Penzel, Fred

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PENZEL, Fred

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Received Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Western Suffolk Psychological Services, 755 New York Ave., Ste. 200, Huntington, NY 11743; fax: 631-424-4041. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Author, consultant, lecturer, and psychologist. Western Suffolk Psychological Services, executive director. Member of science advisory board, the Trichotillomania Learning Center and the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation. Lecturer on trichotillomania and obsessive-compulsive disorders; has appeared on television programs such as Dateline, NBC, and 20/20, ABC.

WRITINGS:

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: A Complete Guide to Getting Well and Staying Well, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

The Hair-pulling Problem: A Complete Guide to Trichotillomania, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to the newsletters of the Trichotillomania Learning Center and the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation.

SIDELIGHTS:

A practicing psychologist in Huntington, New York, Fred Penzel has studied and treated trichotillomania and other forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD for more than two decades. Penzel is active in professional organizations dedicated to the disorders, including the Trichotillomania Learning Center and the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation. He has conducted workshops in the United States and abroad and has appeared on television programs such as Dateline, on NBC, and 20/20, on ABC, to speak about the subject of trichotillomania and OCD.

Trichotillomania is a psychological disorder involving compulsive hair plucking and pulling. Those with the disorder compulsively pull out the hair from their scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes, and other parts of the body until there are noticeable bald spots. In Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: A Complete Guide to Getting Well and Staying Well, Penzel describes the hair-pulling disorder, as well as other conditions, such as body dysmorphic disorder, in which sufferers imagine themselves to be ugly or deformed; skin-picking, in which persons scratch, squeeze, and pick at their skin until it bleeds or develops sores; and compulsive nail-biting. Penzel directs his book squarely at those with OCD, and at their families, with less emphasis on therapists or health care providers. He "seeks one ultimate goal: to empower this group of sufferers, their families, and those who would help them," commented Yan Feng and Markus J. P. Kruesi in Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Penzel explains the symptoms of a variety of OCD's, then "outlines in great detail procedures for a self-administered program of behavioral therapy," noted Mary Ann Hughes in Library Journal. Penzel "takes the reader through each step of the most effective behavioral therapies, detailing how progress is made and how to avoid relapse," commented Feng and Kruesi, who complimented Penzel's use of "lay language so that it brings the reader close to the core of disorders very effectively." The author also provides a discussion of medication and pharmaceutical use in the treatment of OCD, and how to determine the effectiveness of drug therapies. Penzel also focuses particular attention on the diagnosis and treatment of OCDs in children and adolescents. Symptom checklists, a bibliography of printed resources, lists of relevant Internet sites, a glossary, and many pages of relaxation scripts and strategies round out a volume that Hughes recommended as "the most useful of the recent books on OCD." According to Feng and Kruesi, Penzel's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders is "a relevant, useful, encompassing but not overly obsessive volume."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, December, 2003, Yan Feng and Markus J. P. Kruesi, review of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: A Complete Guide to Getting Well and Staying Well, p. 1534.

Library Journal, November 15, 2000, Mary Ann Hughes, review of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, p. 84.

Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1991, Elizabeth Venant, "The Urge for Order," section E, p. 1.