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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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.
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