In episode 34 of The OCD Stories podcast I interviewed Julia Gottwald. Julia is a PhD student at Cambridge University and is researching adolescent OCD. Julia is a communicator for The Cambridge Neuroscience Society and was shortlisted for The Max Perutz Science Writing Award. Julia has co-authored a book called “Sex, lies and brain scans” which is due for release in 2017.

Julia Gottwald

I chat with Julia about her research into adolescent OCD, memory, why low confidence and low self esteem can be a side effect of OCD. She expresses the need for patient centred treatment and treating adolescent OCD as a subtype, as adolescents show different results and markers from adults with OCD. Advice for parents with kids with OCD. This was a fun conversation, I learned a lot and I’m sure you will too. Enjoy.

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podcast

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Show notes:

Why Julia is researching adolescent OCD (5:30)

Memory and OCD (7:20)

Julia’s study (8:30)

Testing memory training for improved treatment (13:30)

Why low confidence and self-esteem can become a side effect of OCD (17:00)

Teenage boys are two to three times as likely to develop OCD (20:20)

Why adolescents with OCD have more cognitive flexibility than adults with OCD (preliminary research results) (22:30)

Potential for adjusting treatment for adolescents (28:00)

How early OCD can start in kids (39:40)

Can we prevent OCD in kids? What helps kids with OCD? (44:20)

Good techniques to get adolescents to take part in OCD treatment and the most important thing to know about adolescent OCD (52:00)

Does OCD improve as you get older? (56:20)

The importance of research? (59:40)

Julia’s book (1:03:00)

Julia’s one piece of advice (1:06:20)

Julia’s advice for living an amazing life (1:07:00)

What Julia would have on her billboard (1:08:15)

Find out more about Julia:

Julia on Twitter – @Julia_Gottwald

Julia’s info – Cambridge University

Take part in Julia’s study – http://www.ocdaction.org.uk/node/140814

“Sex, lies and brain scans” by Julia Gottwald (Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com)

Resources:

Naomi Fineberg

Chris Baier UNSTUCK documentary

“The man who couldn’t stop” by David Adam

Kat Nicole on the podcast

Sponsors:

NOCD: http://go.treatmyocd.com/theocdstories

To your success,

Stuart and The OCD Stories team

Comments (4)
  1. Regarding memory, from what I know, have experienced it is not that the memory of a task vanishes, it just wasn’t in the frontline of brain, like a thought train, while I was doing a certain task the task being a routine, not-so-important falls back to lower priority. It is being completed while I am in the middle of some thought which I process as important.
    I don’t know if ocd causes memory lapse or memory lapse causes ocd. I had pretty good memory. I don’t know much but I believed somehow ocd helped me have such good memory. Recently there has been a lapse in memory downwards very fast, earlier I could remember the states of something I heard, saw in full detail such that I could recreate the whole thing back in my mind and get whatever information I needed out of it. I could remember passwords, cryptic and those based on my methods, which didn’t necessarily relied on muscle memory. I could remember random strings, licence plates, phones numbers I heard over phone. But it was all filed systematically, key thing was the link each detail had link to other, that’s how it all unrolled.

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