OCD is not a personality quirk about tidy desks. It is intrusive thoughts you never asked for and rituals that eat your hours, and it responds to specific treatments that too few people ever receive. Care is available across Maryland by secure telehealth.
Book a Telehealth Appointment →OCD affects roughly one in forty adults, yet the average person waits more than a decade for an accurate diagnosis. Part of the reason is that most OCD is invisible: not hand-washing, but taboo intrusive thoughts about harm, sexuality, contamination, or morality, paired with mental rituals like reviewing, counting, praying, or endless reassurance-seeking. This presentation, often called Pure O, is routinely mistaken for anxiety, depression, or worse, and treated with approaches that do not touch it.
The evaluation here screens for OCD properly, distinguishes it from generalized anxiety and from intrusive thoughts in depression, and, critically, names what is happening. For many patients, learning that a horrifying thought is a textbook OCD symptom, not a hidden truth about who they are, is the single most relieving moment of care.
Treatment follows the evidence: SSRIs at OCD-appropriate doses, which are often higher and slower to work than depression dosing, sometimes augmented when response is partial. The gold-standard therapy is exposure and response prevention (ERP), and Alice coordinates with ERP therapists in Maryland or helps you find one, so medication and therapy reinforce each other. All visits are by secure telehealth.
Harm, sexual, religious, and moral obsessions with invisible mental rituals. The most missed form of OCD, and the core of this practice’s OCD work.
The classic presentations still deserve modern care: right-dose SSRIs plus ERP coordination, not white-knuckling.
Living with untreated OCD is exhausting, and depression commonly follows. Both are treated, in the right order.
The endless Googling, confessing, and asking-if-you-are-sure. Naming the loop is step one to breaking it.
Intrusive OCD thoughts are ego-dystonic, meaning they horrify you precisely because they violate your values, and clinicians trained in OCD know the difference between intrusive thoughts and intent. You can say the unsayable here and be met with a diagnosis, not alarm.
Often because it was dosed for depression. OCD typically needs higher doses for longer, sometimes ten to twelve weeks, before judging the trial. An honest medication review is often where OCD treatment restarts.
Alice provides evaluation, medication management, and supportive care, and she works alongside ERP specialists rather than duplicating them. If you need an ERP therapist in Maryland, she will help you find one and coordinate care.
Yes. Evaluation and medication management transfer fully to video, and even ERP is now commonly delivered virtually with strong results.
OCD evaluation and medication management by telehealth across Maryland.
Book Now →Or call/text: (703) 791-9099