Psychologist specialized in Psychiatry, PhD
Vibeke Fuglsang Bliksted
Research Unit of Psychiatry, Department of Clinical Research, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southern Denmark and Department of Psychiatry Odense, Mental Health Services, Region of Southern Denmark
| Project management | ||
| Project status | Open | |
| Data collection dates | ||
| Start | 30.01.2025 | |
| End | 31.12.2028 | |
The ECHO study: Compassion-focused therapy for young voice hearers and their caregivers
Short summary
The purpose of the project is to develop and test psychotherapy that can be quickly implemented in clinical work with young voice hearers. The treatment is based on Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), a branch of cognitive therapy that has been effectively used with adults diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Rationale
In the current research project, a manualized CFT manual is being tested, which at the same time also involves the patient's primary caregivers in the treatment. In addition to traditional CFT, the treatment is expanded with an intervention where an audio file is recorded with content corresponding to the adolescent's voice hearing. The primary caregivers are invited to listen to the audio file while participating in a therapy session. This will help improve the caregivers understanding of the young person's experiences and challenges. The treatment is transdiagnostic and consists of 10 sessions, which are considered to be a realistic duration in relation to clinical resources. This is a feasibility study, where we will investigate the clinical feasibility of a ten session CFT treatment, where primary caregivers are closely involved in the treatment of young voice hearers. We also want to investigate the feasibility of data collection, including amount of e.g. clinical rating scales and achieve knowledge of which specific treatment outcomes are targeted with this CFT manualized treatment. Finally, we collect evaluations from the young voice hearers and their primary caregivers with regard to the treatment. By comparing young voice hearers to patients with first-episode schizophrenia, we hope to be able to identify potential subgroups of young voice hearers which might have a larger need for further preventive psychiatric treatment. Furthermore, we will investigate the association between voice-related distress and perceived social support.
Description of the cohort
We include 60 patients with voice hearing aged 13-18 years and 20 patients with newly diagnosed schizophrenia aged 18-21 years.
Data and biological material
We will collect behavioral data from psykological assements of cognition and social cognition. Furthermore, we will do clinical interviews regarding psychotic symptoms, perceived social safeness and social connectedness.