The Average Person Waits 17 Years for Proper OCD Treatment. I Have a Few Thoughts.

About the author: Jenna Overbaugh has been treating OCD and anxiety since 2008, and has had it basically her whole life. She’s worked with some of the most severe, life-consuming cases out there, quit her job in 2023 to teach people all over the world how to be their own therapist, and has a book coming out in 2027. She’s been terrified for most of her life and keeps doing the things anyway, and she’s going to show you how to build a life so big and so bold that OCD and anxiety just can’t keep up. She runs on chai tea and the conviction that this is possible for you, too.

The cure for OCD has been discovered! It’s celery juice, apparently. Truly thrilled that after 18 years of working in this field and almost being admitted into an inpatient facility for this disorder myself, that the answer lies simply in my local Piggly Wiggly’s produce section.

It was produce! It was produce the whole time, you guys! I guess I’m all done here now.

Except, no.

I’m nowhere close to being done.

The celery juice thing sounds funny and ridiculous until you realize it’s right up there with rubber bands, ice packs, and a $297 supplement pack from someone with good lighting and absolutely zero clinical training with none of it labelled.

The mental health space is incredibly unregulated. Anyone can wake up and decide to teach OCD recovery strategies. Some of those people are BRILLIANT. Some are touting celery juice like it’s the absolute miracle cure. And some people really can’t tell them apart until they’ve already paid and lost another year to this condition.

A few months ago, someone slid into my DMs to tell me they’d been following an OCD coach for two years. They were doing all the things - they paid for the course, watched the videos, implemented the strategies, and their symptoms just got worse. Significantly, measurably, spending even more hours a day on rituals worse. When they finally asked why it wasn’t working, the coach simply said, “Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better.”

Do you think they talked about ritual prevention? No. Extinction bursts? No. Letting anxiety be there without interfering? No. Holding off on exposures until the person could actually develop the mental muscle of tolerating a single modicum of discomfort? Willingness? The natural nature of anxiety and intrusive thoughts and how they are naturally occurring, human experiences? Attention as a mental compulsion? Mental compulsions.. at all? Compulsions.. AT ALL? No. None of it.

This coach wasn’t being intentionally cruel or money hungry. I think they’re just, sometimes (not always), completely unequipped. And that's somehow worse.

So let’s get into it. Here’s what the mental health space continues to get wrong and what to actually look for instead.