Limited research has explored the specific impact of voice-hearing experiences upon the social relating of adolescents. This study examined the associations of voice-hearing in youth with social ...relating, and putative explanatory factors. An observational, cross-sectional design using a clinical comparison group was employed to examine historical and concurrent associations with voice-hearing. Thirty-four young people (age 14-18 years) with voice-hearing experiences and 34 young people who did not hear voices were recruited from NHS mental health services. Participants completed measures about social relating and potential explanatory factors. Analyses of covariance were used to examine between-group differences. Voice-hearers scored higher on negative schematic beliefs (self-beliefs, partial eta.sup.2 = .163, p = .001; other-beliefs, partial eta.sup.2 = .152, p =. 002) and depressive and anxiety symptoms (partial eta.sup.2 = .23 and partial eta.sup.2 = .24, p-s <. 001 respectively). The two groups did not differ significantly on childhood trauma levels (partial eta.sup.2 = .02, p = .273), however, the voice-hearing group scored lower on premorbid adjustment (partial eta.sup.2 = .19, p < .001). Hearing voices in help-seeking youth could be an indicator for social relating issues and holding negative schematic beliefs, and may be an indicator for of increased psychopathological complexity. Although poorer premorbid adjustment might indicate an early vulnerability to social relating difficulties, voice-hearing might be an aggravating factor and one that requires treatment.
Introduction Mental health stigma causes a range of diverse and serious negative sequelae. Anti-stigma campaigns have largely aligned with medical theories and categorical approaches. Such campaigns ...have produced some improvements, but mental health stigma is still prevalent. The effect of alternative theoretical perspectives on mental health within anti-stigma campaigns has not been tested. Moreover, we do not know their effect on help-seeking intentions. Methods We conducted an online experimental pre-post study comparing the effects of two anti-stigma campaign posters on mental health stigma and help-seeking intentions. One poster adhered to the medical, categorical approach to mental health, whereas the other poster portrayed mental health problems in line with a non-categorical, continuous perspective. Results After controlling for familiarity with the campaign poster, country of residence and pre-test scores, we found no significant between-group differences in terms of help-seeking intentions and all stigma attitudes except for danger-related beliefs. That is, those who viewed the non-categorical poster reported an increased perception that people with mental health problems are dangerous. Discussion Our largely null findings may suggest the equivalence of these posters on stigma and help-seeking intentions but may also reflect the brevity of the intervention. Our findings concerning danger beliefs may reflect a Type I error, the complexities of stigma models, or the adverse effects of increased perceived contact. Further research is needed to test the effects of differing mental health paradigms on stigma and help-seeking intentions over a longer duration.
Due to the general psychopathological vulnerability of young people who hear distressing voices, research has stressed the importance for clinicians to assess this experience in youth. Nonetheless, ...the limited literature on the topic comes from studies with clinicians in adult health services and it primarily reports that clinicians do not feel confident in systematically assessing voice-hearing and doubt the appropriateness of doing so. We applied the Theory of Planned Behavior and identified clinicians' job attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and perceived subjective norms as putative predictors of their intent to assess voice-hearing in youth.
Nine hundred and ninety-six clinicians from adult mental health services, 467 from Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHS) and Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) services and 318 primary care clinicians across the UK completed an online survey. The survey gathered data on attitudes toward working with people who hear voices, stigmatizing beliefs, and self-perceived confidence in voice-related practices (screening for, discussing and providing psychoeducation material about voice-hearing). Responses from youth mental health clinicians were compared with professionals working in adult mental health and primary care settings. This study also aimed to identify what youth mental health clinicians believe about assessing distressing voices in adolescents and how beliefs predict assessment intention.
Compared to other clinicians, EIP clinicians reported the most positive job attitudes toward working with young voice-hearers, the highest self-efficacy in voice-hearing practices, and similar levels of stigma. Job attitudes, perceived behavioral control and subjective norms explained a large part of the influences on clinician's intention to assess voice-hearing across all service groups. In both CAMHS and EIP services, specific beliefs relating to the usefulness of assessing voice-hearing, and perceived social pressure from specialist mental health professionals regarding assessment practices predicted clinician intention.
Clinicians' intention to assess distressing voices in young people was moderately high, with attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control explaining a large part of its variance. Specifically in youth mental health services, promoting a working culture that encourages opening and engaging in discussions about voice-hearing between clinicians, and with young people, and introducing supportive assessment and psychoeducation material about voice-hearing could encourage conversations about voices.
