FORCE was founded by people who have experienced the gaps in the OCD ecosystem from multiple sides—and spent their careers working to change them.
Our founding team brings together experience across neuroscience research, evidence-based clinical care, behavioral-health leadership, clinician education, science communication, advocacy, technology, quality improvement, nonprofit strategy, and organizational systems.
Just as importantly, every member of our founding team knows the realities of severe OCD and serious mental illness through personal lived experience, family and caregiving experience, or both.
Those perspectives led us to the same conclusion:
Important work is happening across the OCD field. But too much of it remains disconnected.
Scientific discoveries do not automatically become better care. Effective treatments do not automatically become accessible. People cannot reach the right treatment if OCD is never recognized. And research, care, and education are all weaker when the people most affected by the disorder are absent from the decisions that shape them.
FORCE was created to help close the spaces between them.
Our Story
FORCE began with a conversation between two people who had already spent years trying to change the mental health system from different sides of it.
Co-founders Tracie Ibrahim and Uma Chatterjee met through their work speaking, educating, and advocating within the OCD community. Tracie came to that work as a longtime clinician, behavioral-health executive, educator, parent, advocate, and person with severe OCD. Uma came to it as a neuroscientist, science communicator, advocate, and person whose own life had been profoundly shaped by severe OCD and other serious mental illnesses.
Their conversations became personal quickly.
One of the earliest was about suicide.
They talked about hospitalization. Misdiagnosis. Taboo and stigmatized symptoms. Treatment resistance. Co-occurring mental illness. Financial barriers. The exhausting process of trying to explain experiences that professionals did not recognize. And the extraordinary difference it made when someone finally understood what they were experiencing and knew how to help.
What struck them was not simply how severe their individual experiences had been.
It was how familiar the failures were.
Different lives. Different generations. Different professional paths. Almost all of the same gaps.
Both had lived what happens when OCD is misunderstood.
Both had seen what happens when evidence-based treatment technically exists but people cannot find it, afford it, or access it.
Both knew what it meant for symptoms to be mistaken for something else—and how dangerous that misunderstanding can become when OCD centers on violence, sexuality, morality, religion, suicide, identity, or other experiences people may be terrified to disclose.
And through their professional work, they had encountered another version of the same problem.
Researchers were advancing knowledge. Clinicians were treating patients. Educators and advocates were raising awareness. Organizations were building programs. People with lived experience were speaking about what they needed.
But too often, everyone was working in parallel. The closer we looked, the clearer the gaps became. Those observations became especially tangible through Tracie and Uma’s involvement in OCD advocacy, nonprofit work, and community initiatives in Wisconsin.
Working closely within the state’s OCD community offered a direct view of what was available—and what remained difficult to find.
Basic public understanding was still inconsistent. Many people did not know what OCD actually looked like beyond familiar stereotypes. Specialized clinicians were limited and often difficult to access. Financial and insurance barriers could make appropriate treatment unreachable. Families and community systems lacked clear pathways to reliable information and qualified care. Research often felt far removed from the people whose lives it was intended to improve.
And the more they looked beyond Wisconsin, the more obvious it became that these were not uniquely local problems.
Across the broader OCD landscape, the same pattern appeared again and again:
Pieces of the solution existed. The connections among them often did not. We stopped asking which gap mattered most. FORCE grew from the belief that the OCD community should not have to choose.
Better science matters.
So does whether that science ever becomes treatment.
Evidence-based treatment matters.
So does whether someone can afford it, find it, or even recognize that they need it.
Education matters.
Because neither research nor treatment can help someone whose symptoms remain misunderstood.
Lived experience matters.
Because the people closest to the problem can see questions, barriers, and consequences that institutions may otherwise miss.
This became the foundation of FORCE: not another initiative built around a single piece of the problem, but an organization designed to strengthen the connections among them.
Our Mission
FORCE advances obsessive-compulsive disorder research, expands access to evidence-based care, and transforms education through science, lived experience, and collaboration—working to improve the lives of everyone affected by OCD.
We do this by strengthening the OCD ecosystem: the interconnected network of scientific research, clinical care, education, and lived experience that turns knowledge into better lives.
