Biomedical causal attributions for obsessive-compulsive disorder: Associations with patient perceptions of prognosis and treatment expectancy

In recent years, with scientific advances and growing understanding of neurobiological processes, biomedical explanations of psychiatric disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), have become more prominent in research and in clinical care. Patient perceptions of biomedical models of OCD have been understudied, particularly in how they relate to patients’ beliefs about prognosis and treatment expectancy. The current study measured self-identified OCD patients’ (N = 130) current beliefs about their own prognosis and treatment and how believable they found two explanatory models of OCD: 1) a biomedical model that attributes OCD to biological functioning in the brain and 2) an integrative biopsychopsychocial model. Correlational results indicated that patients who found the biomedical model to be highly believable expected that their OCD would be chronic and require long-term treatment. In contrast, ratings of believability in the model that integrated biological, psychological and social factors in explaining OCD were not associated with prognostic pessimism. Instead, we observed a trend in which stronger belief in the biopsychosocial model was associated with the belief that behavioral changes could improve symptoms of OCD. Notwithstanding limitations inherent in the correlational nature of this study, the current findings highlight the need to further investigate the clinical implications of OCD causal models