Mental Contamination: ZOOM WORKSHOP PRESENTATION


Registration closes @ 12 noon on 23.03.26

‘It looks clean but it feels dirty’ is the phrase coined by Jack Rachman to summarise mental contamination in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) – an internal sense of dirtiness or wrongness that the person seeks to avoid and get rid of via acts (compulsions) to reduce the internal feeling. What appears as a response to ‘contact contamination’ e.g. excessive handwashing can be a response to an internal sense of mental contamination. Without addressing the meaning of mental contamination (physical or psychological violation, self-contamination, visual contamination and fear of ‘morphing’), and exploring the origins of this feeling, ERP or CBT is unlikely to be helpful. Specific knowledge and understanding of mental contamination enables clinicians to identify specific experiences and beliefs that are pertinent to successful treatment.

Participants will gain knowledge of:

  • The cognitive model of mental contamination in OCD
  • Forms of mental contamination including following physical or psychological violation, self-contamination, visual contamination and fear of ‘morphing’

Participants will gain skills in:

  • Recognising the key features of mental contamination
  • Conducting an assessment of mental contamination OCD
  • Engaging with people experiencing mental contamination OCD and building a sound therapeutic relationship
  • Normalising the features of mental contamination
  • Identifying the threat appraisal
  • Collaboratively deriving a specific OCD formulation that forms a shared understanding between the person with OCD and the therapist
  • Developing a Theory A / Theory B – an alternative, less threatening belief
  • Using specific interventions for mental contamination including imagery and behavioural experiments

This workshop will be presented by Victoria Bream and/or Paul Salkovskis.

Certificate of Attendance

A digital certificate that states the hours of live participation in the workshop will be emailed to you after the training event. You must attend the workshop live to receive a certificate.

New: Workshop recording is now available to attendees

By attending this workshop I understand I am giving my consent for the workshop to be video recorded and for this video recording to be available to people attending the workshop live and for it to be sold separately, for the amount of time determined by OCTC and outlined in the purchase agreement. My name, if displayed onscreen, and my image will make up part of this recording. Recordings are the property of OCTC and making copies of these recordings or sharing login details is not permitted. Please do not reveal details which may compromise the anonymity of clients.

The recording will be available to view for a period of three months.

Presenters

Paul Salkovskis, Director of OCTC

Paul Salkovskis qualified as a clinical psychologist in 1979 at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley Hospital. He then worked in Yorkshire as a full time NHS clinical psychologist in Psychology services and Liaison Psychiatry, before moving to Oxford as a Research Clinical Psychologist. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Reading in 1990. While working in Oxford he was a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow, and was appointed Professor of Cognitive Psychology of the University before moving to work at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry as Professor of Clinical Psychology and Applied Science and Clinical Director in the Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma in SLaM NHS Trust. From 2010 until 2018 he was Programme and Research Director for the Clinical Psychology Doctorate Programme at Bath, which he developed as a new programme. In Bath, Paul also set up and ran a highly specialist NHS Clinic, working with Avon and Wiltshire Partnership NHS Trust, accepting national referrals involving people experiencing severe anxiety problems who had not found previous treatment sufficiently helpful.

In April 2018 he began his appointment as Director of the Oxford Centre for Psychological Health, the Oxford Institute for Clinical Psychology Training and Research and The Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre (University of Oxford and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust). In 2019 he was appointed as Professor of Clinical Psychology in the University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology. He has continued to carry out clinical work in the NHS throughout his entire career, and is the Director of the Oxford Health Specialist Psychological Interventions Clinic. He is strongly committed to the continued dissemination and improvement of appropriate help for mental health issues, working in partnership with all stakeholders.

He is regarded as an expert in several areas of clinical psychology, including Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, the understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders in general, and more specifically in OCD, Hoarding Disorder, Panic and Agoraphobia and Health Anxiety. He also has expertise in Health Psychology. His interests also extend to the mechanism of change in psychological therapy and transdiagnostic factors. He has published more than 400 articles and chapters.

He is registered with the HCPC as both a Health and Clinical Psychologist and is similarly Chartered with the BPS. He was recipient of several prizes including two different Aaron T Beck awards and the British Psychological Society Monte Shapiro Award. Paul has served with NICE in several capacities, including guidelines groups.  He is Patron of, and clinical adviser to, OCD and anxiety disorder charities. His main research interests include the study of cognitive (appraisal) and behavioural (safety seeking) factors in the understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders. He has led CBT skills training both nationally and throughout the world.

