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.

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

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

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Lifestyle training for schizophrenia: STEPWISE fails to make a difference

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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Preventive cognitive therapy when continuing or tapering off antidepressants

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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.

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Is Cannabidiol (CBD) an effective antipsychotic?

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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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Collaborative care for depression and physical multimorbidity: clinically and cost-effective over the long term

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Gemma Shields summarises the findings of a cluster RCT looking at the long-term clinical and cost-effectiveness of collaborative care (versus usual care) for people with mental-physical multimorbidity.

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Low dose Amisulpride for very late onset schizophrenia-like psychosis: the ATLAS study

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Elwira Lubos summarises the recent ATLAS RCT of antipsychotic treatment for very late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis, which provides evidence for the effectiveness of a very low dose of Amisulpride (100 mg).

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After the crisis: self-management and peer-support

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Jenny Collom, Maria Giorgalli and Derek Tracy welcome a new RCT published yesterday in The Lancet which demonstrates the benefits of peer-supported self-management for people discharged from a mental health crisis team.

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