News

We are delighted to announce that, as part of our continuing Lecture Series, we will be hosting a virtual Zoom event featuring a presentation by Dr. Jenn Rapkin on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, at 6:30 pm.

Dr. Rapkin will explore “Sitting with the Discomfort of ERP.” Discover how mind-body and body-centered tools and techniques can increase emotional tolerance when resisting urges, rituals, and mental compulsions, and how these concepts work hand-in-hand with Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy.

Dr. Rapkin is a licensed naturopathic physician, bodyworker, and former dancer with over 25 years of experience in integrative mental health, mind-body medicine, and body-centered therapies. Her personal experiences with OCD have deeply shaped her commitment to increasing awareness and understanding of the illness. Throughout her clinical career, she has helped patients learn to tolerate emotional discomfort by cultivating a friendly, trusting, and attuned relationship with their bodies. She is the author of The Feeling Muscle: How Felt Emotion Can Help You Sit with and Outlast Hard Feelings.

Her website is drjennrapkin.com.

Click here to register for this exclusive presentation.

The ancient solution to the modern crisis of attention is to devote your focus to just one idea a day—an approach outlined 2,000 years ago by the Roman philosopher Seneca and recently highlighted in S.J. Murray’s New York Times essay, There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention. Seneca warned that easy access to too many papyrus scrolls made readers restless, scattering their minds so that nothing stuck. Today, we face a similar issue, yet modern fixes like app blockers, minimalist phones, and new gadgets treat distraction as a technical flaw rather than addressing it as a fundamental moral and character challenge.

To combat this, the proposed daily practice relies on intentional foraging and deep processing. Each morning, spend less than 10 minutes—roughly three to four pages—reading a book to discover a single, challenging passage. Once identified, return to that same idea repeatedly throughout the day, allowing it to settle into your long-term memory and build fresh mental associations.

To read the entire article on the New York Times website, click here.

Hoarding Disorder is a mental health condition characterized by a persistent inability to discard possessions, regardless of value, leading to severely cluttered and unusable living spaces. Affecting at least 1.5% of the population equally across genders, this chronic condition typically begins in childhood or adolescence and worsens over time. Unlike simple disorganization or structured collecting, hoarding is driven by severe emotional distress during discarding, low insight, and a strong genetic component.

Treatment relies heavily on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), averaging 26 sessions of individual or group therapy that often include home visits. Clinicians use specialized assessment scales to measure clutter and focus therapy on cognitive skills training, such as decision-making and organization. Patients also practice behavioral exercises such as “acquisition rides,” in which they visit favorite stores to practice resisting the urge to buy or take items.

For families and loved ones, a compassionate, non-judgmental approach is critical to successfully encouraging professional intervention. Support guides emphasize focusing first on home safety and keeping discussions confidential to build trust. Well-meaning helpers should avoid forcibly clearing items, getting angry, or treating the individual like a child, as these actions can cause severe distress and trigger relapse.

Click here to download a PDF document containing more details.

A recent Brown University study published in Imaging Neuroscience found that while individuals with OCD perform sequential cognitive tasks as well as healthy controls, their brains recruit additional, previously unrelated regions to do so. By using MRI scans during a dynamic sequencing task that mimics real-world cognitive demands, researchers identified new brain networks involved in motor control, working memory, and object recognition.

Co-author Nicole McLaughlin, PhD, notes that targeting these newly implicated regions could significantly improve the efficacy of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treatments, which currently help only 30% to 40% of patients. Consequently, the team plans to use this sequencing task as a clinical assessment tool to track brain activity changes during treatment and predict effective symptom reduction.

To read the entire article on the Brown University Medicine@Brown website, click here.

As part of our Lecture Series, we were honored to host a presentation by Christopher Pittenger, MD, PhD, director of the Yale OCD Research Clinic. Dr. Pittenger gave an overview of OCD and discussed how cognitive-behavioral therapy affects the brain.

This special event was held on the evening of Tuesday, June 16, 2026, at 6:30 pm in the Cohen Auditorium at the Yale Child Study Center, 230 S. Frontage Road, NIHB E-02, New Haven, CT. Doors open at 6:00 pm.

