Norwegian cheese company funds intensive OCD treatment in NZ

An intensive 'circuit-breaker' type treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which is having phenomenal results internationally, will soon be available in this country.

The Bergen Four-Day OCD Treatment programme offers new hope to the estimated 100,000 New Zealanders struggling to get help - and it is largely thanks to a Norwegian cheese dynasty.

• OCD estimated to affect 1-2 percent of population, but many undiagnosed and most missing out on effective treatment
• Bergen Four Day OCD Treatment (B4DT) programme reduces symptoms for 90 pecrent of participants, and
• Norwegian charity Kavli Trust is supporting the global B4DT rollout and is providing funding for NZ clinicians.

Auckland man Ethan Spaabaek, who has suffered OCD for most of his life, said the reality of living with the mental disorder was nothing like the Hollywood depiction.

"In movies and television, they're sort of endearing, maybe even a bit cute with their little frustrations. But it couldn't be further from the truth.

"People with OCD have almost cartoonishly high rates of suicide and self-harm."

His consuming "obsession" was the fear he could harm others.

"I was constantly afraid that I was making things unclean or infected or contagious, which spiralled into I'm some kind of ... not like a force for evil, but some of contaminant that's hurting others around me."

He was compelled to constantly check he had not harmed someone.

One day at school, he accidentally pulled out a chair from under a classmate while trying to help him.

The boy was uninjured, but their teacher scolded Ethan that he could have paralysed him - and that was enough to spark a new obsession.

"He wasn't even a friend but I managed to get his phone number and I phoned him every day during the holidays, maybe twice a day, for the whole holidays, trying to mask what I was actually checking for, which was, 'Are you in a wheelchair?'."

At any one time, he would be juggling three or four of those obsessive fears.

"It was like several full-time jobs panicking about other people."

Sometimes it would not even be something he had done that set it off, but an image of something he might have done.

"Like I might think, 'What if l left the knife block too near the edge of the kitchen counter and someone gets impaled on it?'. And I would get an image of that in my mind and start thinking 'What's wrong [with] me to even think that?'."

To adults and therapists, he appeared to be just another anxious kid with recently divorced parents, maybe struggling with the onset of puberty.

Spaabaek was in his early 20s before he got a formal diagnosis, and it took years to get effective help.

Now 31, he only had a couple of so-called "avoidances" left, and hoped to tick them off in the next six months.

"I've learned to accept that if something feels unbearable now, it will probably be OK in another minute. And if it's still bad then, it will probably be OK in an hour. Or if it's still bad then, it will probably OK tomorrow, or in another couple of days.

"That's progress. People with OCD tend to catastrophise. They run on the assumption that 'Oh, this bad thing is happening. That's me now forever'."

New charity working to make treatment 'accessible'

About 1-2 percent of people have OCD, and for many it is profoundly disabling - but very few get the help they need, even if they can afford to pay for it.

A new charity called Open Closed Doors - set up this year by a group of clinicians, advocates and families - is on a mission to change that.

Co-founder Megan Jones said the Bergen programme, which started in Norway, was one of the most successful interventions for treating severe OCD, with 90 percent of clients experiencing significant improvements, and nearly 70 percent still recovered after four years.

She got in touch to ask how the programme worked.

"And basically they said, 'We'll help you. We'll partner with you to bring the programme to New Zealand'."

Five New Zealand psychologists are currently doing two-weeks' intensive training in Singapore - and in January, Bergen clinicians are coming here to teach those practitioners how to deliver the training to others.

"And it's all being paid for by the Kavli Trust in Norway, founded by a family that made its fortune in cheese. So we're laughing that a Norwegian cheese charity is rolling out a mental health service in New Zealand!"

The gold-standard treatment for OCD is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP).

Essentially, that aimed to help people confront the thoughts, images, objects, or situations that made them anxious and give them the tools to reframe them as non-threatening.

Like most psychotherapies, it was typically delivered in weekly one-on-one sessions over several months.

Another founding member of Open Closed Doors, clinical psychologist Marthinus Bekker from Auckland University, said the Bergen treatment was "an evolution" of ERP.

"It condenses it into an intensive period of about four days. You start on the Tuesday, let's say, and on the Friday, the treatment concludes."

The other major difference with the Bergen treatment was the use of a group setting.

"So you get a lot of individualised support but you also get normalisation, the validation you get from being around other people going through the same challenges."

While effective treatment for OCD had been around for many years, access was still "sporadic" in New Zealand, he said.

Megan Jones said the Bergen programme was not only effective, it was cheap to deliver, as it did not require a residential facility.

"And obviously long-term it saves the government a lot of money because it's a short, sharp treatment with great results, that gets people back to work, back into education."

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