We know from decades of research that caregiver involvement, including family and non‐family members, in a patient’s mental health treatment can make a tremendous difference in the trajectory of their loved one’s life by supporting recovery, reducing relapse, and decreasing mental health crises. Family and caregiver involvement also decreases provider stress, improves caregiver well-being, and can lead to lower patient healthcare utilization and costs. But despite their importance, many family members and caregivers struggle to engage in the kind of support that can benefit the patient and themselves. They often lack access to education, resources, or skills to step into this critical role despite a desire to help. Our initiative intends to develop a pilot Family and Caregiver Training and Support Program (FACTS) program that aims to decrease barriers to caregiver involvement and improve caregiver support.
Our team will develop online training that will include an orientation to having a loved one who is psychiatrically hospitalized and will teach families and caregivers practical communication skills while their loved one is in our care. These topics would be relevant regardless of a patient’s diagnosis and will be adapted from existing evidence‐based models. The pilot will be tested with caregivers of patients hospitalized at the new Center for Behavioral Health and Learning and we will proactively integrate input and feedback from participants to inform program improvements along the way.
We will also build a public-facing website to host FACTS training materials as well as mental health information and resources that we will curate for accuracy and reliability. We expect the FACTS pilot content will serve as a foundation for additional offerings that will include diagnosis specific skills trainings as well opportunities for in-person sessions and Family Peer Support programming.
Many people love someone who uses substances in a harmful way and want to help that person. Family members and friends often are key supports in people seeking and staying engaged in treatment and services. At the same time, family members and friends feel like they lack the skills or support to help their loved one effectively. This may be especially true for opioid use disorder, where the strongest evidence for treatment is for medication for opioid use disorder, but families and friends don’t know how to help their loved ones access and stay on these life-saving medications.
Our study will talk with people who are getting medications to treat opioid use disorder and ask about the involvement of their family members and friends in their lives and recovery. We will reach out to these key supports to ask how they would want to do a group-based program to help them develop skills and knowledge to support their loved one’s care. These groups would be delivered by nurses with specialized training in opioid use disorder and treatment. Group content will be based on an existing, evidence-based treatment designed for family members and will help people understand the role of medications in treating opioid use disorder and teach skills to support their loved one.
Medication nonadherence is common among patients with serious mental illness, including schizophrenia. The use of long-acting injectable antipsychotics (LAIAs) for schizophrenia is an evidence-based practice that improves medication adherence, decreases symptomatic recurrence and reduces hospitalizations. However, patients and clinicians often face several challenges in access and coordination resulting in the underutilization of LAIAs in care.
Administering LAIAs at community pharmacies could potentially increase accessibility, reduce barriers for treatment and improve patient outcomes. This project aims to assess the fit or compatibility of LAIA administration in community pharmacies. We will survey community pharmacy staff and behavioral healthcare providers in Washington State to assess the acceptability, appropriateness and feasibility of LAIA administration in community pharmacies. If LAIA administration at community pharmacies is found to be a good fit, the next steps will be to develop strategies to support implementation. A scalable and adoptable model for administering LAIAs at community pharmacies could have substantial impacts on public health through increasing access to treatment and expanding behavioral health services at the community level and in rural areas.
Individuals with serious persistent mental illness (SPMI) and their families and communities face significant challenges during psychiatric hospitalization. Persons with SPMI and their supporters express a need for enhanced communication from their behavioral healthcare teams during these pivotal periods of time where symptoms are new or intense. Yet, a substantial number of mental health providers have limited training in communicating complex topics such as diagnosis and prognosis. This can lead to providers avoiding essential conversations; individuals with SPMI can be unheard or excluded from participating in treatment planning.
This educational initiative seeks to craft an innovative curriculum for psychiatry residents focused on person-centered communication skills. Drawing from proven communication training frameworks within palliative care, the training will equip residents with strategies such as: utilizing person-centered language; conducting family meetings; delivering diagnostic and prognostic information. The curriculum will be developed with guidance from individuals with lived experienced of SPMI and their supporters. Moreover, the project will deliver a dedicated online portal featuring educational materials, recorded presentations, role-play scripts, and communication guides. Tools, such as self-assessment and evaluation rubrics, will be created to evaluate efficacy.
Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), the purposeful, direct damage of one’s body without the intent to die, is a pervasive public health concern with clinically significant long-term consequences. Mindfulness – a core skill in DBT, an evidence-based treatment for NSSI, is designed to target emotion dysregulation and rumination and may be particularly relevant due to the proliferation of digital mindfulness interventions in recent years. To this end, the goal of this study is to expand the use of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and to develop and evaluate a program of habit-formation strategies (e.g., SMART-goal setting, reinforcement scheduling) to boost user engagement and treatment effects of DMI. Following a 1-week EMA baseline period, participants (N=40) will be randomized to either TAU (Mindfulness only) or Experimental (Mindfulness + Behavioral Prompts) conditions for a 4-week intervention EMA period.
The purpose of this project is to enhance the usefulness and cultural relevance of the Spanish version of the PMQ-9, a questionnaire that assesses manic symptoms in individuals with bipolar disorder.
People with psychosis are admitted more frequently to inpatient psychiatric units and have a longer length of stay once admitted compared to those with other psychiatric conditions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for psychosis (CBTp) reduces hospital admissions when delivered in outpatient settings and facilitates quicker symptom improvement when delivered in inpatient settings. Despite this, implementation of CBTp is exceedingly rare in practice. The purpose of this study is to test the feasibility and acceptability of a conjoint single-session CBTp intervention + FOCUS digital mental health intervention for people with psychosis admitted to inpatient psychiatry units.
Though the focus of most research on dementia is the pathogenesis of cognitive deficits, neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) are identified in >90% of those afflicted, resulting in hastened cognitive decline, worsened general health, reduced patient and caregiver quality of life, sooner institutionalization, and increased mortality. Affective symptoms, including depression, are the most common NPS in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), and are present in over half of patients. Using the in-depth clinical phenotyping of participants in the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center (NACC) with matched plasma samples, we propose to determine the correlation between select cytokines/chemokines and T-cell differentiation with depression in dementia.
