ACT for OCD: When to End Therapy

Now, let’s look to this idea of determining when to end treatment with your clients and especially when you’re working within a new modality it can be hard to know quite when someone is ready to wrap up with treatment and when they have covered all the concepts. So, this video is going to be about giving you a sense of what those goal posts are so you can work toward that.

As we talked about at the very beginning of this, we want to be giving self-report measures and to include behavior tracking. These are objective forms of assessment that we can return to, especially at this point in treatment to see, “Are we seeing the changes that we’re looking to have happen within this treatment?” So the self-report measures that you want to return to are measures of psychological flexibility like the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire, the second version or the Y-BOCS, the standard measure for OCD symptoms.

Twohig, M. P. (2004). ACT for OCD: Abbreviated treatment manual [unpublished treatment manual]. University of Nevada.

Let’s start with the Y-BOCS. When people are at the end of treatment, their Y-BOCS scores tend to be in the low-moderate to mild range and clients are typically ready to end treatment at that point and they might start saying things that indicate that as well, but this is one of the measures of that.

Twohig, M. P. (2004). ACT for OCD: Abbreviated treatment manual [unpublished treatment manual]. University of Nevada.