Exposure Response Therapy (ERP) Rogers Behavioral Health

In the summer of 2018, we set off to Florida for 8 weeks of partial hospital programming at Rogers Behavioral Health.

Things we did like: We were a team effort, not just the child, but both parent and child undertook the program. I had a private space to work while B was in treatment. Occasionally I was pulled into his treatment, but they also ran classes for parents while our kids were engaged in the partial hospital program. At the end of the day, there was a debrief for all of us. The Ronald McDonald House was amazingly kind and helpful. You cannot beat Florida (St. Petersberg) for being in treatment over the summer. We watched a lot of kids recover using ERP (exposure response therapy) while we were there. However, those kids were petrified of tangible things, things the therapists could touch, feel and control, which on so many levels made treatment easier and more successful. Pure OCD is not as easy.

Things we were disappointed about: They didn’t recognize pure OCD or PANS/PANDAS. They didn’t believe me when I said the medication they were insistent on trying had been tried before and made everything worse, spoiler: it did. Most disappointing, in the end, we left without any real movement in symptoms or complexity.

“Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) used to treat a variety of conditions, including anxiety, phobias, and eating disorders. It is considered the gold-standard treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).”

In fact, 5 years later, and I have finally paid off the copayment, he is still very upset at me for making him stay in a program that was “useless and made him feel much worse about himself”. All fair comments. We left that program with a  diagnosis of “pathological self-hatred”! Which now I know better, is a HUGE indicator for Pure OCD and I feel the therapists should have been very aware of the connection and subtle presentation.  The reassurance compulsion was what triggered the “self-hatred” piece of the diagnosis in the first place.  How to comprehend that cycle of hatred and OCD and PURE OCD?

“How do you Recover from OCD and an Addiction to Self-Hatred by Harris Pike

Mental illness is not easy to comprehend for the ill or the healthy. The overwhelming majority of medical professionals believe that many disorders are incurable with our current tools. Many say the best a person can hope for is relief from the symptoms.”

Breaking this cycle is proving monumentally hard.