Community families: A qualitative study of families who volunteer to support persons with severe mental illness.

Int J Soc Psychiatry

1 DEFACTUM - Public Health & Health Services Research, Aarhus, Denmark.

Published: February 2017

Background: Social interventions targeted at people with severe mental illness (SMI) often include volunteers. Volunteers' perspectives are important for these interventions to work. This article investigates the experiences of volunteer families who befriend a person with SMI.

Material: Qualitative interviews with members of volunteer families.

Discussion: The families were motivated by helping a vulnerable person and by engaging in a rewarding relationship. However, the families often doubted their personal judgement and relied on mental health workers to act as safety net.

Conclusion: The volunteer involvement is meaningful but also challenging. The families value professional support.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0020764016674346DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

severe mental
8
mental illness
8
families
5
community families
4
families qualitative
4
qualitative study
4
study families
4
volunteer
4
families volunteer
4
volunteer support
4

Similar Publications

Cognitive training is a promising intervention for psychological distress; however, its effectiveness has yielded inconsistent outcomes across studies. This research is a pre-registered individual-level meta-analysis to identify factors contributing to cognitive training efficacy for anxiety and depression symptoms. Machine learning methods, alongside traditional statistical approaches, were employed to analyze 22 datasets with 1544 participants who underwent working memory training, attention bias modification, interpretation bias modification, or inhibitory control training.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Unhealthy substance use (USU) is common and ranges from use above guideline-recommended levels to severe substance use disorder. USU results in substantial morbidity and mortality yet primary care practices rarely systematically screen, diagnose, and treat USU. Supporting Unhealthy Substance use care Through a whole person Approach and user centered INtegration into primary care (SUSTAIN) tests whether the implementation of a co-designed change package for USU improves patient function.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Salivary cortisol measures across the clinical stages of psychosis: An individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis.

Psychoneuroendocrinology

January 2025

King's College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, Department of Psychosis Studies, London, UK; National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London, London, UK; Division of Insurance Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Electronic address:

Background: Studies of salivary cortisol levels in psychosis have yielded inconsistent findings, which may be attributable to heterogeneity in cortisol measurement, illness stage, and approaches to dealing with sampling factors and potential confounders. To address these issues, we performed an individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis comparing individuals at different stages of psychosis to controls using five different salivary cortisol measures and explored potential effect modifiers.

Methods: Salivary cortisol data from five London-based cohorts were used to derive the cortisol awakening response, total daytime cortisol output, basal cortisol, and diurnal slope measures (wake-to-evening and peak-to-evening).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Evidence-based digital therapeutics represent a new treatment modality in mental health, potentially providing cost-efficient, accessible means of augmenting existing treatments for chronic mental illnesses. CT-155/BI 3972080 is a prescription digital therapeutic under development as an adjunct to standard of care treatments for patients 18 years of age and older with experiential negative symptoms (ENS) of schizophrenia. Individual components of CT-155/BI 3972080 are designed based on the underlying principles of face-to-face treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: An effective primary treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in children and adolescents as well as adults is exposure and response prevention (ERP), a form of intervention in the context of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Despite strong evidence supporting the efficacy and effectiveness of ERP from studies in research and real-world settings, its clinical use remains limited. This underuse is often attributed to access barriers such as the scarcity of properly trained therapists, geographical constraints, and costs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!