Outline and Evaluate Classification and Diagnosis of Ocd

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‘Outline and evaluate classification and diagnosis of OCD’ 24 marks OCD is an anxiety disorder characterized by obsessions that lead to compulsions. Obsessions manifest themselves as repetitive, recurring and unwanted thoughts, which cause anxiety and are a product of the individual’s own mind. One example may be the constant thought that something negative will happen to you. This obsession will then lead to a compulsion, which the patient believes will prevent these unwanted thoughts coming to life. For example, the idea that by keeping everything abnormally clean and organised the thought that something negative will happen to you will be prevented. As these thoughts are recurring and repetitive, the compulsions that follow them are also. In order to be clinically diagnosed with OCD, these symptoms have to have been persistent for a minimum of two weeks and the other symptoms from other disorders from the Axis ll must be absent. A strength of the classification and diagnosis of OCD is that it has a very high inter-rater reliability. In the context of OCD, this measures the extent to which two different clinicians agree on the diagnosis of the same patient. The fact that Woody et al 1995 postulated that this reliability was very high in Y-BOCS scale implies that the diagnostic criteria outlines the specific symptoms of OCD in detail and with clarity. This explains why such a low number clinicians disagreed on the diagnosis of the same patients, as clearly outlined symptoms that are specific to OCD reduce the likeliness of a clinician misinterpreting the diagnostic criteria and hence, misdiagnosing the patient. Consequently, clinicians can be confident that this diagnostic criteria can be relied upon to provide the correct symptoms of OCD provide the patient’s symptoms at the diagnostic interview are an accurate representation of the severity of their OCD. This
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