Why We Work Across the Whole OCD Ecosystem
Our experiences taught us that OCD’s biggest challenges do not exist in isolation.
Research cannot improve lives if discoveries never reach clinical care.
Evidence-based treatment cannot help people who cannot realistically access it.
Access cannot improve if people, families, healthcare providers, and communities do not recognize OCD in the first place.
And research, care, and education all become stronger when people with lived experience help identify the questions and problems that matter most.
That is why FORCE works across Research, Care, and Education rather than treating them as three independent missions.
Research should inform care.
Scientific discovery should improve how OCD is recognized, understood, prevented, and treated.
Care should inform research.
The experiences of patients, clinicians, and families should generate new scientific questions and expose where existing knowledge falls short.
Education should strengthen both.
Accurate education helps people recognize OCD, helps professionals identify and treat it, helps communities understand new discoveries, and makes science more useful outside academic settings.
Lived experience should strengthen every stage.
People living with OCD bring knowledge that can improve research priorities, reveal barriers in care, identify gaps in education, and keep systems responsive to the people they exist to serve.
FORCE was built to help these systems work together.
Our Values
Everything FORCE does is guided by principles that shape how we make decisions, build programs, select partnerships, and work alongside the OCD community.
Science should serve people.
Research matters because of what it can make possible: deeper understanding, earlier recognition, better treatments, more personalized care, improved quality of life, and less suffering.
Scientific progress should not stop at publication. It should ultimately improve human lives.
Evidence-based care should be accessible.
Knowing how to treat OCD is not enough if effective treatment remains unreachable.
A person’s ability to receive competent OCD care should not be determined by geography, finances, insurance status, provider shortages, or privilege.
Lived experience is a form of expertise.
Scientific, clinical, and lived expertise are not interchangeable.
They answer different questions.
People living with OCD bring knowledge that can reveal unmet needs, strengthen research questions, improve care, identify failures in education, and help institutions understand the consequences of the decisions they make.
We believe these forms of expertise are strongest when they work together.
Education changes outcomes.
What people know about OCD affects whether symptoms are recognized, whether someone feels safe disclosing them, whether a clinician identifies the disorder, whether a referral is appropriate, and whether a person ever reaches effective treatment.
Accurate, accessible education is not secondary to improving outcomes.
It is part of how outcomes improve.
Collaboration accelerates progress.
No single person, profession, institution, or organization holds the entire solution.
Researchers, clinicians, educators, advocates, families, policymakers, funders, communities, and people with lived experience each hold part of it.
We believe progress happens faster when those groups work together rather than in parallel.
What We Are Building
FORCE is translating these principles into practical programs across our three mission areas.
We are developing models to:
Advance Research by supporting rigorous OCD science and strengthening the connections among investigators, participants, communities, and lived experience.
Expand Access to Care by reducing financial and structural barriers to evidence-based OCD treatment and strengthening pathways to qualified clinicians.
Transform Education through public awareness, professional training, community outreach, science communication, and resources designed to improve OCD literacy across systems.
Over time, we aim to build a sustainable infrastructure that does more than support isolated projects.
We want to create an engine for OCD progress—one capable of moving knowledge between laboratories, clinics, communities, institutions, and the people whose lives are ultimately affected by it.
Our Vision
We envision a future where obsessive-compulsive disorder is recognized early, treated effectively, studied seriously, invested in proportionately, and understood with the urgency it deserves.
A future where scientific discoveries move more quickly into clinical care.
A future where financial circumstances, geography, insurance status, stigma, or provider shortages do not determine whether someone receives competent treatment.
A future where researchers, clinicians, educators, advocates, policymakers, funders, families, and people living with OCD work together instead of in parallel.
A future where fewer years are lost to delayed diagnosis, ineffective treatment, inaccessible care, and misunderstanding.
Ultimately, we envision a future where people living with OCD spend less time fighting the system—and more time living their lives.
Different expertise. Shared stakes. One mission.
FORCE’s founding team reflects the model of collaboration the organization was built to advance.
Together, our founders bring experience across neuroscience research, evidence-based clinical treatment, behavioral-health leadership, clinician training, science communication, public education, lived experience advocacy, quality improvement, technology, digital strategy, nonprofit work, and organizational infrastructure.
They also bring personal and family experience with severe OCD and serious mental illness.
We built FORCE from the belief that neither professional expertise nor lived experience is sufficient on its own—and that the strongest solutions emerge when people who understand different parts of a system build together.
Tracie Ibrahim, LMFT, CST
Co-Founder & Board President
Tracie Ibrahim is a mental health executive, clinician, educator, and lived experience advocate with 34 years of experience across the continuum of behavioral healthcare. Her career has taken her from frontline psychiatric and residential care through clinical practice, therapist training, program leadership, and senior executive oversight. As Chief Compliance Officer for NOCD/Noto, she works at the intersection of evidence-based care, quality, ethics, regulation, and implementation at scale. She has also trained and supervised more than 100 pre-licensed therapists and has spent decades expanding access to specialized mental-health treatment and education.
Her work is deeply informed by her own experience navigating severe OCD and other serious mental illnesses, as well as by raising children with serious mental illness and neurodivergence. Through FORCE, Tracie brings together the perspectives of patient, parent, clinician, educator, executive, and advocate.
Read Tracie’s Full Bio
Uma R. Chatterjee, M.S., MHPS
Co-Founder & Board Vice President
Uma Chatterjee is an award-winning mental health neuroscientist, science communicator, and lived experience advocate whose work spans the translational research continuum—from studying disease biology in the human brain and modeling its mechanisms in the laboratory to communicating science with the communities it is ultimately intended to serve. A Ph.D. candidate and NIH TL1 Predoctoral Fellow in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Neuroscience Training Program, her research primarily investigates the genetic and biological mechanisms of OCD. She is conducting the first known studies quantifying OCD-associated proteins in the human brain.
Alongside her research, Uma has delivered more than 150 presentations worldwide, hosts A Chat with Uma, and has reached millions through mental-health, scientific, advocacy, and media platforms. Her work is deeply shaped by her own experience living with severe mental illness, neurodivergence, chronic illness, cancer, and disability. Through FORCE, she brings together the perspectives of scientist, patient, communicator, educator, storyteller, and advocate.
Read Uma’s Full Bio
Phil Ibrahim
Co-Founder & Board Secretary
With a career spanning technology, quality assurance, organizational improvement, and behavioral-health administration, Phil brings an analytical, systems-oriented perspective to FORCE. His experience includes strengthening complex processes, leading quality initiatives, supporting behavioral-health professionals through technology and operations, and identifying ways organizations can function more effectively and reliably.
His commitment to FORCE is also deeply personal, shaped by supporting family members living with OCD and other mental-health conditions. He brings to the founding team both operational expertise and a family perspective on the real-world consequences of whether mental-health systems are understandable, accessible, and effective. Through FORCE, Phil helps strengthen the organizational systems and infrastructure necessary to translate an ambitious mission into sustainable impact.
Zac Bostick
Co-Founder & Board Treasurer
With more than a decade of hands-on experience across web development, software development, IT operations, digital infrastructure, and nonprofit strategy, Zac brings technical expertise and systems thinking to FORCE’s work. His background includes building digital platforms, strengthening technical infrastructure, improving organizational workflows, and helping mission-driven organizations translate complex ideas into accessible, useful public resources. His experience spans initiatives connected to mental healthcare, scientific research, education, and community outreach.
Zac’s commitment to FORCE is also personal, informed by supporting family members affected by OCD and other serious mental-health conditions. Through FORCE, he focuses on building the digital foundation, technical systems, and public-facing infrastructure necessary for the organization to grow, communicate effectively, and reach the communities it exists to serve.
We built FORCE because better is possible.
We have seen what scientific progress can make possible.
We have seen what effective treatment can give back.
We have seen what happens when someone finally learns that the thoughts they were terrified to disclose have a name.
And we have seen the consequences when research, healthcare, education, institutions, and communities fail to connect.
Those experiences are why FORCE exists.
To advance the science. To expand access to what works. To change what people understand. And to help ensure that fewer people lose years of their lives waiting for systems to catch up.
Help build what comes next.
Invest in better science, better access, better understanding, and better lives.