Clinician track

Which OCD CE course should you take? The options, compared

No board makes you take any of these, which is part of why the choice is confusing. Here's what each option actually is, what it costs, and how I'd pick between them. OCD is pretty much all I do, so I have opinions.

Which OCD CE course should you take?

It depends on how much OCD is in your caseload. If OCD is newer territory for you, the IOCDF's BTTI is the field's core intensive and includes consultation on your first cases, while a self-paced course of 6 to 16 hours is the cheaper way to get oriented. If you already run exposure and response prevention (ERP), consultation on your real cases will do more for you than another survey course.

When a colleague asks me this, I usually ask a couple of things back. How much OCD are you actually seeing? And do you want somebody looking at your cases, or do you want something you can finish over a weekend? Then there's the boring one, which is whether your board takes the credit. That's the one people forget until after they've paid.

The caseload question matters more than it sounds like it should, because the patient is probably already on your schedule. In the national comorbidity survey, 93% of US adults with severe OCD had gotten some kind of mental health treatment in the past year. The share who had gotten treatment aimed at OCD was 30.9%. So most of the severe cases were already sitting across from a clinician. They just weren't getting OCD treatment.

For what it's worth, the way I'd sort it depends on which of these sounds most like you.

• You see OCD a few times a year and mostly want to stop missing it. Start with something free or short. A couple of hours gets you the basic recognition and a few intake questions, and for a caseload like that, that's most of the value.
• OCD is becoming a real part of your practice. This is where I'd have you spend the money, on the BTTI or Penn's workshop. Both put you in a room with faculty for days, and the BTTI keeps you on the phone with them afterward. Those calls are the part I'd be paying for.
• You already run ERP and want help with the cases that stall. The IOCDF's consultation groups, which our guide to the training ladder walks through, or The Knowledge Tree's certification track if you want the consultation with a designation at the end of it.

If I had to hand you one rule of thumb, it's to count the consultation before you count the hours. A lecture can teach you what ERP is. What it can't tell you is why the plan stalled with the patient in front of you, and that's the question you'll actually be stuck on. The thing that answers it is another clinician who does this every day, looking at your case with you.

The OCD CE options, compared

Everything below is what each provider had published as of September 2026. It drifts, by event and by sale, so before you pay, read the provider's own page and check your board's rules. Where I name approving bodies, they're the ones each provider lists. That means the American Psychological Association (APA) for psychologists, the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) for social workers, the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) for counselors, and the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) for physicians.

The intensives

The BTTI is the one your patients are being taught to ask you about, and if OCD is going to be a real part of your work, I think it's still the right default. It's three days in person or five virtual half-days of ERP, and then three group consultation calls after, all inside the one fee. The foundation runs between 11 and 13 of them across North America each year, in General and Pediatric versions, plus a BTTI for Treating OCD in Communities of Color and one conducted in Spanish.

You do have to qualify. You need an independent license, a current caseload that includes OCD or a related disorder, and it has to be your first time. CE credits are offered for psychologists, social workers, and mental health counselors, with the specifics published before each event. If you hold a different license, ask before you register rather than assuming.

Penn's Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety runs the other serious intensive. Four full days on Zoom, 9 to 5, taught by the center's own psychologists, with patient training videos and the assessment materials included. It's the most CE hours on this page, 24, and the most expensive, at $1,500. The credit is listed for Pennsylvania-licensed clinicians and for New York psychologists, so if you're licensed anywhere else you're relying on your own board's reciprocity rules, and that's worth settling before you pay. It's open to licensed clinicians and to people working under one, as long as you already have some cognitive behavioral therapy experience.

The certificate tracks

The Knowledge Tree issues a designation it calls Certified in Exposure and Response Prevention, or CERP. Earning it takes five core courses totaling 31.5 CE hours, two hours of group consultation, two hours of individual consultation with a case presentation, and ten client treatment hours, all within two years. You can take the courses live or on demand. It's open to master's and doctoral clinicians, associates under supervision included, and to psychiatric nurse practitioners and psychiatrists. The faculty has names you'll know if you've spent any time around the OCD world, Jon Hershfield, Reid Wilson, and Kimberley Quinlan among them.

The Anxiety Institute's certificate is three courses from one psychologist, live or on demand: Foundations (6 CE hours), Building Blocks (4), and an OCD Master Class (4), each $199 on demand with 180 days of access. The credit comes through AKH Inc., approved nationally for psychologists and social workers, and it's for US-based participants only. I'll give them credit for one thing in particular. Their own page says the certificate "does not confer the title of 'OCD Specialist' or 'Certified ERP Provider'". That's exactly right, and I'd want it said that plainly on every certificate page on this list.

The self-paced courses

These are the ones you do on your own time, and they differ mostly in what they cover and whose credit they carry. Some of this, by the way, is just pulling things back up. There are things you learn three or four times over a career, and then a year goes by and it's, wait, what was it again? A self-paced course is a perfectly good way to do that.

