Recently, The Washington Post released an article titled “Obsessive-compulsive disorder nearly ruined her life”. This article, written by Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff, reviews Schaaff’s life as she struggles to overcome her obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the article, she discusses the many hardships that she faced such as needing to see multiple doctors frequently over obsession of a mole, and constantly worrying that she left the stove on or that her babysitter was really a child abductor. These compulsive thoughts led to high amounts of anxiety and slowly began to take a toll on her health and the lives of her family. It was after her husband refused to allow the family to endure this anxiety when she finally decided to seek out help.…show more content… Thomsen participated in a clinical trial in which he researched the effects of combining antipsychotic drugs with cognitive behavior therapy as a potential solution to obsessive-compulsive disorder. In this journal, he looks at various medications and their effectiveness when added in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy in adolescents. The study found that sertraline is the most effective drug however that most studies showed that it is rare for someone to completely be OCD symptom free when treated with medication alone. He then stresses the importance of also combatting the medication with cognitive behavioral therapy. The medication alone will not give the patient permanent results and therefore, there is a crucial need for therapy as…show more content… Schaaff wrote her piece to connect with others who could possibly be struggling as a way to show there was others who had OCD as well, while Thomsen’s goal was to reach other scientists and scholarly people and inform them on the results found through his analysis of different studies. Also, the subjects of the articles differ drastically. While Schaaff write about her OCD as an adult and adults using pharmacological-therapy approaches, Thomsen shows that the same approach is effective in children and adolescents. Lastly, Schaaff uses personal experiences and views of her treatment as basis of evidence for her readers to evaluate, while Thomsen uses scientific findings and statistical calculations to show that medicine and therapy can be shown
