Smoking cessation for people with severe mental illness? “Oh yes they can!” SCIMITAR+

stop-4036139_1280

David Shiers and Peter Byrne summarise the new SCIMITAR+ trial out today in The Lancet Psychiatry, which evaluates a bespoke smoking cessation intervention for people with severe mental illness.

[read the full story...]

Community supported discharge service for teenagers leaving psychiatric hospital

ethan-haddox-547498-unsplash

Robyn Murphy summarises an RCT that compares the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an intensive community supported discharge service versus treatment as usual for adolescents with psychiatric emergencies.

[read the full story...]

Lamotrigine for “Borderline Personality Disorder”: should we prescribe it? #BIGSPD19

charisse-kenion-1417690-unsplash

Keir Harding prepares for the #BIGSPD19 conference by reading Mike Crawford et al’s recent RCT on the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of lamotrigine in borderline personality disorder.

[read the full story...]

Advance care planning in dementia nursing homes with family carers

Josie Dixon considers a paired-cluster randomised controlled trial of an advance care planning intervention, called the Family Carer Decision Support (FCDS) intervention, undertaken by Kevin Brazil and colleagues (2018) in dementia nursing homes.

[read the full story...]

Hope for recovery: REFOCUS-PULSAR recovery training in specialist mental health care

guillaume-bourdages-477545-unsplash

Simon Bradstreet welcomes the positive findings of the REFOCUS-PULSAR trial, which evaluated recovery-oriented practice training in specialist mental health care.

[read the full story...]

Lifestyle training for schizophrenia: STEPWISE fails to make a difference

clem-onojeghuo-1169553-unsplash

Ben Janaway writes his debut elf blog on the STEPWISE RCT which is out today in the British Journal of Psychiatry: Structured lifestyle education for people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and first-episode psychosis.

[read the full story...]

A psychological victory for the domestic violence and abuse sector: the PATH trial

Young adults who reported depressive and/or suicidality symptoms in adolescence were significantly more likely to have experienced relationship violence in their romantic relationships

Emma Yapp summarises two new studies out yesterday looking at the PATH intervention (Psychological Advocacy Towards Healing), a CBT-informed psychological intervention delivered by trained domestic violence and abuse (DVA) advocates in specialist services.

[read the full story...]

Transdiagnostic and disorder-specific anxiety disorder treatments have equivalent treatment effects #TransDX2018

pawel-czerwinski-716699-unsplash

Jill Newby and Peter Norton blog an RCT on the unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders compared with diagnosis-specific protocols for anxiety disorders.

[read the full story...]

Preventive cognitive therapy when continuing or tapering off antidepressants

thomas-jorn-461490-unsplash

Linda Gask is encouraged by the findings of a new high quality RCT (the DRD study), which compares preventive cognitive therapy while tapering antidepressants versus maintenance antidepressant treatment versus their combination in the prevention of depressive relapse or recurrence.

[read the full story...]

Is Cannabidiol (CBD) an effective antipsychotic?

24281909498_a080b71a94_k

Luke Sheridan Rains publishes his debut blog on a recent multicentre RCT of Cannabidiol (CBD) as an adjunctive therapy for people with schizophrenia, which suggests that CBD had a beneficial, but modest impact on positive psychotic symptoms and severity of illness when used alongside existing antipsychotics.

[read the full story...]