Motivational Interviewing for Patients With Acute Psychosis

Summary

Psychotic disorders are associated with high levels of distress, limitations in quality of life, and a high risk of chronification for those affected. The treatment guidelines recommend combining the pharmacological treatment with psychotherapeutic methods, starting already in the acute phase. At the same time, there is little research evidence on which mechanisms of psychotherapy are most effective and best feasible for the acute setting. Therefore, the aim is to run a pilot study to test specific psychotherapeutic interventions for patients with psychosis on acute psychiatric wards.

The method of "Motivational Interviewing" is a well-known and established interviewing technique, which originally comes from the treatment of addictive disorders. In this study, it is used to strengthen the therapeutic alliance between patient and practitioner already in the acute phase of the disease, to increase adherence, and thus to achieve the overall goal of better integrating patients with pronounced positive symptoms into treatment. This appears to be extremely important, as non-adherence represents one of the greatest risks for chronification of the disease. The intervention will subsequently be evaluated in comparison to "treatment as usual".

Conditions

• Psychosis
• Schizophrenia

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Motivational Interviewing

In our study intervention, patients should receive four session of motivational interviewing (MI). Throughout the MI sessions, interviewers use common MI techniques including open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, summaries, asking permission, expressing empathy, supporting self-efficacy, etc. Interviewers are clinical psychologists who received MI training immediately prior to the study.

BEHAVIORAL

Supportive conversations

In the control intervention patients should also be given four sessions, in which no MI techniques take place. They will be carried out in the sense of supportive conversations (i. e. conver-sations that do not follow a specific psychotherapy concept). Since we want to check whether the patients really benefit from the specific intervention and not from getting more speaking time, the patient in the control group will also be given four conver-sations. It is known that supportive conversations can have a certain effect on the well-being and recovery process of patients, as the therapeutic relationship, i.e. appreciation, attention and/or attention, is an important efficacy factor (e. g. Grawe, 1995).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Psychiatric University Hospital, Zurich

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Philipp Homan, Prof. · University of Zurich

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

65 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-03-15

Primary Completion

2023-12-31

Completion

2023-12-31

Countries

• Switzerland

Study Locations