Shahzad Chaudhry

This review is based on the end result for my 14-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, after 25 sessions there was no improvement. Even though it started fine and overall the therapist is a nice person who seems to be experienced in treating OCD, and it looked very promising in the beginning, but after 3 months of treatment, my daughter still had the same symptoms, including some that have not been addressed. On top of that, almost 1/3 of the sessions the therapist rescheduled, canceled, or did not show up for. There were times when my daughter would join Zoom meeting and sit and wait for the therapist, but later he would message her different excuses like having a “bad internet connection,” “being with another patient”, etc. For example, my daughter joined the Zoom session at 10:00 a.m., after the therapist didn’t show up, she messaged him and at 10:30 a.m. he replied he is “running late with another patient,” and he asked to reschedule the session. The next session the therapist didn’t show up at all, and after waiting for 15 minutes my daughter messaged him, but he didn’t reply, so I sent him a message myself and the therapist replied almost 1 hour after the session was scheduled to start, stating that he again had a “network outage.” Because the therapist had my cell phone number, he could’ve called and my daughter would not have wasted time (again) just by sitting and waiting for him when she should have been in school. It made her feel like other patients were his top priority and her anxiety would go up. Some sessions that we expected would be 45 minutes to 1 hour were cut short to 30 minutes by the therapist, which he called “check-ins” sessions. In my opinion, there were not enough exposures done and some of the exposures that were done were very light to be effective, and I am very familiar with how exposure and response prevention should look like and what the result should be, based on prior experience outside of NOCD and experience with my older child. However, I feel the concept of NOCD is great, and we are willing to give it another try. We have selected a therapist at NOCD who we believe is a good fit for our daughter and can really help her. Unfortunately, we were told that it might be months until that therapist will be available, and we have already been waiting for a month. We really hope that my daughter will be able to see that therapist soon enough to have enough time for the sessions authorized by our insurance not to expire. I will add that the customer service people at NOCD have been very nice, helpful, and reply very fast, so overall it’s not a bad experience with NOCD itself, but specifically based on the end results of 25 sessions with the therapist we had. I am still hopeful that next time I will be able to post a positive review based on how things go.

My therapist was very professional, yet empathetic. I felt safe enough to discuss my symptoms. So far, so good

Shezad is very good at his job. His is knowledgeable and very patient