Victoria Bream, Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Victoria Bream trained as a Clinical Psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, and completed the Postgraduate Diploma in Cognitive Therapy at the OCTC. She joined OCTC in 2019 after 15 years working in the Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma at the Maudsley Hospital, specialising in using CBT with people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and related problems, and hoarding disorder. She has provided supervision and teaching to a wide range of trainees and professionals in the NHS, and in local authorities. She is a co-author of the self-help book ‘Break Free from OCD’ the clinician guide ‘CBT for OCD’ and most recently the self-help book ‘Break Free from Maternal Anxiety’. Victoria is part of the team in the Oxford Health Specialist Psychological Intervention Centre (OHSPIC), an NHS national clinic offering specialist CBT.

Additional Information

Cancellation & changes policy

If you cancel more than 14 days prior to your booked event, we will refund your fee minus a charge of 15% to cover our administration costs. We regret that cancellations 14 days or less before the booked event cannot be refunded or changed/transferred.

If you wish to change/transfer your booking after confirmation we will do our best to accommodate you if you notify us 14 days prior to your booked event, and if there is space to do so. However there will be an administration charge of £15 per change/transfer.

Confidentiality

Workshops often contain clinical material. This is always anonymised as far as possible but delegates are none the less reminded to respect confidentiality.

All that is discussed in your therapy sessions will be treated as confidential, with the following exceptions.
We are required to seek supervision by our professional body (The British Psychological Society or equivalent) as a means of ensuring good practice. We will usually inform your referrer of your progress, but the details that we disclose will be discussed with you. We do have a statutory obligation to break confidentiality under rare circumstances, namely, if we believe that a client is of danger to themselves or to others (under the Mental Health Act, 2001) or if we believe that a child is at actual risk of physical or sexual abuse (The Children Act, Section 47, 1989).

If we felt that it would be helpful to request additional medical, social or legal information, we could only do this with your consent. Similarly, should another medical, social or legal professional request information from us, we would not release this without your consent.

Disclaimer

OCTC makes every effort to ensure that this programme is delivered as advertised. However, should a presenter have to cancel, we will endeavour to find another suitable presenter. We will inform attendees as soon as is reasonably practical and, if requested, will offer a refund. In the rare event that we are unable to substitute a presenter, we may cancel a workshop and refund payments already made by attendees. OCTC will not refund travel and accommodation costs that attendees may incur.
All the workshops in this programme are carried out by highly experienced therapists and trainers. The individual presenter is responsible for the content of the workshop and any views expressed do not necessarily represent those of OCTC.
Although highly informative, none of the open workshops or workshop series confer a formal qualification or assurance of competence in CBT (or a specialist area of CBT) since we are unable to assess attendee competency within the training event. However, credit and award-bearing courses that lead to formal qualifications are offered by OCTC in conjunction with the University of Oxford. More about these courses is available on our website www.octc.uk

Levels of competence

Before booking a place on a workshop, please ensure that it is pitched at the appropriate level of competence for you. The guide to levels is as follows:

Basic

Basic workshops are for people from a variety of backgrounds, who have at least one year’s clinical experience. Cognitive behavioural knowledge is not necessary for attendance at these workshops, though in practice, a number of attendees will have some skills in the area, and are refreshing/updating their knowledge.

Intermediate

Intermediate workshops are directed towards people who already have knowledge of CBT, and experience in using cognitive formulations and treatment methods – for instance, they are able to identify and test automatic thoughts, and design behavioural experiments. Most participants will be using CBT as part of their clinical practice, and may still be acquiring new CBT skills.

Advanced

Advanced courses are directed towards those professionals who use CBT routinely as part of their clinical practice. They have probably undertaken a significant number of training courses and/or workshops, and use a broad range of cognitive behavioural strategies to work with a range of presentations at varying levels of complexity.

Making reservations

Bookings can only be considered confirmed after we have received your online registration or application form and payment (or invoicing details, including an official purchase order document).

The registration closing date for each workshop is shown on the workshop description page.  Please note that no applications received after this deadline will be permitted.

If you are booking a workshop place for someone else, you must complete your own details in the billing field, but ENTER THE WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS NAME/ADDRESS in the shipping field. If you wish to order items using a paper order form instead of online, you can view or download an order form in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. Once downloaded, print it out, fill it in, and send off with your payment [cheque made payable to OXFORD HEALTH NHS FOUNDATION TRUST] to the address on the form.

Refreshments

The cost of the workshops includes hot drinks on arrival, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, but not usually lunch unless stated. However, for workshops that do include lunch, if you have any special dietary requirements please let us know at the time of application.

Accessibility requirements

We welcome applications from diverse backgrounds. If you have any particular needs, please contact us
prior to booking.