Effectiveness of Neuropsychoeducation, Intrinsic Motivation, and Metaphoric Content Integrated with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in the Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Pilot Study.

Background: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is considered frequent, unnecessary thoughts that lead to repetitive actions to lessen the apprehension provoked by thoughts; this repetitive sequence may further influence trouble in one's daily activities. The remedial procedure for OCD includes medication (such as SSRIs, anxiolytics, and antidepressants) with psychotherapy [such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and exposure response prevention (ERP)]. Previous investigations indicated that regardless of the trend of adopting CBT and ERP to treat OCD, only around half of the patients experienced a full reduction in symptoms.

Purpose: The ERP component in CBT has been termed as a challenging treatment as it contains threatening anxiety-provoking indications, and it has been reflected that between 25-30% of OCD patients reject the ERP treatment, and the refusal and dropout rates for ERP in OCD are higher than other interventions. Thus, in the present investigation, researchers developed a proposed therapy that includes neuropsychoeducation, intrinsic motivation, and metaphoric content integrated with CBT in addition to regular pharmacological management to treat OCD patients and validated the efficacy of the proposed therapy through psychometric ratings (Y-BOCS).

Method: In this pilot study, 10 cases of OCD received a 12-week proposed therapy program. The primary outcome was the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS), which was assessed at baseline and post-treatment.

Results: The present study's results revealed a significant decrease in scores on the obsessions and compulsions domains and overall total scores on Y-BOCS among OCD patients.

Conclusion: The findings show that this proposed therapy, which includes neuropsychoeducation, intrinsic motivation, and metaphors contents integrated with CBT in combination with pharmacological management, is effective in the treatment of OCD. Therefore, the proposed therapy may be beneficial in the treatment of OCD. It has far-reaching implications in the areas of clinical, psychiatry, and mental health.