Specialized OCD Therapy Can Help Treat the Cause of Your Depression

While OCD often coincides with depression, OCD can also lead to depression. This is especially true when the condition is left untreated. People with OCD engage in compulsions that take time and effort and can negatively affect their relationships, work, school, or overall health and well-being. It makes sense that depression might arise from living with OCD every day. Many in our community have found that working with an OCD therapist also addressed their depression and were able to get their lives back on track. 

Depression can be defined as feelings of sadness and despair that negatively affect how you feel, think, and act. Depression can arise in the wake of a traumatic event or sudden change in a person’s life. It can take hold after the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, etc. Depression can also result from the reduced quality of life and high levels of social and occupational impairment that often accompany untreated OCD. 

But there is a silver lining here: while OCD symptoms can cause depression, receiving specialized OCD treatment can often alleviate it. 

OCD Is the Core Issue. Depression Is the Symptom

Depression is a common bi-product of something called the OCD cycle. That cycle can look like this: 

A person with OCD starts unintentionally giving meaning to an intrusive thought. Everyone has intrusive, unwanted, and “ego-dystonic” thoughts. (An ego-dystonic thought is entirely against what a person wants and who they believe themselves to be.) 

People without OCD can shrug an intrusive thought off and carry on with their day. Even people with OCD aren’t bothered by all intrusive thoughts, just the ones they get stuck on. When people with OCD assign danger to the thought and fixate upon it, anxiety begins to take hold.

The highly uncomfortable, anxious feelings result in a strong urge to perform a compulsion. That compulsion is meant to relieve that anxiety—but it only does so for a bit. The more you try to respond to these distressing thoughts, the more frequently and intensely they return. The distress of these negative recurring and intensifying thoughts causes the cycle to continue. 

Being caught in this self-perpetuating cycle of OCD can cause a person to feel as though their life is coming apart at the seams. People with OCD spend more of their time in distress, obsessing, feeling anxiety, and performing compulsions. As their quality of life nose-dives, it’s pretty typical for people to be overcome by feelings of sadness and hopelessness. Seemingly caught in a trap, depression can set in.  

Let’s look at a real-world example of how OCD can lead to depression.

Jonathan

Jonathan is at a summertime party on the rooftop of a friend’s apartment building. His best friend Sarah rummages around for a drink in a cooler placed a couple of feet from the edge. Suddenly, the thought of giving Sarah a hard shove and watching her fall eight stories to the sidewalk below pops into Jonathan’s mind. He is horrified. 

“Would I actually do that?”    

As a precaution, Jonathan takes several steps away from his friend while he fixates on the thought.  

“Does this thought mean that I want to hurt Sarah?” 

Due to this uncertainty about whether he can trust himself, he begins to feel the need to exert some control. Jonathan starts to doubt whether he can ever really trust himself not to harm or even kill Sarah and enacts a compulsion. Why? Because compulsions give a mistaken feeling of control. 

Jonathan’s initial compulsion is to avoid interacting with Sarah all together. He tells Sarah that he’s not feeling well and leaves the party immediately. He cancels the next three get-togethers they have planned, offering Sarah increasingly strained excuses. When Jonathan pulls out of a long-planned camping trip the pair had arranged with a few other friends for Sarah’s birthday, things come to a head. 

Terrified about opening up about his obsession with the idea of hurting or even killing his best friend, Jonathan doesn’t pick up his phone when she calls, nor does he respond to Sarah’s numerous texts or those of their mutual friends.

In addition to his avoidance of Sarah, Jonathan constantly ruminates on whether or not he is or isn’t an evil person, whether he is capable of committing such a heinous act. When he eventually attempts to socialize with other people, he finds himself obsessing over thoughts of hurting them too.  

These ruminating and avoidance compulsions give more weight to Jonathan’s obsessions. He quickly finds himself ensnared in a trap that he is utterly unable to break free of. His friendship with Sarah seems unsalvageable, as does his relationship with others in their friend circle. 

In a short amount of time, Jonathan finds himself feeling miserable, guilty, and discouraged. He is unable to sleep, uninterested in the things that, up until recently, he loved to do. Jonathan’s OCD has now become the main trigger of his depression.  

How an OCD Specialist Can Help Someone Struggling With OCD and Depression

A therapist with specialized training in OCD is very familiar with seeing people who struggle with depression. Because of this, OCD specialists build treatment plans with depression in mind.

An OCD specialist will provide you with an evidence-based treatment plan. They’ll tailor it to your unique needs and address the root issues causing your depression. Their goal is to get you back to living your life and doing the things you love. 

During your first couple of sessions, an OCD specialist will focus on the root issue. In turn, this treats your depression because the treatment targets what is at the heart of the matter—OCD. As you begin your treatment journey with them, they’ll provide you with a personalized and structured exposure and response (ERP) therapy plan. 

A wealth of evidence demonstrates that the most effective treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention therapy. Psychologists developed ERP in the 1970s specifically to treat OCD. It’s important to know that more generalized, talk-based therapy, while often effective in treating other mental health disorders, can harm people with OCD and worsen their symptoms.

That’s because people with OCD tend to place too much importance on the content of their thoughts. Talk therapy hones in on that content, causing them to ruminate. And that’s a problem. 

Unlike traditional talk therapists, the ERP therapist isn’t working with you to gather evidence for whether a thought is valid or not. They’re focused on helping you lean into and accept the uncertainty of the obsessions by helping you manage your compulsive responses. Their goal is to free you from the cycle of obsessions and compulsions so you can get back to living your life and doing the things you love.

ERP is most effective when the therapist conducting the treatment has experience with OCD and specific training in ERP. At NOCD, all our therapists receive ERP-specific training and specialize in treating OCD and related disorders like depression. Book a free, 15-minute call with our team and get matched with a specialty-trained, licensed NOCD therapist who is committed to treating your OCD and the depression that so often comes with it. 

As you progress through your ERP sessions, your NOCD therapist will regularly check to see if the level of depression you’re experiencing in your life is decreasing. They’ll work with you to create a personalized treatment plan to get you back to living your life.