Professor Caleb Lack

12/23/2025

While often heavily focused on obsessions and compulsions in OCD (and rightfully so!), it's very crucial to also assess for avoidance behaviors too. This new article highlights how prevalent avoidance is in youth with OCD:

"Avoidance behaviors were highly prevalent, with 76% of participants endorsing avoidance in at least one domain. Youth with avoidance demonstrated significantly higher OCD symptom severity, greater self-reported mood symptoms, increased family accommodation, and more functional impairment. "

12/20/2025

I loved being interviewed by my friend Dr. Erin Clair for her new podcast on happiness. Check it out and listen to us ramble about anxiety, why the modern world isn't doing your mental health any good, and the occasional digression into hilarious named kunekune pigs.

Listen here - https://youtu.be/8A42Mzsyd7s?si=VcEdDGGiqhGmmxG4

12/19/2025

For folks struggling with OCD, one of the most important things to realize is that a thought is not actually dangerous. It is when you start treating them as very important that they then start seeming scary, rather than seeing them for what they are: just meaningless, brief, soon to be gone bits of neural activity that don't have to guide your emotions or actions.

Grab some amazing stickers from my colleague at the StickyThoughtsShop on Etsy to help remind you of that!

12/18/2025

How long does work for anxiety disorders? This newly published longitudinal research looking at five years post-treatment shows the answer is "A really long time for almost everyone!"

"Improvements in anxiety symptoms and psychosocial functioning that were evident at post-treatment and 6-month follow-up were largely preserved after 5 years. ... From 6 months to 5 years, overall remission rates remained stable, with the majority of patients exhibiting no reliable change in symptom severity. Reliable relapse occurred in 4.9% and reliable new remission in 6.5%. Most patients (63.4%) did not seek additional treatment. Among those who did, depression (64.2%) and anxiety (60.5%) were the most frequently cited reasons, although only a minority (6.0%) sought further treatment exclusively for anxiety. "

12/17/2025

Just a reminder that the American Psychiatric Association has made a large number of very useful psychological measures and interviews - including the Cultural Formulation Interview - free to download and use on their website:

https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/educational-resources/assessment-measures

APA offers a number of online assessment measures which includes instructions, scoring information, interpretation guidelines, and "emerging measures” in Section III of DSM-5-TR.

12/16/2025

Who wants to come work with me?!?

We are hiring for a tenure-track professor position in Behavior Analysis. It's a thriving program at a master's level university in one of the best places to live in Oklahoma, with a very supportive faculty and administration. You need to be a licensed BCBA and have an earned doctorate in Psychology or Behavior Analysis.

Job link in the comments!

12/16/2025

In my view, one of the biggest and most exciting developments in treatment over the past 15 years has been the Written Exposure Therapy (WET) protocol. Quick and easy to implement, it shows comparable symptom decreases to both prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy...in about 1/3 of the dose and with much lower dropout!

This new study out of Azerbaijan shows even more support for using it in diverse non-English populations (to go with our studies on Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian samples):

"Treatment outcome findings indicated that there were significant decreases in PTSD symptoms, d = 1.84; depressive symptoms, d = 1.43; and maladaptive beliefs, d = 0.85. At posttreatment, most (87.1%) participants showed a reliable reduction in PTSD symptoms, and 71.0% met the criteria for clinical recovery. "

12/14/2025

Muchos gracias a un maravilloso hotel aquí en Tulum.

12/13/2025

Join myself and a host of amazing presenters for this amazing training on all things trauma and treatment.

This 135 hour course will take place from March to August 2026, with some trainings in English (with Spanish translation) but many in Spanish. I will do a 10 hour training on Written Exposure Treatment (WET) for PTSD, and other presenters include Drs. Patricia Resick (Cognitive Processing Therapy), Martin Bohus (DBT for PTSD), Sheila Rauch (Prolonged Exposure), and many more.

12/11/2025

One of my most read papers across the past several years has been this one with my University of Cape Town co-author, Jacques Rousseau. Go check it out!

"More people now admit they are having psychological struggles and seek help than ever before. But, these shifts are largely disconnected from actual psychological science and instead are often more influenced by “popular” understandings of psychology. The influence that pop psychology gurus wield frequently dwarfs that of legitimate clinical understandings of mental health problems. Pseudoscientific treatments have flourished among laypersons and licensed professionals alike, while rates of using evidence-based treatments are low. This article examines the factors that lead people to rely more heavily on anecdote and authority rather than statistics and science, and provides guidelines to use when disseminating clinical science to the general public."

Link - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348232136_Mental_Health_Pop_Psychology_and_the_Misunderstanding_of_Clinical_Psychology

12/09/2025

Incredibly sad findings, but it matches up with what I’ve seen for two decades: most people who have OCD are not being accurately identified and treated.

12/09/2025

A thorough and important new review paper out in the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders from Dr. Jon Abramowitz. If you treat OCD and aren't living under a rock, there's a good chance you've heard about a new treatment based on inferential confusion, often called inference-based CBT (ICBT).

In this, Dr. Abramowitz and his co-author review the literature to see how much actual support exists for the theory and assumptions of ICBT, with pretty mixed results. The entire thing is worth a read, but here are the highlights:

1) Very mixed support for inferential confusion (IC) as a key process in OCD.
2) Questionable construct validity for how IC is being measured
3) Large need for more research and replication from non-ICBT labs