Evaluating the Effectiveness of Paradox Therapy for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - Abstract
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is recognized as a severe and debilitating psychological illness. The purpose of the present study was to investigate
the effectiveness of paradox therapy on patients with OCD. The present study recruited eighteen patients with OCD. Participants were assessed on the Yale
Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS). Subsequently, they underwent six sessions of the PTC model of paradox therapy, each lasting approximately 45
minutes. A single group with pre- and post-assessment was adopted to evaluate the changes in the participants in response to the intervention. A linear mixed
effect model with an unstructured residual covariance matrix was fitted to the data. A significant effect was evident for time, F (2, 17) = 108.8, p < .001. Direct
comparison of mean scores showed a significant reduction from baseline to post-treatment; the mean difference = 20.22, SE = 1.5, p < .001, d = 2.1, and a
significant but small reduction from post-treatment to follow-up, the mean difference = 1.56, SE = .41, p = .002, d = .16. The residuals were approximately
normally distributed, skewness = .51, kurtosis = .7, and there were no extreme outliers. All participants showed a reliable change, i.e., a change more than
expected from measurement error. Also, the improvement for all participants was clinically meaningful. The findings of the present study suggest that the PTC
model of paradox therapy is efficacious in reducing the severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in patients with OCD.