Beyond the OCD Stereotypes with Dr. Kimberly Glazier Leonte

The term OCD is often misused and misunderstood; Kimberly Glazier Leonte, PhD has found this to be true countless times throughout her career. Initially inspired by her work at the world renowned McLean Hospital’s OCD residential program, Kimberly gained comprehensive knowledge regarding OCD. Through her work, she learned how common it was for individuals to receive multiple incorrect diagnoses from professionals, prior to receiving a correct OCD diagnosis. This upsetting pattern sparked Kimberly’s clinical and research passions. 

Dr. Leonte conducted a pivotal research study in 2013, which won an award from the International OCD Foundation. The study found high rates of OCD misidentification among mental health professionals. Her follow-up studies examined and found similar high misidentification rates among medical health professionals and psychology doctoral graduate students. Over the years, numerous researchers have contacted Kimberly to discuss their study that they are modeling after Kimberly’s 2013 OCD study.

While increasing awareness regarding OCD is one of Kimberly’s focuses another area of passion is helping individuals with OCD learn the highly effective and teachable tools for OCD recovery. Exposure and response prevention (i.e., ERP) is the gold-standard, research-based, approach for OCD. ERP is a compassionate and behavioral approach that educates people on the OCD cycle, why rituals reinforce the OCD, and how exposures break the OCD cycle. Doing exposures in sessions with clients and helping clients gain the expertise to become their own “OCD therapist” is at the heart of the process. Kimberly founded and is the Director of Clearview Horizons, a specialty group practice that specializes in working with children through adults with OCD, anxiety, and/or perfectionism. 

With Kimberly’s aim of spreading OCD awareness, knowledge, and recovery tools in a large-scale and accessible way, Kimberly developed Break The Cycle. Featured on the platform is the OCD Awareness Scale, a free assessment tool Kimberly developed to increase awareness regarding the broad range of ways OCD presents. The measure includes 19 obsession categories and 22 ritual categories, with extensive examples to increase usefulness and relatability of the measure. The scale is geared to help individuals with OCD, people who have a loved one with OCD, and mental and medical health professionals. 

Dr. Leonte is also an advocate of reducing mental health stigma. One of her research studies found the majority of mental health professionals in the study believed the terms Abnormal Psychology and Psychopathology increase stigma and are inaccurate terms to describe mental health conditions. As these terms are commonly used as the name for the course that teaches about mental health conditions (Abnormal Psychology; Psychopathology), Kimberly conducted a 2^nd study, this time focused specifically on faculty who teach at mental health graduate programs. This study found the majority of participants believe the terms increase stigma and also supported no longer using the terms Abnormal Psychology or Psychopathology for the title of the course that teaches about mental health conditions. 

For more OCD, anxiety and mental health related resources, Kimberly is on Instagram (@breakthecyclewithkim) and LinkedIn.