Carol Mathews, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Florida
“OCD is not the presence of intrusive thoughts. It’s really the failure of the brain’s braking system to appropriately inhibit those thoughts—it’s the failure to suppress the thoughts that leads to ongoing, repetitive symptoms.”
Why I chose psychiatry
I’m a clinical psychiatrist with a background in genetic research. I’ve always been interested in psychiatry and the connection between people and how the brain works. While I started my career thinking I wanted to become a neurosurgeon, I realized that what I really wanted was to talk to people—I wanted to access their minds while looking in their eyes.
OCD is a genetic disease
OCD is a neuropsychiatric disorder—a brain disease that is biologically driven. While the susceptibility to OCD is genetic, we've not yet seen a gene, or a series of genes that suggests it’s deterministic, that genes are fate. It’s not like Huntington’s disease, for example, where anyone with the genetic mutation will develop the disease in one form or another at some point in their life. Rather, I think of OCD in the same way I think of inherited characteristics like intelligence or height or blood pressure, where there are hundreds and hundreds of genes acting together to increase your risk for developing the disease.
FFOr’s focus and ambition
FFOR’s goal is to understand the biology of treatment-resistant OCD, such that effective treatments can be mounted, tested, and brought to clinical use, resulting in improved quality of life, and, ultimately, remission. To do that, FFOR is replacing the competitive nature of research in the scientific community with a collaborative, systematic approach that facilitates rapid dissemination of findings across the projects and disciplines—from molecules to neurocircuitry to outcome.
