Essay on obsessive compulsive disorder

Submitted By dukehalie
Words: 683
Pages: 3

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in College Students Obsessive Compulsion disorder has a lot of effects on college students today. This study investigates how much obsessive compulsion spectrum disorders occur and how it relates to college students. The experimenters enrolled participants into an undergraduate education course or a psychology course. Participants ranged in the ages of seventeen and twenty seven. They started with measuring a procedure called “the picking scale.” This includes the participants who start picking their fingers or have the urge to pick their fingers. They asses this through certain domains such as urges to pick, time spent on picking, impact of the skin due to an individual’s social or occupational functioning and distress associated with picking. Massachusetts did a similar study to this except they did their experiment on hair pulling. OCD involves the presence of ongoing cognitions or obsessions. It also has the presence of anxiety reductive rituals which we call compulsions. Picking the skin or pulling of the hair is two of these obsessions that a lot of college students do to make their situation less stressful. They do it so much to relieve their stress that is becomes an obsession and they feel dependent on it. Millions of people are expected to have a disease such as OCD and functional impairment can be profound. In this correlational study three hundred and fifty eight participants were enrolled into the skin picking scale assessment. One hundred and forty nine of them reported that they had the urge to pick their skin during class. Overall that was 42 percent of students. One hundred and thirty six students occasionally picked their skin during class. This came out to about 35 percent of students in this experiment. The students who reported picking at their skin also experienced distress and/or psychosocial impairment. There was no difference between males and females for skin picking. From these results it is obvious that students who pick their skin during class are having social distress (35%). Also, more than one third of the students claimed to either have an urge, or they were physically picking their skin during class which obviously causes a distraction to their learning abilities. In the hair pulling experiment, which was also a correlational study, the results came out to be 22 percent of the students experienced hair pulling urges. 13 percent of the students occasionally pulled at their hair. Of the students that pulled their hair during class, 3 percent experienced distress and/or psychosocial impairment related to hair pulling. In this