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Method of Levels for People Using Community Crisis Services

NCT05484518 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 6

Last updated 2025-12-10

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

A mental health crisis is when someone is so distressed they need urgent help from services; often because they behave in ways that poses risk to themselves or others. Crisis teams offer care in the community to support people at home rather than in hospital. Current psychological interventions offered by crisis teams tend to be short-term and mainly involve providing information about the difficulties people are experiencing and help them to develop skills, such people as problem solving. This can be useful, however providing more intensive psychological support has been much more difficult within crisis settings, as teams must use limited resources to focus on managing risk. A therapy, called Method of Levels (MOL), designed to be flexible, may be helpful to add to treatment offered by crisis services in the community.

MOL aims to help people hold their attention on a problem long enough to view it in different ways, so that they might think of new solutions. This works by helping a person to regain a sense of control in their life and feel less distressed. MOL is useful for working with lots of different issues, since therapy does not only focus on one type of problem. People also get to choose what is discussed in therapy and session structure.

Research has shown MOL can be useful for people in crisis in places such as inpatient settings. So far, no research has been conducted within the community for people in crisis. This study aims to examine if MOL can be delivered within a crisis service in a way that is helpful and acceptable to people. To do this, the investigators will offer MOL to a small number of people presenting to crisis teams and collect information on whether people take up the therapy, and their experience of receiving it.

Conditions

  • Individuals Presenting to Crisis Services

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Method of Levels Therapy

Method of Levels (MOL) is a therapy that is the direct application of Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) (Powers, 2008) which proposes that psychological distress results from a person's reduced control over important life goals. A conflict between two or more goals can occur outside of a person's awareness (Carey, Mansell \& Tai, 2014) and the achievement of one goal leaves the other incompatible goal unachievable, leading to distress (Mansell, 2012). MOL therapy aims to help people develop awareness of important goals and conflicts between them, to increase their chances of developing potential solutions. Conflict can be resolved through reorganisation; a mechanism through which random change is continuously generated until control is restored (Tai, 2016). Therapy uses a questioning style to help clients bring their attention to their problems long enough for them to restore control. In practice clients choose the number, frequency and duration of therapy sessions

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • University of Manchester

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Sara Goodier, MSc · University of Manchester

Study Design

Allocation
NA
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Model
SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2022-09-06
Primary Completion
2023-02-26
Completion
2023-03-30

Countries

  • United Kingdom

Study Locations

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Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT05484518 on ClinicalTrials.gov