Outcomes and change processes of an established family education program for carers of adults diagnosed with a serious mental health condition.

Background: Family education programs (FEPs) target caregiving-related psychological distress for carers of relatives/friends diagnosed with serious mental health conditions. While FEPs are efficacious in reducing distress, the mechanisms are not fully known. Peer group support and greater mental health knowledge are proposed to reduce carers' psychological distress by reducing stigmatising attitudes and self-blame, and strengthening carers' relationship with their relative.

A randomised controlled trial of acceptance-based cognitive behavioural therapy for command hallucinations in psychotic disorders.

Command hallucinations represent a special problem for the clinical management of psychosis. While compliance with both non-harmful and harmful commands can be problematic, sometimes in the extreme, active efforts to resist commands may also contribute to their malignancy. Previous research suggests Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) to be a useful treatment for reducing compliance with harmful command hallucinations.

Auditory hallucinations: a review of assessment tools.

Auditory hallucinations are a common and troubling symptom in psychotic disorders. We aimed to identify measures that could be used by clinicians and researchers to assess the experience of auditory hallucinations. A literature review was conducted to identify auditory hallucination measures that were developed since the last such review in 1998.

An evaluation of Well Ways, a family education programme for carers of people with a mental illness.

Objectives: Family education programmes aim to improve the well-being of carers of people with a mental illness. We evaluated the effectiveness of one such programme, Well Ways, in reducing negative care-giving consequences.

Method: We employed a pre-post design to evaluate the effectiveness of Well Ways in a naturalistic setting using a sample of carers of people with a mental illness.

The voices acceptance and action scale (VAAS): Pilot data.

Acceptance and mindfulness methods that emphasise the acceptance rather than control of symptoms are becoming more central to behavioural and cognitive therapies. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is the most developed of these methods; recent applications of ACT to psychosis suggest it to be a promising therapeutic approach. However, investigation of the mechanisms of therapy within this domain is difficult because there are no acceptance-based measures available specifically for psychotic symptoms.