Young women who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET) experience poorer health and social outcomes compared to non-NEET young women and to NEET young men, especially in deprived areas ...with intersecting inequalities. The evidence on effective public health approaches is scarce. Interventions that target hope, which NEET young women notably lack, offer a promising theory-driven and intuitive means to prevent mental health problems and improve social outcomes. Hope can be defined as a goal-focused mindset comprising self-agency (motivation and self-belief) and pathways (identifying routes to achieving goals). Hope is implicated in a variety of evidence-based psychosocial interventions for young people, but is not directly targeted by existing prevention programmes for NEET populations. The current study used a phased qualitative research design and participatory methods to model a hope-focused intervention for NEET young women. Phase 1 investigated population needs and intervention parameters through semi-structured interviews with 28 key informants living or working in disadvantaged coastal communities in South-East England. The sample comprised eight NEET young women, four family members, and 16 practitioners from relevant support organisations. Phase 2 refined intervention parameters and outcomes through co-design sessions with four NEET young women, followed by a theory of change workshop with 10 practitioners. The resulting intervention model is articulated as a mentor-supported, in-person psychosocial intervention that builds hope by enhancing positive sense of self and time spent in meaningful activities, before explicitly teaching the skills needed to identify, set, and pursue personally meaningful goals.
Abstract
Background
Data from studies with undergraduate and postgraduate taught students suggest that they are at an increased risk of having mental health problems, compared to the general ...population. By contrast, the literature on doctoral researchers (DRs) is far more disparate and unclear. There is a need to bring together current findings and identify what questions still need to be answered.
Methods
We conducted a mixed methods systematic review to summarise the research on doctoral researchers’ (DRs) mental health. Our search revealed 52 articles that were included in this review.
Results
The results of our meta-analysis found that DRs reported significantly higher stress levels compared with population norm data. Using meta-analyses and meta-synthesis techniques, we found the risk factors with the strongest evidence base were isolation and identifying as female. Social support, viewing the PhD as a process, a positive student-supervisor relationship and engaging in self-care were the most well-established protective factors.
Conclusions
We have identified a critical need for researchers to better coordinate data collection to aid future reviews and allow for clinically meaningful conclusions to be drawn.
Systematic review registration
PROSPERO registration CRD42018092867
Suicidal ideation is an increasingly common presentation to the paediatric emergency department. The presence of suicidal ideation is linked to acute psychiatric hospital admission and increased risk ...of suicide. The paediatric emergency department plays a critical role in reducing risk of suicide, strengthening protective factors and encouraging patient engagement with ongoing care.
This rapid review aims to synthesise evidence on interventions that can be implemented in the paediatric emergency department for children and adolescents presenting with suicidal ideation.
Six electronic databases were searched for studies published since January 2010: PubMed, Web of Science, Medline, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Cochrane. Outcomes of interest included suicidal ideation, engagement with out-patient services, incidence of depressive symptoms, hopelessness, family empowerment, hospital admission and feasibility of interventions. The Cochrane risk-of-bias tool was used to evaluate the quality of studies.
Six studies of paediatric emergency department-initiated family-based (n = 4) and motivational interviewing interventions (n = 2) were narratively reviewed. The studies were mainly small and of varying quality. The evidence synthesis suggests that both types of intervention, when initiated by the paediatric emergency department, reduce suicidal ideation and improve patient engagement with out-patient services. Family-based interventions also showed a reduction in suicidality and improvement in family empowerment, hopelessness and depressive symptoms.
Paediatric emergency department-initiated interventions are crucial to reduce suicidal ideation and risk of suicide, and to enhance ongoing engagement with out-patient services. Further research is needed; however, family-based and motivational interviewing interventions could be feasibly and effectively implemented in the paediatric emergency department setting.
Background
Levels of mental health stigma experienced can vary as a function of the presenting mental health problem (e.g. diagnosis and symptoms). However, these studies are limited because they ...exclusively use pairwise comparisons. A more comprehensive examination of diagnosis-specific stigma is needed.
Aims
The aim of our study was to determine how levels of mental health stigma vary in relation to a number of psychiatric diagnoses, and identify what attributions predict levels of diagnosis-specific stigma.
Method
We conducted an online survey with members of the public. Participants were assessed in terms of how much stigma they had, and their attributions toward, nine different case vignettes, each describing a different mental health diagnosis.
Results
We recruited 665 participants. After controlling for social desirability bias and key demographic variables, we found that mental health stigma varied in relation to psychiatric diagnosis. Schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder were the most stigmatised diagnoses, and depression, generalised anxiety disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder were the least stigmatised diagnoses. No single attribution predicted stigma across diagnoses, but fear was the most consistent predictor.
Conclusions
Assessing mental health stigma as a single concept masks significant between-diagnosis variability. Anti-stigma campaigns are likely to be most successful if they target fearful attributions.
Young people with social disability and non-psychotic severe and complex mental health problems are an important group. Without intervention, their social problems can persist and have large economic ...and personal costs. Thus, more effective evidence-based interventions are needed. Social recovery therapy is an individual therapy incorporating cognitive-behavioural techniques to increase structured activity as guided by the participant's goals.
This trial aimed to test whether or not social recovery therapy provided as an adjunct to enhanced standard care over 9 months is superior to enhanced standard care alone. Enhanced standard care aimed to provide an optimal combination of existing evidence-based interventions.
