Press Release: SLaM & OCD ACTION LAUNCH ‘OCD AT SCHOOL’ WEBSITE

The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Service for children and young people has partnered with OCD Action to develop an innovative new website to provide information on OCD to young people and parents. 

The ‘OCD At School’ website aims to bring awareness of OCD into the school environment, helping educators to spot the signs of OCD and to provide support to pupils with the disorder.

SLaM and The City Bridge Trust worked with OCD Action to bring together educators, parents and young people with OCD to develop the OCD At School project.

Dr Isobel Heyman, head of SLaM’s OCD Service for children and adolescents, said the new website would provide advice to both young people with OCD, and their parents and teachers.

“OCD is a debilitating condition which affects around one per cent of young people under the age of 18 in the UK.  As the symptoms increase, OCD can consume the a young person’s daily life.  Peer and family relationships of often suffer and individuals may even become housebound or stop attending school,” Dr Heyman said.

“This new website will give young people experiencing OCD an independent, confidential source of advice and help them and their families to better understand the condition.”

For young people with OCD in school, life can be miserable and beset with challenges that are hard to imagine. OCD Action believes that by working with young people, parents and teachers lives can be turned around and young people with OCD can become part of a nurturing school environment and have a greater chance of succeeding in life.

The website will enable young people, parents and educational professionals to share thoughts and ideas online.  It will be managed by OCD Action with the help of a volunteer committee of young people, parents and educators.

Along with the website, the project will incorporate:

• A network of parent volunteers who will visit schools to meet with special educational needs co-ordinators, school nurses and counsellors
• An OCD At School resource pack will be made available to school, parents and young people with OCD
• A training day for educational professionals in September 2011
• A meet-up day for young people and their parents will be organised for Summer 2011

OCD is common, chronic and debilitating.  The World Health Organisation ranks OCD in the top 20 most disabling conditions, affecting around one to two per cent of the population worldwide. 

In the United Kingdom alone there are estimated to be more than a million people with OCD, many who are unaware that it is a treatable condition.  It can occur in children as young as six, and most patients who develop OCD will have symptoms in childhood or adolescence.  It affects males and females equally. 

OCD is characterised by intrusive unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and ritualistic behaviours (compulsions).  Sufferers of OCD recognise that their obsessions originate from their own mind, but experience them as out of character, unwanted and distressing.  Common obsessions include fears and concerns about germs or contamination, symmetry and order, safety, worries about hurting others or themselves and unwanted sexual thoughts.

Compulsions are repetitive stereotyped behaviours, typically for the purpose of ‘neutralising’ the fear or anxiety provoked by the obsession.  Patients realise that the action is purposeless but cannot resist performing it and often fear that ‘something bad’ might happen if they do not do it.  Common compulsions include checking, touching, lining up items, hand washing, cleaning and counting. 

SLaM’s OCD Service assesses and treats young people from all over the United Kingdom with complicated or unusual OCD and related conditions, including body dysmorphic disorder, tic disorders, Tourette’s syndrome, anxiety and habit disorders, including trichotillomania.  The service also assesses and treats OCD-related anxiety disorders in young people with a developmental disorder, for example high functioning autism spectrum disorders or neurological conditions

The service provides a range of evidence-based care packages tailored to meet the needs of the young person and their parents or carers. Many of the young people we see are offered individual cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which may involve parents or carers and other family members.

Notes:

• Dr Isobel Heyman is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the Trust, and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry.  She is leads theObsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Service at the Maudsley Hospital. She holds consultant positions in specialist children’s services at Great Ormond StreetHospital for Children, leading the Tourette Syndrome clinic and the liaison service for children with severe epilepsy. She is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Child Health  www.national.slam.nhs.uk/isobelheyman
• SLaM’s OCD Service offers assessment and treatment of children and adolescents with OCD and related conditions, including body dysmorphic disorder, tic disorders, Tourette’s syndrome, anxiety and habit disorders, including trichotillomania.   
• The service has active research programme and are committed to increasing knowledge and understanding of the disorders we treat, and developing our treatments to help improve the outcomes for young people with OCD. We offer treatment as part of a trial to the majority of young people we see. Treatment trials provide the same package of care, but under more controlled protocols.
• The service also offers an extensive programme of training and consultancy in the assessment, treatment and management of different aspects of OCD through seminars, workshops, individual case supervision and research project supervision.
• For more information on SLaM’s OCD Service for children and adolescents visit www.national.slam.nhs.uk/camhs-ocd
• South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) provides national and specialist mental health services to children and adolescents across the UK.  Our child and adolescent services (CAMHS) include a range of outpatient clinics and five inpatient units, located at the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell, the Bethlem RoyalHospital in Beckenham, and in Staplehurst, Kent. 
• SLaM’s CAMHS services are renowned both in the UK and internationally, with clinical practice that thrives on links with the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) and the Medical Research Council Child Psychiatry Unit. 
• For further information on the CAMHS OCD Service please contact Laura Crowden, National Services Media Officer on 020 3228 8584 or laura.crowden@slam.nhs.uk