What techniques are used to treat BDD?
Within cognitive behavioral therapy, then there's cognitive techniques and behavioral techniques. And the cognitive techniques are about helping a person identify some of the dysfunctional thoughts they have or irrational thoughts and restructuring them, which means changing them to see a little bit more rational viewpoint. And the behavioral component of the treatment can have different parts to it one of them is to do what's called response prevention or ritual prevention and that's decreasing gradually the compulsive behaviors that they do that make the behavior worse so decreasing their mirror checking, spending less time getting ready to leave in the morning things like that. Another technique that we use behaviorally are called behavioral experiments and that's where somebody for example if they have the idea that when I'm around other people they tend to look away from me because they think that I'm ugly. And so you might help somebody setup an experiment where you say well let's test that out if that's really true because it could be that what they're doing is they're not making eye contact or they leaving this situation and they never find out. So the experiment is to go to that party and stay there and observe people and see if it's really true that everybody's turning their eyes away. And then you can maybe disconfirm your previous beliefs.
