Compass Health Center accepts most major commercial insurance plans. Insurance benefits and coverage are verified individually, call us to understand how Compass works with you to make care as affordable as possible.
OCD & Anxiety Treatment
Your Life, Louder Than OCD
If you’re living with OCD, you know it’s more than what people often assume. It’s not about being “neat” or “organized.” It’s the exhausting, relentless cycle of intrusive thoughts and compulsions that can make daily life feel overwhelming or impossible. Maybe you’ve tried therapy before. Maybe you’ve felt misunderstood. Compass Health Center specializes in evidence-based care that goes beyond symptom management. Our OCD & Anxiety Partial Hospitalization (PHP) and Intensive Outpatient (IOP) programs are designed to help you, your child, or your loved one disrupt the cycle of OCD or anxiety and reengage with life. Treatment isn’t about fixing OCD. It’s about reclaiming what OCD has been keeping you from.
About the Program
Program offerings may differ by location. Kindly call us to confirm specific program details.
Ages
- Child (8-13)
- Teen (13-18)
- Young Adult (18-23)
- Adult (23+)
Treatment Levels
- IOP
- PHP
In-Person
- Chicago, IL
- Northbrook, IL
- Oak Brook, IL
- Silver Spring, MD
- Brookfield, WI
- Golden Valley, MN
Virtual Locations
- Illinois
- Maryland
- Minnesota
- Virginia
- Washington, D.C.
- Wisconsin
Program Overview:
OCD creates barriers. Learn to move past them.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) can feel isolating, exhausting, and relentless. It convinces you that your thoughts are who you are, that your compulsions are necessary, and that if you resist, something terrible will happen.
Our specialized, evidence-based care helps individuals disrupt the cycle of OCD. Whether you’re seeking support for yourself, your child, or a loved one, our intensive programs offer the structure, tools, and clinical expertise to move forward.
We work with individuals whose symptoms interfere with daily life, whether they already have a diagnosis or are still trying to make sense of what they’re experiencing . Many come to Compass when weekly therapy isn’t enough, after an ER visit, or following inpatient care. Others need support for co-occurring conditions like substance use, depression, or trauma, and benefit from our integrated, whole-person approach.
OCD isn’t a choice—but taking action with the right care is.
Not Sure If This Program Is Right for You?
You’re not alone. Many people come to us feeling uncertain, unsure if what they’re going through is “serious enough” or if they’re ready for treatment.
Here’s the truth: If you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like things are getting worse—not better— we’re here to help.
Let’s take the first step together.
Ages
Who We Help: OCD & Anxiety Treatment by Age Group
Our OCD & Anxiety Partial Hospitalization (PHP) and Intensive Outpatient (IOP) programs are tailored to each stage of life. These disorders shows up differently at every age, and so should treatment.
- Developmentally appropriate ERP, ACT, DBT, and CBT to address OCD and anxiety disorders
- Individual and family therapy to build understanding and reduce accommodation
- Structured, supportive environment with academic support (PHP only), skill-building through play, and experiential modalities
- ERP, ACT, DBT, and CBT-based care for OCD and co-occurring concerns like anxiety, depression, and school refusal
- Family therapy and psychoeducation to strengthen support systems at home
- Academic support (PHP only) and coordination with schools to reduce disruption
- OCD and anxiety treatment, including ERP, ACT, DBT, and CBT, focused on independence, identity, and co-occurring mental health challenges
- Flexible, transition-friendly scheduling to support college, work, or personal goals
- Emphasis on functional skills, peer connection, and long-term well-being
- Comprehensive care for OCD and anxiety, including support for trauma, mental health and substance use, and depression
- ERP integrated with ACT, DBT, and CBT that promote lasting change in daily life and relationships
- Flexible scheduling for working professionals, caregivers, and others balancing complex roles
Our Specialized Approach
Why Choose Compass for OCD & Anxiety Treatment?
Our OCD & Anxiety Partial Hospitalization (PHP) and Intensive Outpatient (IOP) programs provide the specialized, multidisciplinary care needed for meaningful, long-term change.
Evidence-Based Therapies
Gold-standard clinical approaches rooted in research and best practices.
Multidisciplinary Team
Psychiatrists, individual and family therapists, group facilitators, nurses, educational specialists and discharge planners who specialize in OCD and co-occurring conditions.
Personalized Treatment Plans
Tailored care plans built around each participant’s goals for sustainable progress.
24/7 Psychiatric Access
On-call prescribers available around the clock for urgent needs outside program hours.