Dr. Pittenger earned his MD and PhD degrees from Columbia University, where his graduate work was done with Nobel Prize recipient Eric Kandel. He returned to Yale University, his undergraduate alma mater, for residency and research training in psychiatry in 2003. He joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2007 and is now Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Psychology and in the Child Study Center, and Deputy Chair for Translational Research in the Department of Psychiatry.

Dr. Pittenger has always been fascinated by the question of how the brain, a complex but ultimately a physical structure, creates thought, feeling, consciousness, and other aspects of the mind. As a psychiatrist, he is additionally focused on how these processes go wrong—how brain dysregulation leads to dysregulated cognition, emotion, and behavior and to mental suffering, and how advancing our understanding of these relationships can guide us to new strategies to alleviate that suffering.

Dr. Pittenger’s website is https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/christopher-pittenger/.
The Yale OCD Research Clinic website is https://medicine.yale.edu/psychiatry/ocd/.

The FDA recently approved a brain-stimulation headset from Swedish company Flow Neuroscience as a first-line treatment for depression. Utilizing transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), the device delivers a weak electric current to the brain to help neurons fire more effectively. Unlike the more intensive electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which triggers seizures and can cause memory loss, tDCS is designed for home use and typically results in only minor, temporary side effects like skin irritation or headaches.

The approval marks a significant shift in psychiatry, offering an alternative or supplement to traditional antidepressants like SSRIs. While many treatments focus on chemical imbalances, neuromodulation views depression as a matter of impaired neural connectivity. Proponents argue that electricity is the “lingua franca” of the brain, and using a device to “tickle neurons” could help patients move past old mental patterns. In some cases, clinicians have used the headset to help patients avoid additional medications or taper off existing ones.

Despite the milestone, the technology remains in its early stages with varying clinical results. While a recent trial showed that 45% of participants achieved full remission using the device, the FDA noted a “moderate level of uncertainty” regarding its benefits compared to placebos. Researchers are now looking to refine the technology through personalized brain mapping and higher voltages. For patients like Sophie Davies, who used the device alongside medication, the therapy provided a much-needed sense of clarity and emotional recovery during a mental health crisis.

To read the entire article on The New York Times website, click here.

Changing medications abruptly can result in dangerous side effects. Elizabeth, a long-time caregiver for her two autistic sons, experienced a mental health crisis after her doctor advised an abrupt switch from Celexa to Zoloft. Instead of finding relief from burnout, she suffered from “protracted withdrawal,” enduring severe psychological distress and physical symptoms like heart palpitations and suicidal thoughts. Her story highlights a dangerous gap in medical practice, where a lack of standardized guidelines leads some physicians to switch potent medications too quickly, leaving patients vulnerable to debilitating side effects.

Experts suggest that switching medications should often be a last resort, preceded by dosage adjustments or adding supplemental treatments like psychotherapy. When a change is necessary, the gold standard is “cross-tapering”—gradually reducing the old drug while slowly introducing the new one over several weeks. This method helps minimize withdrawal symptoms such as “brain zaps” and extreme anxiety, ensuring that patients like Elizabeth can safely transition without enduring the trauma of sudden chemical shifts.

To read the entire article on The New York Times website, click here.

SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions) is an evidence-based program developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz to assist children and adolescents struggling with anxiety, OCD, and related challenges. A unique aspect of this treatment is that it focuses on empowering parents rather than the child, meaning the child does not typically need to attend the sessions to experience the benefits.

Instead of focusing on changing the child’s behavior, the program teaches parents to adjust their own responses to their child’s needs. By learning how to provide more effective support and reducing accommodations that may inadvertently reinforce anxious behaviors, parents can help their children overcome symptoms and improve their overall functioning.

To learn more about SPACE and how it works, visit its website at spacetreatment.net.

Please RSVP to ct.ocdf@gmail.com by Tuesday, April 28th, so we can keep an eye on numbers.

This is an in-person session only.

The Hubbard Room seats 80 people.

Parking: Parking for the Russell Library is available in several nearby municipal lots and metered street spaces, with over 200 spots within half a block. Parking is generally enforced from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, Monday through Saturday. Key options include the adjacent Broad Street Lot, the Kid City Lot, and the Middlesex Corporate Center Garage, with payments accepted via the ParkMobile App or kiosks. 

Russell Library website: russelllibrary.org.