and a chat with you once a month. We’d love to have you join us, and there’s still just a little bit of time to hop in on that to be in the know and become an insider.

Join our email list@carriebach.com. I wanted to talk with you today about an important OCD assessment called the YBOX 2. This stands for Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. It’s in its second version. We’ll put a link in the show notes for you if you’d like to take it. It can be completely done on your own.

The first section talks with you about obsessions that you may be having and you can answer yes or no depending on your experiences with those. I like it because each one has a little bit of an example with it too that helps. There are questions right after that ask you to rate on a zero to five scale how severe these obsessions are bothering you.

Then the next part of the assessment has to do with compulsions. And once again, there’s a zero to five scale on how badly they’re bothering you or impacting your life. This assessment is scored from 0 to 50, and a lot of times we find it helpful in the counseling process. Usually I’ll give people the Y box at the beginning of treatment.

We can also look at it maybe in the middle to see if what we’re doing is working or see if we need to switch course at all. And then it’s a nice follow up at the end. I don’t usually necessarily give it to people at the end, but if they wanted to see how their scores decreased or were impacted over time, that would be a good objective measurement for you as you’re going through your process.

It’s interesting to me how many people I’ve talked to that have received OCD treatment before, yet never been assessed with an assessment like this, or maybe they did and don’t remember. When we know how much OCD is impacting someone, we can make guidance and recommendations regarding next steps for courses of treatment.

It may be an objective way of saying, hey, this is really impacting you. Have you thought about getting on medication? If the score is very high, it may be a conversation surrounding intensive outpatient therapy or if the person’s just really not functioning well in their environment, they may need some type of residential program until they can get to treatment.

a place where they can function well enough to be at home or to be back in outpatient treatment. Obviously, we want people to receive the best care as possible, so they’re getting everything they need, while at the same time balancing that we don’t want someone to be in what we’d call a higher level of care, like intensive outpatient, if they don’t need to be.

If they can manage their symptoms at home with medication and outpatient therapy, that’s the ideal, right? One thing I hear from people after they take the Y Box, clients that have come in, will usually tell me, wow, after taking that and seeing all the different examples of obsessions and compulsions, I didn’t realize how many of these things were OCD.

I had chalked some of them up to maybe anxiety. So even just taking the assessment provides a greater level of awareness sometimes for people. I find the majority of people with OCD who are coming into therapy are what I call self diagnosed. They found something like this podcast or they found blog articles or talked with other people maybe that have had OCD who guided them down a pathway of receiving information.

I think all of that is very helpful and beautiful because People didn’t have that type of information at their fingertips regarding mental health 20 years ago, probably not even 15 years ago, the same amount of information that’s out there now. It’s not uncommon for people to seek therapy and tell me, I think I have OCD.

But I’ve never been formally diagnosed by a counselor or by a psychiatrist. Having this objective measure of the why box gives us a glimpse inside of what people are thinking and feeling without them having to necessarily name every single obsession they’re having. That’s another thing that I like about it.

It’s a lot easier for someone to click, yes, I’m having harm obsessions. then to verbalize those things to a therapist, that can be really difficult for people to express. If you have a child that might have OCD, there is also a child version of the Y Box, and the questions are better worded and suited for children.

Other assessments that I am not as familiar with are the Dimensional Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale and the National Institute of Mental Health Global Obsessive Compulsive Scale. So you may be asking yourself, why does it even matter if I have a diagnosis or not? What’s the benefit of having a diagnosis?

I OCD I really struggle with this concept of do I have this OCD diagnosis or am I making excuses for poor behaviors, whatever they determine the poor behaviors to be? Am I saying it’s OCD when it’s really a spiritual, moral issue? Am I saying it’s OCD when really I’m just being reckless, careless, or negligent in some way?

Is it OCD or relationship problems? This is exactly the benefit of a diagnosis. If you sit down, talk with a professional who’s trained in OCD, take some of these assessments, explain to them your symptoms. We don’t just base diagnosing on an assessment, obviously. Obviously, we’re going to talk with you and find out what your experience is like.

Take those two pieces into consideration before making a diagnosis. It’s not about just giving someone a label. It’s about helping you understand and explain your symptoms, helping you know why your brain works the way it does, how it’s getting stuck on certain things, what you’re engaging in to try to relieve that anxiety.

So oftentimes these assessment tools are really the first step in treatment to say, okay, here’s where we are and where can we go from here? It’s very similar. If you went to the doctor and got some blood work done and they said, hey, your A1C is high. Let’s try these lifestyle changes or let’s try this medication, whatever you’re going to throw at that first that you and your doctor determine, and then you’ll go back for blood work in a prescribed amount of time to check your A1C to see if it’s gone down.

It’s the same thing that we’re doing in a psychological sense of, okay, where are you at right now? What’s the best method of treatment for you considering your symptoms? And then we’ll reassess. We can always circle back around and say, Hey, is what we’re doing working? Is this medication that you’re on working?

Is the therapy component, are you really able to utilize the skills that you’re learning? Is that working? Do we need to try something different? Do we need to look at a different kind of care for you? I would encourage you not to see assessment or a diagnosis as a bad thing. It can be a really good thing and a good first step in your journey towards a healthier you.

If you’d like to see what services I provide, you can always go to karybach. com. I would love, love, love to book some intensives this fall, so if you are ready to dive into the deep end of the pool, work through some OCD, tackle some trauma, if that’s part of your story, then I’d love for you to schedule a consultation and we’ll talk about how an intensive therapeutic retreat may or may not be right for you.

We also have a previous episode on this. If you want to go back and listen to it. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review.

This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.