Psychiatric Evaluations
Initial evaluation within 48 hours, with ongoing medication management and regular consultation.
Integrated Care Model
A psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner follows each participant throughout treatment and manages medication when appropriate.
Immediate Access
Mental health assessments within 24 hours, with program entry as soon as the next day.
More Than OCD: Expert Care for Anxiety Disorders
Our expert team provides specialized treatment not only for OCD, but also for a range of anxiety disorders and obsessive compulsive related conditions, including:
- Social Anxiety Disorder
- Panic Disorder with or without Agoraphobia
- Illness Anxiety Disorder
- Specific Phobias (like Trypophobia, Emetophobia, Thalassophobia, Arachnophobia, Claustrophobia, Acrophobia, and Hypochondria)
- Separation Anxiety Disorder
- Trichotillomania
- Excoriation Disorder
Whether you’re navigating OCD, an anxiety disorder, or both, our program meets you where you are. This integrated approach ensures that each person receives care tailored to their needs, with a focus on measurable progress and lasting progress.
What If Treatment Works?
Many people spend years misdiagnosed or in therapy that doesn’t fully address their specific challenges. Non-specialized treatment often falls short when it comes to OCD and anxiety disorders.
When OCD has been your constant companion, the idea of change can feel frightening—or impossible. The relentless need for certainty makes it hard to tolerate doubt, leaving you stuck in a cycle of anxiety and compulsions. Effective, specialized treatment helps you separate your identity from OCD and take meaningful steps toward the life you want.
This reclaimed life can look like:
- Building more meaningful, deeper relationships and connections.
- Feeling capable at school and work again.
- Experiencing freedom from time-consuming compulsions and rituals.
- Gaining confidence to tolerate uncertainty and fully engage in life.
Virtual Evening OCD Treatment for Young Adults & Adults
Virtual Evening OCD treatment is available through our Partial Hospitalization (PHP) and Intensive Outpatient (IOP) programs for adults and young adults (18+). Designed for individuals whose symptoms are impacting daily life, these structured, evidence-based programs provide specialized care while allowing you to stay engaged in work, school, and family responsibilities.
Program Highlights
- Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy
- Psychiatrist-led treatment and medication management
- Individual, group, and family therapy
- Measurement-based care to track progress
- 100% virtual evening format
- Rolling admissions
- Available across multiple states
Ready to Disrupt the Cycle?
OCD and anxiety are powerful, but you are stronger. With the right treatment and support, real change is possible.
Contact us today to schedule an assessment or learn more about how our specialized OCD and anxiety programs can help.
Gold Standard, Evidence-Based Treatment Modalities
Individual therapy is a confidential, one-on-one session between a patient and a licensed therapist focused on supporting mental health treatment through evidence-based care. In these sessions, the therapist and patient work together to explore thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, identify unhelpful patterns, and develop personalized coping strategies and treatment goals.
Family therapy occurs between a therapist and all or some family members. It is often focused on exploring the dynamics within a family, improving communication, resolving conflict, and helping families live more harmoniously. Supporting families in family therapy to integrate evidence-based skills as a family and as individuals can be incredibly impactful. Skills can help family members feel more connected with one another and empower them to manage stressors in the family system. At times, the therapist might want to meet with individuals alone to prepare for sessions with the whole family system; however, most of the treatment is provided with families together. At Compass, family therapy is an essential part of our treatment model. Ensuring our patients and their loved ones feel informed, supported, and engaged in the treatment process and practicing evidence-based skills is a top priority. Our dedicated family therapists work closely with patients to identify who should participate in family therapy sessions and to create a focus for those sessions to best support their goals at Compass.
Group therapy includes one or two group facilitators and a cohort of participants (typically between 4 – 16 people in the space). The number and make-up of participants in each group may depend upon program census, type/content of group, and various other factors. The group therapy space is developed to be a confidential and supportive milieu in which participants can learn and practice coping skills and discuss topics to build insight and actively move towards identified treatment goals. Group members are encouraged to validate and relate to each other and engage with therapists to discuss and process skill integration, emotions, and thought processes that influence specific behaviors and share about current struggles and successes. Group therapy at Compass Health Center focuses on building awareness around behavioral goals, learning and practicing evidenced-based skills, and using a confidential space to process relevant and relatable topics with peers. Group facilitators guide understanding related to skills and topics linked to ACT, DBT, and CBT while connecting these topics to treatment objectives and skill application and integration in the home, school, and work settings. Groups may be didactic, psychoeducational, interpersonal/process, or experiential and often employ multiple techniques to increase engagement and impact.
