An open trial of group metacognitive therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder

Research supporting the metacognitive model of OCD (Wells, A. (2000). Emotional disorders and metacognitions: Innovative cognitive therapy. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons; Wells, A. (1997). Cognitive therapy of anxiety disorders: A practice manual and conceptual guide. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons) is beginning to accumulate Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) aims to teach clients to shift to a ‘metacognitive mode’ and incorporates cognitive strategies and behavioural experiments, with the aim of modifying maladaptive metacognitive beliefs rather than the content of anxious beliefs themselves. The current paper reports on a preliminary study, applying MCT in a clinical group setting with eight adults suffering from a variety of OCD presentations. Promising results indicate a larger randomised controlled trial, with recovery achieved for seven of the eight participants on the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale at 3-month follow-up. All participants demonstrated improvement on measures of OCD symptom severity and metacognitions.