Compulsion & Brain - an online outreach project

Topic:	STEM impulses
Type of funding:	Individual funding programmes
Funded institution:	Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

The Prisma fund will enable Prof. Dr. Tobias Hauser, Professor of Computational Psychiatry in Tübingen, to set up a new German-language platform to provide information on the causes of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Goals

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a common mental disorder that affects around one in thirty people. Like all mental disorders, it is caused by a change in the brain. Unfortunately, obsessive-compulsive disorder is still highly stigmatized. It is hardly known that it is a "brain disease".

In collaboration with the two largest OCD organizations in the world, Professor Hauser has designed and created an English-language platform to raise awareness of the brain disorder and counteract the widespread stigma.

The aim of the funding is to translate the English platform into German and disseminate it to the public. To date, there is no such information service in German-speaking countries that can help sufferers and their families and hopefully enable more sufferers to access treatment.

The platform will also help to emphasize the importance of research in the field of OCD and make it easier to recruit test subjects for further research.