The gold standard treatment for body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) that helps individuals understand triggers and replace habits like hair-pulling, skin-picking, and nail-biting with safer, more constructive ones.
ERP is one of the most effective treatments for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and other complex anxiety diagnoses, including Illness Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and other anxiety disorders. Patients gradually confront their feared object or situation in a hierarchical, prolonged, and planned manner. By doing so, patients learn to gain mastery over their anxiety and fears.
DBT is an evidence-based model of treatment designed by Dr. Marsha Linehan to help patients build meaningful lives and improve their ability to regulate emotions. DBT guides patients through identifying patterns in thinking, behavior, emotions, and interpersonal interactions that contribute to problems in living. Once identified, the goal is to change these patterns using coping skills. The “D” in DBT refers to dialectics, the presence or co-occurrence of two seemingly contradictory or opposing concepts simultaneously. DBT centers on the dialectic of acceptance and change and encourages individuals to walk the middle path between the two, working to balance acceptance (“I’m doing the best I can,” “this is how things are right now”) and change (“I need to try different for things to be different”). DBT comprises four central tenets to help people accept and change: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Interpersonal Effectiveness, and Emotion Regulation.
CBT is an evidence-based, present-focused, structured, and time-sensitive therapy proven effective by thousands of studies over decades for many physical and mental health concerns. CBT centers around the interconnectedness of a person’s thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiological responses. CBT posits that the way one perceives and reacts to a situation causes them the most distress, rather than the situation itself. CBT offers skills to reduce distress by helping individuals identify distorted thinking patterns, evaluate their effectiveness, and reframe thinking to more realistic and helpful thoughts. CBT focuses on building awareness of what an individual experiences in the here and now and then problem-solve using this insight to create change in thinking patterns and behaviors using this increased insight and specific coping skills.
ACT is an evidence-based therapeutic model that combines behavior modification interventions with specific types of acceptance and mindfulness exercises. ACT aims to change a person’s relationship with their own troubling thoughts, whether it is ruminating on past mistakes, focusing on potential threats in the future, or feeling overwhelmed by traumatic memories. In changing how a person thinks about and responds to these troubling thoughts, that person frees themselves up to live a value-based, rich, full, and meaningful life. Since there is no manualized protocol for ACT, Compass adapts tools to meet patients and groups where they are at in their treatment journey. These tools assist patients in making room for their emotional experiences and to have space to focus on identifying and doing what is most important to them.
Executive functioning skills are mental skills that allow a person to organize, plan, and follow instructions, think flexibly, and demonstrate impulse control. These skills are utilized daily as individuals prioritize tasks, achieve goals, and learn. Executive function challenges can make it hard to focus, follow directions, and regulate emotions. Executive function skills are learned; patients benefit from modeling and explicit teaching.
Interpersonal effectiveness refers to constructive communication. The phrase “Interpersonal Effectiveness” is a DBT term that denotes a set of skills designed to help individuals manage challenging situations, validate the emotions and experience of self and others, improve and maintain current connections, and create new meaningful relationships. Interpersonal Effectiveness skills offer concrete guidance and support around balancing acceptance and change within relationships, asserting wants and needs in effective ways that maintain the relationship, and navigating complex situations in values-aligned ways.
Distress tolerance refers to sitting with experiences of distress (distressing thoughts, emotions, urges, and/or physiological responses). In DBT, distress tolerance refers to specific skills designed to help individuals navigate crisis moments as effectively as possible. These skills focus on guiding individuals through radically accepting the situation as it is and, at the same time, working to change what they can. DBT Distress Tolerance skills support individuals in skillfully moving through distressing realities without increasing their suffering.
Emotion regulation refers to adjusting or modulating one’s emotions. The phrase “Emotion Regulation” is a DBT term that denotes a set of skills designed to help individuals both increase resilience to intense emotions and decrease suffering related to emotions. These skills are not designed to “eliminate” or “avoid” emotions, but rather to help individuals identify and express emotions, alter their responses to their emotions, shift the emotions they are experiencing and/or the intensity of their emotions, and navigate difficult to sit with emotions safely and effectively.
Mindfulness is a term used in various ways based on setting and context. DBT defines Mindfulness as “the act of consciously focusing the mind in the present moment without judgment and attachment to the moment.” Mindfulness is active—it is something all people can engage in, actively choose to do, and can develop into practice with repeated effort. Most Mindfulness activities and tools, including the DBT Mindfulness skills, are adapted from cultural and spiritual traditions like meditation and breathwork. DBT Mindfulness skills help individuals practice being fully present in the moment, tuning in to what is happening inside and around them, and moving forward aligned with inner wisdom.
Recreation therapy at Compass Health Center is an evidence-based treatment modality that uses structured recreational and experiential activities to support mental health recovery and skill development. Led by trained recreation therapists, these sessions focus on improving emotional regulation, social skills, stress management, and overall well-being through activities such as movement, games, creative expression, and mindfulness-based exercises. Recreational therapy availability varies by program and location.
Art therapy is a specific type of experiential therapy that engages individuals in art-making and creative expression to explore internal experiences, build insight, and learn and apply skills related to treatment goals. Art therapy is a therapeutic intervention led by professionally trained art therapists with specific educational and practical experiences. At Compass, art therapy is integrated into programming in age-specific, values-aligned, and skills-focused ways.
Art therapy is a therapeutic modality that utilizes art materials and the artistic process alongside work with an art therapist within a therapeutic setting. Art materials aid clients in communicating and processing their emotions through non-verbal means. By observing the process, form, content, interests, and comments, an art therapist comprehensively assesses a client’s needs and determines treatment plans to restore, maintain or improve an individual’s mental health.
Motivational Interviewing is a therapeutic technique that helps individuals bridge the gap between their current behavioral choices and their identified goals. The four tenets of Motivational Interviewing (MI) are facilitating engagement, focusing on goals, evoking awareness and motivation, and planning for reasonable steps to move toward helpful goals. Open-ended questions, validation, reflective listening, and summarizing are helpful tools to guide these steps.
Animal-assisted therapy at Compass Health Center is a structured, goal-directed therapeutic intervention that incorporates interactions with trained therapy animals as part of a patient’s overall treatment plan. Guided by a licensed clinician, these sessions use animal interactions to help patients reduce anxiety, build emotional regulation skills, increase motivation, and improve social engagement. Animal therapy availability varies by program and location.
Parents often carry a quiet weight: uncertainty, self-doubt, and the sense that they should know how to fix what is happening. Parent groups provide space to learn skills, ask questions, and hear from others navigating similar challenges. These conversations often bring relief as much as information.
For More Information or to Schedule an Assessment, Call Us or Fill Out the Form Below.
Frequently Asked Questions
OCD & Anxiety Treatment: Your Life, Louder Than OCD
ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy and is the first line treatment for OCD and anxiety disorders. It helps individuals gradually face feared thoughts or situations without engaging in compulsive behaviors, retraining the brain’s response to anxiety and uncertainty.
Yes. Research supports the effectiveness of virtual ERP-based care. Compass Health Center’s virtual OCD & Anxiety Programs offer the same expert-led treatment, structure, and support as our in-person programs.
We offer rapid access to care, with same or next-day assessments and admissions available. Our team works with you to ensure the quickest possible path to getting started.
Yes. Many individuals with OCD also experience anxiety, substance use, depression, trauma, or other mental health challenges. Our integrated care approach addresses the full picture, not just one piece of it.
If you’re experiencing intrusive thoughts, compulsive behaviors, or rituals that interfere with daily life, even if you’re unsure whether it’s OCD or an anxiety disorder, our team can help assess your needs and recommend the best course of care.
Our Impact
We understand that success can look different for everyone depending on your hopes and needs. Here are a few ways we define success:
95%
of patients step down to a lower level of care after treatment
99%
would refer a family member or friend
97%
of patients choose to start a program the same day or next day
90%
of patients maintain progress, not requiring higher care levels for 12+ months post-treatment
I liked the group sessions, the creative expression, the enthusiasm, and genuineness of the staff. I thought it was really important to have the balance of one-on-one care and group connection, and this program nailed it.
I trusted my entire team.
Compass has it "down" in helping their patients! A very complete and comprehensive program. We were impressed with the services and the compassion our son received.
They gave me hope again.
Meet Forward, Compass Health Center’s Lookbook
Mental health care is changing—and so is the way we tell its story.
Forward is a collection of voices, insights, and design that feels less like a brochure and more like a magazine you’d actually want to flip through. We created this Lookbook to show how care can be approachable, engaging, and thoughtfully designed—just as our treatment experience is. Inside, you’ll find our philosophy, programs, and patient outcomes shaping Compass care today, and what’s next.