#TraineeTuesday: Kyle King

This #TraineeTuesday, meet Kyle King, an undergraduate researcher in the Yale Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Research Clinic! He recently submitted a manuscript on how social support influences readiness to change in treatment in adults with OCD to the Bulletin of The Menninger Clinic, a psychiatric hospital located in Houston, Texas, providing treatment for adults and adolescents with mood, personality, anxiety, and addictive disorders.

Kyle’s manuscript is the product of a research study that he and his mentor Brian Zaboski, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, began thinking over 2 years ago. The entire project is based on first-person reports of experiences with OCD, a mental disorder in which a person experiences uncontrollable, recurring thoughts and behaviors. This research has involved a lot of face-to-face interactions with patients, which has been “super rewarding” for Kyle.

Additionally, Kyle was recently elected to the Board of the Early Childhood Peace Consortium, which is a group of researchers around the globe interested in promoting early childhood development. For Kyle, ages 0 to 3 are an unprecedented time in the development of a child’s brain and thus a topic of focus in development.

Kyle’s research embarks on the struggle with treatment for OCD. The treatment is not only challenging, but it is difficult for patients to be self-motivated. Readiness to change is a crucial treatment-related construct, also being positively associated with self-efficacy. Social support’s possible influence is studied in Kyle’s project. To do so, clinical interviews and self-reports are collected, studying how increasing social support will increase readiness to change through self-efficacy.

What drew Kyle to research was his own experiences with OCD. Diagnosed at 13, he struggled to get access to treatment. Kyle has been in recovery for about seven years now, but ever since, it has been his goal to try to improve the situation for those who have not been as lucky as he has.

Attracted to Yale’s prominent OCD research program, Kyle applied to the school. His work with the Yale OCD research clinic began even before his start as a first-year. For Kyle, it has been “great” to get involved in research early and keep up with it despite the different interests that undergraduates are introduced to when they first arrive on campus. He particularly appreciates the community and atmosphere in the “family” he has made with his lab group.

By some estimates, only about 50% of people with OCD recover using first-line behavioral treatments, and Kyle’s strives to increase that number. He hopes to nudge the psychiatric and psychological community to put more emphasis on integrating nonprofessional social support as a low-cost adjunct to traditional treatment paradigms, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). As a neuroscience major on a pre-medicine track at Yale, Kyle also aims to practice psychiatry, continuing to work at the intersection of social support and mental illness.