Regional Councils extend OCD SoCal’s mission into local communities by organizing events, supporting outreach efforts, and helping create spaces for education, connection, and hope. Their work ensures that people across Southern California have greater access to support and evidence-based information. We are profoundly thankful for the volunteers who generously share their skills and heart to make these efforts possible.
San Diego Regional Council
Cathy Agostino
Cathy’s journey with OCD began in her early 20s, shortly after graduating college. Like many others, she faced the challenges of navigating a new diagnosis while transitioning into adulthood. However, through years of dedicated therapy and persistence, she successfully reclaimed her life. Today, Cathy is living a full and vibrant life, but she hasn’t forgotten the hurdles she cleared along the way. Driven by her own success in treatment, she is now devoting her time to the Southern California OCD community. Her mission is twofold:
- Raising Awareness: Helping others recognize OCD not as a lifelong sentence of struggle, but as a highly treatable illness.
- Providing Insight: Sharing her personal perspective to offer hope and practical understanding to those still in the thick of their journey.
Cathy is a firm believer that with the right tools and support, everyone living with OCD can find their path to a fulfilling life.
Lora Bednarek
Lora Bednarek is an undergraduate student and researcher at UC San Diego, whose path into the OCD world began with her experience growing up as a sibling of someone with OCD. Seeing the daily challenges her older brother faced motivated her to do something to help him. After discovering research in high school, Lora became involved in studies focused on OCD, as well as depressive and other anxiety disorders, with the goal of helping to deepen understanding and inform interventions. She is passionate about OCD advocacy, spreading awareness, and creating a community for individuals dealing with or affected by the disorder.
Summer Contreras-Lemmon
Summer Contreras-Lemmon is a Certified Medi-Cal Peer Support Specialist living in San Diego with her husband. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from the University of Arizona in Tucson and is currently working toward a second degree in Psychology from Southern New Hampshire University. She hopes to write books about her mental health recovery, start her own peer support business for individuals with OCD, and travel the world to play and judge the Pokémon Trading Card Game as a Pokémon Professor.
Katherine Pica, LCSW
Katherine Pica, LCSW, is the owner and clinical director of Resilience Counseling. Resilience Counseling is a San Diego based group practice dedicated to specializing in the treatment of OCD and in training therapists to become strong evidence-based ERP clinicians. The practice provides care for children, teens, adults, and families and is committed to offering high-quality, developmentally informed treatment across the lifespan. Katherine is deeply committed to OCD work with evidence-based practices. She is equally dedicated to training therapists to build strong clinical skills and confidence so they can provide effective OCD treatment with consistency and compassion.
Olivia Wallace
Olivia Wallace is a research coordinator at the Center for Understanding and Treating Anxiety at San Diego State University. She received her B.S. in Biopsychology from UC Santa Barbara. She is currently coordinating the STRIVE study, which focuses on understanding how exposures work for people with OCD.
