Mental contamination in young people; relationship to OCD & betrayal
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Mental contamination in children and young people; the relationship to OCD and betrayal
IRAS ID
236024
Contact name
Katie Wilkinson
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Bath
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 9 months, 31 days
Research summary
Research Summary
This research will look at Mental Contamination (MC) in children and young people (CYP). MC is when someone feels dirty without having touched anything dirty. We know that some adults experience this, particularly if they have a diagnosis of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Currently there has been no research to see if MC is also a difficulty for CYP and there are still significant gaps in knowledge of paediatric OCD and its treatment. Therefore, this research aims to identify whether this presentation of OCD occurs in CYP. This may help to improve our understanding of OCD and its treatment in CYP in the future.
This research will also aim to understand more about how MC develops. In adults there has been research that suggests that experiencing betrayal increases the likelihood that MC will occur. It is proposed that this depends on ‘sensitivity to betrayal’. Sensitivity to betrayal is a measurement of how much a betrayal event effects how a person thinks, feels and behaves. In adults some research has found that the more sensitive someone is to betrayal the more likely they are to develop MC. We would like to find out if this is also the case for CYP. This is particularly important research to do with CYP because it is thought that childhood experiences may be important in the development of mental health difficulties in adults.
The research will ask CYP aged 11-17 years with a diagnosis of OCD, another mental health difficulty or those without a mental health difficulty across NHS and non-NHS sites within the UK to participate in the research. Participants will answer four quantitative questionnaires on topics including their mental health, sensitivity to betrayal and MC following an informed consent procedure. CYP will be grouped via diagnosis for analysis (OCD, other mental health difficulty, control).
Summary of Results
Study Title Mental contamination in children and young people: the relationship to OCD and betrayal.
Author
Katie WilkinsonResearch completed as part of the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology Department of Psychology, University of Bath.
Why we did the research
Past research has looked at something called ‘mental contamination’ in adults. Mental contamination is when someone feels dirty even if they haven’t touched anything that they think is dirty. In adults the experience of mental contamination has been found to be associated with the mental health difficulty; obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We completed this research to find out if mental contamination is also experienced by children and young people and if it is also associated with young people’s mental health.We also wanted to understand more about young people’s experience of betrayal. Betrayal is when someone feels they have been hurt or let down by someone they trusted (such as a good friend, a teacher, a member of their family or a boyfriend or girlfriend). Experiences of betrayal have been linked to experiences of mental contamination in adults. So, we wanted to know if this was also the same in young people.
We hope that gaining a better understanding of mental contamination in children and young people will help us to take a step towards better ways of preventing and treating it in the future.
What we did
114 children and young people both with and without mental health difficulties aged 12-17 years took part in the research. They all completed online questionnaires which looked at their current mental health (including symptoms of OCD), their experiences of betrayal (including their thoughts and feelings about past betrayal events) and their symptoms of mental contamination.To be able to look at whether mental contamination was associated with OCD young people were split into groups depending on whether they said that they had a mental health difficulty or not. There were three groups: young people with OCD, young people with any other mental health difficulty and young people with no mental health difficulty. This helped us to compare symptoms of mental contamination between the groups.
What we found
Firstly, we found that approximately 16% of young people (18 out of the 114 young people) who took part scored above the clinical cut-off for mental contamination on the questionnaire that measured this. A clinical cut-off is the score which represents the boundary between a level of symptoms that most people experience and the level of symptoms which could represent a significant difficulty for the person, e.g. a clinical difficulty. This suggests that young people do experience clinical levels of mental contamination.We also found that young people who were in the OCD group had higher scores on the questionnaire that measured mental contamination symptoms than young people in the other two groups. This suggests that mental contamination is more common in young people with OCD symptoms than young people with other mental health difficulties or young people with no mental health difficulties.
Finally, we found that children and young people’s experiences of betrayal were associated with symptoms of mental contamination. This means that young people who reported experiencing more negative thoughts and feelings about betrayals they had experienced in the past were more likely to have higher scores on the questionnaire that measured mental contamination symptoms.
The results of this research have been written up as part of a doctorate in clinical psychology qualification. The full research thesis can be accessed via the University of Bath Research Portal.
REC name
London - Surrey Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/LO/1434
Date of REC Opinion
22 Oct 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion