By the time Elizabeth McIngvale was twelve, life in her Houston home had begun to shift in ways no one could understand. “I was still functioning, still doing well in school,” she recalls. “Then, almost overnight, I started having intrusive thoughts and fears about my family’s safety, my faith, everything. I believed that if I didn’t do certain things a certain number of times, something terrible might happen.”
What began as something quirky, but manageable quickly became paralyzing. Within two years, McIngvale was no longer attending school. She was homebound and consumed by obsessive rituals that took hours to complete. Her family, including her father, Houston furniture icon Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, searched the city’s medical community for help but found few answers. “We went to clinician after clinician in the Texas Medical Center,” she says. “Everywhere we went, we heard the same thing. They’d never seen a case as severe as mine.”
Then, a moment of chance changed everything. One morning, her father opened the Houston Chronicle and read a story about the Menninger Clinic, which was then based in Topeka, Kansas. The article mentioned an OCD program. Within weeks, the McIngvales were on a plane. “That program changed and saved my life,” she says.
At the OCD Program, McIngvale began working with a team that understood obsessive-compulsive disorder and wasn’t afraid of it. “They were confident, calm, and knew how to treat it,” she says. Through a behavioral therapy known as exposure and response prevention, she learned to confront her fears instead of obeying them. “Within days, I had hope. Within weeks, I knew I could get better.”
After three months in residential treatment, she returned home to school, to friends, and to a future she had nearly lost. She would eventually earn her doctorate and return to the same program that saved her life. Menninger’s OCD unit closed and was reopened privately in Houston. In 2019,McIngvale stepped in to lead it. Today, she directs the OCD Institute of Texas, carrying on the same evidence-based model that gave her life back.
“I don’t see it as a business,” she says. “It’s a mission. We don’t treat patients as numbers or opportunities for profit. It’s about outcomes and impact, we truly run the program like that everyday.”
That philosophy, rooted in empathy and science, mirrors her father’s unrelenting optimism. “My parents learned early that mental illness isn’t something you can just fix,” she says. “It’s something you manage with the right help.” The family’s openness about her illness once drew scrutiny, but they never hesitated. “People told us not to talk about it publicly,” she says. “But my parents wanted our story to be able to help others going through similar situations.”
Their willingness to share has done just that. Every week, people visit Gallery Furniture to tell Mattress Mack how his daughter’s journey encouraged them to seek help. “We hear it every day,” McIngvale says. “Families saying they finally understand OCD or that they got treatment because of our story.”
Now one of only a handful of OCD-specific residential programs in the world, the OCD Institute of Texas treats up to 11 residential and seven day program patients at a time. For McIngvale, Houston is exactly where she’s meant to be. “This city has the biggest medical center in the world,” she says. “It should also have the best mental health care.”
More than two decades after nearly losing everything, McIngvale is helping others reclaim their lives, too. “OCD is not an adjective,” she says. “It’s a chronic, debilitating condition, but with effective treatment, you can have freedom from it. I’m living proof.” ocditexas.com