About

The OCD Training Institute

Our Why

The reasoning behind it starts with the scale of the problem.

OCD is common, roughly as common as diabetes, and it's severe. The World Health Organisation ranks it among the ten most disabling conditions in the world. It doesn't just affect the individual. It draws in whole families, who often reorganise their lives around the OCD without realising they're doing it.

Despite how common and how serious it is, most people wait years for the right help. On average, someone lives with OCD for over a decade before they receive treatment that works, and by the time they reach a clinic they're usually very unwell. That delay isn't because effective treatment doesn't exist. Exposure and Response Prevention is the gold-standard approach, backed by decades of research.

The delay happens because too few clinicians are trained to deliver it.

Who we are

The OCD Training Institute was created by Dr Emily O'Leary and Dr Daphne Bryan, two clinical psychologists who have spent more than a decade treating OCD together at The OCD Clinic Brisbane.


Through the clinic, Emily, Daphne and their team treat OCD directly, one client at a time. But treatment alone was never going to close a gap this size. Many of the team are also researchers and academics, working across university teaching, published research, and studies at the Queensland Brain Institute and on Deep Brain Stimulation trials for treatment-refractory OCD. They already sat at the point where clinical
practice, research and teaching meet. The Institute was the natural next step: a dedicated training arm alongside the clinic, built to lift the standard of OCD treatment well beyond the clients they could ever see themselves.
Dr Emily O'Leary is a Clinical Psychologist with 20 years' experience working primarily in obsessive-
compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety disorders and related conditions.

Dr Emily O'Leary

Dr Daphne Bryan is a Senior Clinical Psychologist at The OCD Clinic Brisbane and co-author, with Dr Emily
O'Leary, of the OCD workbook.

Dr Daphne Bryan

Delivering that training online was what made it work. It lets them reach clinicians anywhere, at any stage of their career, without the ceiling of a physical room or a fixed date, so good OCD treatment can spread far faster than it ever could one practitioner at a time.


The clinic treats. The Institute trains.

Both draw on the same specialist expertise, twenty years of practice, active research, a co-authored clinical workbook, and years of supervising registrars and early-career psychologists, and what the Institute teaches is what the team does, week in and week out, with real

clients.

The Institute offers online training, resources and supervision for clinicians who want to treat OCD well. Structured programs, a clinical workbook, and practical tools designed to be used in session, not filed away. The aim follows directly from the problem: more clinicians who can recognise OCD early and treat it properly, so fewer people spend years lost in the system before they get the help they need.

Explore our professional courses now!

“Build the practical skills and confidence to recognise, assess and treat OCD.”
OCD is one of the world's most disabling conditions. Too few clinicians are  trained to treat it. We're changing that.

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