Treatment Methods
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) – Exposure and response prevention is one of the most popular and effective forms of behavior therapy for OCD. It involves exposing you to the anxiety that is provoked by your obsessions and then preventing the use of rituals to reduce your anxiety.
ERP is usually a therapy for people suffering from OCD. But using ERP mixed with other methods has proven successful with some patients.
Discarding- Used in all treatments for hoarding. Discarding doesn’t allow the patient to postpone a decision about an item. The patient will experience a discomforting anxiety when forced to make a decision whether to discard or keep each item. The longer the patient is forced to make these decisions, the more the anxiety levels of discarding will go down. Discarding is also learning that nothing terrible is going to happen if an item that was viewed as valuable is trashed.