I'm desperate to help my daughter help herself. She has struggled since she went to University last autumn and her OCD has become a lot worse. Despite making friends and liking her university and demanding course, it is an intense environment. She now finds it takes hours to get in to bed to sleep as well as all the intrusive thoughts and compulsions during the day and it reached a crisis point last week and she came home for a few days just to sleep. Finding a private therapist was critical as she is on a NHS 8 month waiting list for cbt therapy. It came down to a choice of a well known OCD expert by skype who is very expensive or a local to her university BABCP therapist who is not an OCD expert, she was declined by another well regarded therapist. Choosing the local therapist she has now had 3 sessions but so far has only been given relaxation techniques and told the therapist needs to go into her history more. During her crisis period at home I spent many hours building on my OCD knowledge and we started to do some ERP as a practice in readiness for therapy and because quite frankly there seemed to be nothing to lose as the likelihood of dropping out of university loomed. Having built a hierarchy for home and at university and charted a very long list of her overt and covert compulsions with her just makes me feel that her therapist really needs to know what they are doing with this deeply entrenched illness. We both found hope in starting the ERP together, having carefully chosen from the hierarchy something manageable but not overwhelming. There was a chink of light for my daughter that this was the way forward. Doing ERP very late at night in her room at uni seems much less manageable and I feel very disappointed that no ERP has started after three weeks of therapy.
Medication wise she was on a low dose of fluoxetine and the university local gp put her on a higher dose which seemed to bring about a lowering of mood so she dropped back to the lower dose which I am sure is probably useless, she is having to wait 2 weeks for another appointment to ask if she can try another drug? The appointments are a strict 5 minutes so I don't expect much consideration.
As her mum, I do not want to take on the role of a therapist or advise on medication but yet again I find myself doing anything I have to help her, I don't think she will last long without sleep until she is back home. Should we cut our losses and move on to an expert OCD therapist or is CBT ERP typically very slow starting