Cognitive and Executive Disorders in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Comorbid with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Evidence of Mindfulness

Abstract

The present text carries out a characterization of the anomalous functioning of cognitive and emotional processes governed by the guidelines of a central dysexecutive control, modulated by persistent, negligent, and sometimes insensitive patterns to command lines of detection of external stimuli and required adjustment of focus according to changing keys of a demanding task-oriented context. Rumination as a metacognitive process, once anarchic, is in a domain-free domain capable of usurping memory and attentional resources by retrieving them to the self-referential self, making it a preferred focus of relevance. The ruminative process, slipping into the conscious network normally alert, is incessantly overwritten until it colonizes it, makes it neglect its tasks of observation and surveillance, to instead, abstract it from the outside world and overturn it in a kind of inflated self-absorption or hyper-augmented self-consciousness. The cognitive rumination is postulated as the polymorphic process that serves as a base substrate to explain the logic of appearance and maintenance of both obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depression, these diagnostic entities being the expression of the same polymorphic process. Turned to the future in the TOC and to the past in the TDM. Finally, a review is made of the evidence that the practice of mindfulness has reported in reducing rumination.