Archives for Case Studies

1985 after being in practice for just a couple of years, a patient I will call Joanne, came to me for treatment of a panic disorder. I figured it was a pretty straightforward case that the literature, my experience, and my training indicated should respond to therapy or medication. Joanne was a 50-year-old woman in a bad marriage and her youngest daughter was going off to college. I assumed that Joanne was having panic attacks because of the threatened separations both from her daughter and the possible break up of her marriage. Multiple Medication Approach Failed I thought that a
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Top Student Sidetracked by OCD Despite being handsome, tall, personable, and a top student at Yale, Mark was silently struggling with an intense need to count to 100 every time he had a “bad thought”. This he told himself, reduced the thoughts from taking over. What’s more, he had difficulty socializing with his friends, without unobtrusively washing his hands for fear of contamination. And the back of his head had a patchy baldness—the result of years of nervous hair pulling (a tic like behavior), so he always wore a large baseball cap. As his life was grinding to a halt,
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