Evaluating the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of the 'strengthening families, strengthening communities' group-based parenting programme: study protocol and initial insights.

Background: Up to 20% of UK children experience socio-emotional difficulties which can have serious implications for themselves, their families and society. Stark socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in children's well-being exist. Supporting parents to develop effective parenting skills is an important preventive strategy in reducing inequalities.

Patient and companion shared decision making and satisfaction with decisions about starting cholinesterase medication at dementia diagnosis.

Background: there is little research on how people with dementia are involved in treatment decisions at diagnosis.

Objective: to measure shared decision making when starting cholinesterase inhibitors, investigate associations with contextual factors and explore satisfaction and experience of the diagnostic meeting.

Setting: nine UK memory clinics in two geographical locations.

Discontinuing financial incentives for adherence to antipsychotic depot medication: long-term outcomes of a cluster randomised controlled trial.

Objectives: In a cluster randomised controlled trial, offering financial incentives improved adherence to antipsychotic depot medication over a 1-year period. Yet, it is unknown whether this positive effect is sustained once the incentives stop.

Methods And Analyses: Patients in the intervention and control group were followed up for 2 years after the intervention.

Effectiveness of one-to-one volunteer support for patients with psychosis: protocol of a randomised controlled trial.

Introduction: Social isolation is common in patients with psychosis and associated with a number of negative outcomes. Programmes in which volunteers provide one-to-one support-often referred to as befriending-have been reputed to achieve favourable outcomes. However, trial-based evidence for their effectiveness is limited.

The effect of financial incentives on adherence to antipsychotic depot medication: does it change over time?

Objective: A recent cluster-randomized controlled trial found that offering financial incentives improves adherence to long-acting injectable antipsychotics (LAIs). The present study investigates whether the impact of incentives diminishes over time and whether the improvement in adherence is linked to the amount of incentives offered.

Method: Seventy-three teams with 141 patients with psychotic disorders (using ICD-10) were randomized to the intervention or control group.

The inter-relationship between mood, self-esteem and response styles in adolescent offspring of bipolar parents: an experience sampling study.

The response styles theory of depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991) proposes three main strategies individuals employ in response to low mood: rumination, active coping (distraction and problem-solving) and risk taking. Although recent research has suggested this theory has utility in understanding the symptoms of bipolar disorder (BD), the role of these processes in conferring vulnerability to the condition is poorly understood. Twenty-three adolescent children of patients with BD and 25 offspring of well parents completed the Experience Sampling Method (ESM; Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, 1987) diary for six days.

Cognitive vulnerability to bipolar disorder in offspring of parents with bipolar disorder.

Background: Bipolar disorder is a highly heritable illness, with a positive family history robustly predictive of its onset. It follows that studying biological children of parents with bipolar disorder may provide information about developmental pathways to the disorder. Moreover, such studies may serve as a useful test of theories that attribute a causal role in the development of mood disorders to psychological processes.

Discrepancies between explicit and implicit self-esteem and their relationship to symptoms of depression and mania.

Objectives: Self-esteem is a key feature of bipolar symptomatology. However, so far no study has examined the interaction between explicit and implicit self-esteem in individuals vulnerable to bipolar disorder.

Design: Cross-sectional design was employed.

The dynamics of mood and coping in bipolar disorder: longitudinal investigations of the inter-relationship between affect, self-esteem and response styles.

Background: Previous research has suggested that the way bipolar patients respond to depressive mood impacts on the future course of the illness, with rumination prolonging depression and risk-taking possibly triggering hypomania. However, the relationship over time between variables such as mood, self-esteem, and response style to negative affect is complex and has not been directly examined in any previous study--an important limitation, which the present study seeks to address.

Methods: In order to maximize ecological validity, individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder (N = 48) reported mood, self-esteem and response styles to depression, together with contextual information, up to 60 times over a period of six days, using experience sampling diaries.