A pragmatic, single-blind, superiority randomised controlled trial was conducted in three UK centres: Sussex, Manchester and East Anglia. Participants were aged 16-25 years with persistent social disability, defined as < 30 hours per week of structured activity with social impairment for at least 6 months. Additionally, participants had severe and complex mental health problems, defined as at-risk mental states for psychosis or non-psychotic severe and complex mental health problems indicated by a Global Assessment of Functioning score ≤ 50 persisting for ≥ 6 months. Two hundred and seventy participants were randomised 1 : 1 to either enhanced standard care plus social recovery therapy or enhanced standard care alone. The primary outcome was weekly hours spent in structured activity at 15 months post randomisation. Secondary outcomes included subthreshold psychotic, negative and mood symptoms. Outcomes were collected at 9 and 15 months post randomisation, with maintenance assessed at 24 months.
The addition of social recovery therapy did not significantly increase weekly hours in structured activity at 15 months (primary outcome treatment effect -4.44, 95% confidence interval -10.19 to 1.31). We found no evidence of significant differences between conditions in secondary outcomes at 15 months: Social Anxiety Interaction Scale treatment effect -0.45, 95% confidence interval -4.84 to 3.95; Beck Depression Inventory-II treatment effect -0.32, 95% confidence interval -4.06 to 3.42; Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States symptom severity 0.29, 95% confidence interval -4.35 to 4.94; or distress treatment effect 4.09, 95% confidence interval -3.52 to 11.70. Greater Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States for psychosis scores reflect greater symptom severity. We found no evidence of significant differences at 9 or 24 months. Social recovery therapy was not estimated to be cost-effective. The key limitation was that missingness of data was consistently greater in the enhanced standard care-alone arm (9% primary outcome and 15% secondary outcome missingness of data) than in the social recovery therapy plus enhanced standard care arm (4% primary outcome and 9% secondary outcome missingness of data) at 15 months.
We found no evidence for the clinical superiority or cost-effectiveness of social recovery therapy as an adjunct to enhanced standard care. Both arms made large improvements in primary and secondary outcomes. Enhanced standard care included a comprehensive combination of evidence-based pharmacological, psychotherapeutic and psychosocial interventions. Some results favoured enhanced standard care but the majority were not statistically significant. Future work should identify factors associated with the optimal delivery of the combinations of interventions that underpin better outcomes in this often-neglected clinical group.
Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN47998710.
This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment programme and will be published in full in
Vol. 25, No. 70. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.
Background
Emerging evidence demonstrates that postgraduate researchers have high rates of mental health problems. These problems are distressing, affect PhD studies, and have longer-term potential ...effects beyond the duration of the PhD. Yet large-scale studies of multiple risk and protective factors are rare.
Aims
We aimed to test the predictive validity of a comprehensive set of potential determinants of mental health symptoms (depression, anxiety and suicidality) among postgraduate researchers in the UK, including personal, study-related, and supervision characteristics.
Method
We used regression models applied to data obtained from a national online survey of UK postgraduate researchers (Understanding DOCtoral researcher mental health; U-DOC, 2018–2019) to test predictors of mental health symptoms.
Results
These models show that postgraduate researchers' mental health symptoms are predicted by demographic, occupational, psychological, social and supervisory relationship factors. Greater perfectionism, more impostor thoughts and reduced supervisory communion most strongly and consistently predict mental health symptoms.
Conclusions
Institutions training postgraduate researchers should focus interventions intended to improve depression, anxiety, suicidality, on self-beliefs and social connectedness. Moreover, supervisors should be provided with training that improves the degree of agency, and especially communion, in the relationships they form with postgraduate researchers.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends that Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for psychosis (CBTp) is offered to all patients with a psychosis diagnosis. However, only a ...minority of psychosis patients in England and Wales are offered CBTp. This is attributable, in part, to the resource-intensive nature of CBTp. One response to this problem has been the development of CBTp in brief formats that are targeted at a single symptom and the mechanisms that maintain distress. We have developed a brief form of CBTp for distressing voices and reported preliminary evidence for its effectiveness when delivered by highly trained therapists (clinical psychologists). This study will investigate the delivery of this intervention by a cost-effective workforce of assistant psychologists following a brief training and evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of conducting a future, definitive, randomised controlled trial (RCT).
This is a feasibility study for a pragmatic, three-arm, parallel-group, superiority 1:1:1 RCT comparing a Guided self-help CBT intervention for voices and treatment as usual (GiVE) to Supportive Counselling and treatment as usual (SC) to treatment as usual alone (TAU), recruiting across two sites, with blinded post-treatment and follow-up assessments. A process evaluation will quantitatively and qualitatively explore stakeholder experience.
Expected outcomes will include an assessment of the feasibility of conducting a definitive RCT, and data to inform the calculation of its sample size. If evidence from a subsequent, fully powered RCT suggests that GiVE is clinically and cost-effective when delivered by briefly trained assistant psychologists, CBTp offered in these less resource-intensive forms has the potential to generate benefits for individual patients (reduced distress, enhanced recovery and enhanced quality of life), service-level patient benefit (increased access to evidence-based psychological therapies) and economic benefits to the NHS (in terms of the reduced use of mental health inpatient services).
Current Controlled Trials, ISRCTN registration number: 16166070. Registered on 5 February 2019.
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