• PESI's OCD Treatment Specialist is the broadest of them, 16.5 hours from five presenters, with acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) alongside ERP, plus tic disorders and the ADHD spectrum. Social workers get 16.75 clinical credits through ASWB and physicians get up to 15 AMA PRA Category 1 credits, but it's not offered for NBCC hours, so counselors are on their state board's rules. The page itself says that "becoming a specialist not only requires education and training, but also direct work with clients." List price is $299.99, and it was on sale for $141 when I checked. PESI also sells a two-day ERP training from Caleb Lack, PhD, who teaches for the BTTI, as a 13-hour digital seminar for $459.99.
• The Knowledge Tree's ERP on-demand course is 12 clock hours for $304 with lifetime access, and it counts as a core course toward the CERP designation if you decide to keep going.
• Online CE Credits' ERP for OCD, Step-by-Step is 11 hours for $330, taught by a licensed clinical professional counselor, with NBCC and ASWB approval.
• CBT School's Clinician's OCD Toolkit is Kimberley Quinlan's 8-hour course, 36 videos for $377, covering assessment, ERP planning, self-compassion skills, and relapse prevention across more than 20 OCD themes. Its CE approval is NBCC only, so psychologists and social workers should check with their board first.
• Conicia's OCD Treatment Support for Clinicians is 6 CE or CME hours for $120. It's mine, and it's the only one here where you do the patient program yourself instead of reading about it. More on it below, caveats included.

Free and nearly free

NOCD Academy, the training arm of the OCD therapy company NOCD, gives its home-study courses away. They're 1 to 2 CE hours each, on OCD assessment, subtypes, harm-themed OCD, scrupulosity, inhibitory learning, and the fundamentals of exposure-based treatment, and there's a calendar of free live webinars alongside. The IOCDF's on-demand webinars are the other easy way in, recorded lectures at $30 to $60 each, 1 to 2 credits apiece, approved for psychologists, social workers, and counselors.

If you're not sure OCD is something you want to get into, I'd start here. It costs you an evening. Watch a couple and see whether you get any traction with it.

Is there a certification for treating OCD?

Not one that anybody requires. No state board or national body makes you hold a credential to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. The certificates you'll see are issued by the training providers themselves, like The Knowledge Tree's CERP designation and the Anxiety Institute's certificate of completion, which its own page says confers no title. What patients are being taught to look for is ERP training, consultation, and an OCD caseload.

It's worth thinking about before you pay for a credential, because the IOCDF has already told your future patients what to ask you. On the page where it teaches people how to find a therapist, it hands them the questions. What techniques do you use, are you familiar with exposure and response prevention, what's your training and background in OCD. It tells them to be careful with a therapist who is vague, or who says "cognitive behavioral therapy" and won't get more specific. And it lists what it wants them to find, things like attendance at specialized workshops like the BTTI, membership in the IOCDF or the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and a caseload where OCD is a real share of the work.

Nobody on that page is coached to ask whether you're certified. I get why a certificate is appealing. It's something to put on a website, and it proves you sat through the hours. What it can't tell anyone is what happens in your room when a patient does the exposure halfway, or quietly finishes the compulsion in their head afterward, or asks you for reassurance and you feel the pull to give it. That part you learn by doing it with someone more experienced looking on, which is exactly why the BTTI and the CERP track both build consultation on your real cases into the training.

So my question for any course is a pretty plain one. When it's over, does anyone look at my cases? If the answer is yes, the certificate is a nice extra. If the answer is no, then what you're paying for is the hours, and it's worth knowing that going in.

Where Conicia's course fits

Conicia's CE course is six hours, self-paced, and accredited, for $120. It covers ERP, inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy (I-CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and OCD medication strategy, and you learn them by working through the complete patient program yourself. It orients you to all four models and to a tool your patients may be using between sessions. It doesn't replace an ERP intensive or case consultation.

Full disclosure, I built this one, so read what follows knowing that. I built it for my own patients first, as something structured to do between sessions, and then it turned out to be just as useful for the rest of us. The idea behind the CE version is pretty simple. I think you remember treatment you've been through yourself a lot better than treatment you've only read about, so you go through the program the way a patient does, reading what they read and doing the exercises they do, with a clinician orientation framing each part. Medication is my lane, and it's the part of most OCD trainings that gets one slide, so SSRI dose targets, trial length, and augmentation get real depth here.

Now the other side of it, because I'd rather you hear it from me. Six hours is an orientation, not an intensive, and there are no consultation calls. If OCD is becoming the center of your practice, take the BTTI or Penn's workshop, and use this one for the models they don't cover in much depth, meaning I-CBT and ACT and medication, or to get fluent in a between-sessions tool before you invite a patient into it. The main bulk of what I built is ERP-based, and what I tell my own patients is that it's a supplement to the therapy they're doing. The same goes for the course.

The credit is broader than most on this list. The course is provided by CE Learning Systems, jointly accredited by the ACCME, the ACPE, and the ANCC, with psychologist credit through the APA's Office of Continuing Education in Psychology and recognition from New York State boards for social work, mental health counseling, psychology, and marriage and family therapy. So physicians and nurses can take it for credit, which you'll have noticed is rare on this page. Whether your own board accepts it can depend on your license and state, and the full approval statements are on the course page.

So that's my end of it. Pick by how much OCD you're seeing, and weigh the consultation more than the hours. Check your board before you pay. And if you do end up in mine, tell me what's confusing or clunky. I read everything myself.