Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 3, 2010
New book teaches teens how to deal with OCD
David Laprad
Dr. Timothy Sisemore is a clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders in adolescents. His fifth book, “Free from OCD: A Workbook for Teens With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” has just hit stores. Available online, the book is designed to help teens and parents work together to assess the severity of the young person’s symptoms and offer cognitive behavioral skills to overcome them.
- David Laprad
Dr. Timothy Sisemore, a clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders in adolescents, says he wishes he had less of what he treats in others.
“We all have some anxiety. I joke with my doctor about my white coat hypertension. I walk into a medical office and my blood pressure jumps 20 points.”
Sisemore laughs, but it’s clear he takes his work seriously. Seated in his office at the CBI Counseling Center on McCallie Avenue, he’s surrounded by hundreds of books about mental health issues. He wrote five of them himself, including a new one called “Free from OCD: A Workbook for Teens With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.”
Available online, the book is designed to help teens and parents work together to assess the severity of the young person’s symptoms and offers cognitive behavioral skills to overcome them.
“If your teen doesn’t have severe OCD, you can work through some of the skills with him so you don’t have to take him to counseling. The book can also be used as homework while a teen is in counseling,” Sisemore says.
Books seem like a natural way for Sisemore to utilize his expertise, as he has a way with words that makes complex topics easy for his patients to understand. For example, when defining OCD for a teen, he calls obsessions “stuck thoughts.”
“There are two parts to OCD. The first part is the obsession, which is the thought that gets stuck in your head, or that you’re having but don’t want, such as a fear of germs. The other part of OCD is the compulsion, which is the behavior used to reduce the obsession, such as washing your hands.
“Worrying about germs is the obsession, and washing your hands is the compulsion. You feel better after you wash your hands until you leave the bathroom, and you’re right back where you started,” Sisemore says.
Anxiety disorders such as OCD are the most common mental health problems, Sisemore says, although they aren’t discussed much outside of professional circles.
“You’re not going to hear about anxiety on the news because it’s not one of the glamorous mental health problems, but it is something from which a lot of people silently suffer. More people suffer from anxiety than depression.”
Sisemore says the reasons for anxiety are manifold, although it’s often a result of stress, which can stem from uncertainty. For example, as the economy destabilized, job security went out the window. This made home situations more volatile, and the number of divorces spiked in tandem with the increase in house foreclosures. All of this led to a sense of instability.
There’s good news, though, at least from a mental health point of view: counselors have a number of well-established counseling techniques at their disposal for helping people, Sisemore says.
As a clinical psychologist who works with a lot of children, Sisemore has found playful ways of applying the counseling techniques. As an example, he pulls a bubble bottle out of a drawer.
“One of the ways I teach children to breathe slowly and deeply is by having them blow a nice stream of bubbles,” he says, without demonstrating.
“These techniques can help
them to understand their thoughts better. I also want them to get to the point where they can face their fears. If someone is afraid of getting germs off a door handle, then I want them to grab a door handle and not let it bother them. The science of what I do is in the techniques; the art of it is making it work for kids,” Sisemore says.
Unfortunately, many people are not applying the techniques, says Sisemore. Too often, parents take their children to a physician who prescribes medicine as a way of dealing with anxiety. This trend is beginning to turn around, however, which Sisemore says is encouraging.
“It goes back to the adage that says if you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. We teach skills to help people manage their anxiety,” Sisemore says.
Sisemore spent many years acquiring the skills that would enable him to become what Christian Focus Publications calls “one of America’s leading child and adolescent Christian psychologists.”
Born and reared locally, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and then did his doctorate work at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. After practicing in Memphis, Tenn., for a few years, Sisemore returned to his hometown.
He’s been with CBI (Chatta-nooga Bible Institute) since 1995. In addition to his clinical practice, Sisemore teaches at Richmont Graduate University, which provides graduate counselor education in the same facility as CBI.
Sisemore’s faith has been a big part of his life and a motivating factor in his career. He was raised a Baptist, jokes he “backslid to Presbyterian,” and says his beliefs have helped him to persevere through adversity. When it comes to his practice, however, Sisemore says he respects diversity.
“I can’t imagine doing this without my faith as a backdrop. But just like a therapist isn’t going to treat a male or female differently, therapists are supposed to respect a person’s spirituality. It would be unethical for a therapist who isn’t a Christian to tell a patient who is a Christian to get rid of God and stand on his own two feet. Likewise, if I were counseling a Muslim, it would be wrong for me to try to convert him. I would have to work within his spiritual framework,” Sisemore says.
“I’m not a pastor, so I’m not here to preach. But just like God can call a Christian to be a good physician, God can call a Christian to be a good psychologist. My faith simply gives me a deeper sense of what I’m doing.”
Sisemore says his goal, as a psychologist, is to help people suffer less. This makes his chosen area of practice especially satisfying, as he can see the concrete gains his patients make.
“When anxiety is no longer a major factor for someone who has come to see me, and that person is able to get his life together and have better relationships, I have the pleasure of seeing that,” he says.
Sometimes, good psycho-
logy boils down to facing your fears and overcoming them, Sisemore says. He plans on doing just that the next time he sees his doctor.
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