In 2026, conservative estimates are that 35,000 (1.2% of the population) people in Mississippi will struggle with OCD. Half of those people will experience significant impairment as a result of OCD. We are here to help kids, teens, adults, and families recover from OCD and get their lives back.

What is OCD?

People struggling with OCD often struggle with a specific “what if” question that causes great anxiety. Some examples include:

• Contamination OCD: “What if I get sick due to not washing my hands properly?”

• Existential OCD: “What if nothing is real and this is all just a simulation?”

• False Memory OCD: “What if I did something terrible and don’t remember it?”

• Harm OCD: “What if I grab a sharp object and stab someone with it?”

• Psychosis OCD: “What if I go crazy and I’m never the same again?”

• Just Right OCD: “If I don’t do _____ just right, then everything will feel off.”

• Pedophilia OCD: “What if I’m attracted to children even though I don’t want to be?”

• Relationship OCD: “What if this isn’t the right person for me?”

• Religious or Scrupulosity OCD: “What if I’m not actually a Christian?”

• Sensorimotor or Somatic OCD: “What if I choke?” or “What if I feel this sensation forever?”

• Sexual Orientation OCD: “What if I’m secretly gay?”

• Magical Thinking: “I have to tap my phone three times or something awful will happen.”

• Perinatal and Postpartum OCD: “What if I harm my baby?”

• Emetophobia: “What if I throw up and can’t handle it?”

These are just a few examples of how OCD can manifest. As you can see, many of these are distressing topics to grapple with. The person with OCD has a hard time dismissing them and moving on; they get caught in a mental battle that causes a lot of anxiety and leads to compulsive behaviors.

Understanding the OCD Cycle

Compulsions often take the form of seeking excessive reassurance, confessing, avoiding situations, odd rituals, or constantly checking to be sure your fear isn’t true—but never being able to accept a “good enough” answer.

Compulsions provide short-term relief, but they cause you to be more stuck in the OCD cycle in the long run. The key to recovery is stopping the compulsions and realizing that your fears are likely not true. You learn that perfect proof doesn’t exist, and your world is shrinking the more you try to be perfectly certain that your fears aren’t true. If fear is not your primary struggle, then you’ll learn you don’t have to keep up your rituals to manage anxiety. It’s actually the performance of the rituals that is keeping your anxiety going.

How We Treat OCD

The best evidence-based treatment for OCD is called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). When you do ERP, you expose yourself to your fear by not doing your compulsions and not avoiding triggers. You learn that you can tolerate facing your fear better than you thought, your feared outcome doesn’t come true, and your anxiety actually decreases when you don’t do your compulsions.

There is another evidence-based therapy called Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (I-CBT), which focuses on the faulty logic behind OCD and teaches you how to evaluate your thoughts to avoid getting into the cycle of trying to come to perfect certainty.

We combine these treatments to help clients recover as quickly and as fully as possible. If you have OCD and you aren’t being treated with one of these modalities, you likely will not see the improvement you want. On the other hand, if you work hard at these treatments, there is a very high likelihood that the distress OCD causes you will decrease significantly.

Specialized Training for Lasting Results

We’ve done various training via The International OCD Foundation (IOCDF), NOCD, Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Michael J. Greenberg’s RF-ERP (Rumination-Focused ERP). We are trained to treat both pediatric and adult OCD. These advanced frameworks equip us to be your guide to taking your life back from OCD. 

Whether you are seeking care in-person or via telehealth from anywhere in Mississippi, we are ready to help. We love treating OCD because people get better and grow in courage and confidence when they go through treatment. You can do the same.