REVIEW article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Anxiety and Stress Disorders
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1593384
Benefits and barriers associated with using cognitive-behavioral therapy to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder: a narrative review
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Neuropsychiatry, Hyogo Medical University, Nishinomiya, Japan
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
There is a growing need for widely available, cost-effective, and low-intensity treatments for OCD. Although cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT) is often the first line of treatment, barriers to providing CBT in OCD patients remain unresolved. In this narrative review, we summarize the current literature on the benefits and challenges of using CBT to treat OCD, review the potential of low-intensity, technology-based CBT programs, and identify issues related to the use of these new approaches. We identified articles to include in this narrative review by entering the following search terms into PubMed, PsychInfo, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, cognitive–behavioral therapy, CBT, technolog*, digital. The final literature search was conducted on 13 July 2024, and after checking 68 potentially relevant studies according to our inclusion and exclusion criteria, we included 24 studies (14 review articles and 10 original articles) in the present review. We identified several main factors associated with the accessibility and effectiveness of CBT. Incentives for healthcare practitioners who undergo CBT training may increase the availability of this treatment option. Furthermore, treatment efficacy is related to patient treatment adherence, which may be enhanced by offering low-intensity and convenient treatment options such as digital CBT programs. These findings highlight both the potential and the current limitations of low-intensity and digital CBT approaches for OCD treatment. Although low-intensity and technology-based CBT programs can serve as relatively convenient, effective, and accessible treatment options, further research is needed to examine patient perceptions, and determine the most important characteristics of such programs for optimal treatment efficacy.
Keywords: cognitive-behavioral therapy, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Narrative review, Mental health apps, digital healthcare technology, Internet interventions
Received: 14 Mar 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mukai, Kyosuke, Ogino, Hosoi, Hayashida and Matsunaga. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Keiichiro Mukai, Department of Neuropsychiatry, Hyogo Medical University, Nishinomiya, Japan
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.