View clinical trials related to Schizo Affective Disorder.
Filter by:There is increasing awareness of the importance of providing mental health services and support that promote a recovery-oriented and human rights-based approach. A mental health service system that is guided by a rehabilitation and recovery perspective places emphasis on treating the consequences of the illness rather than just the illness "per se", and on empowering people to regain control of their identity and life, and to have hope for the future. Within this philosophy, mental health policies in several countries advocate for the introduction of peer workers in mental health services, people with lived experience of mental health issues and recovery, who are employed to use their lived experience to support those who access mental health services. However, more effectiveness and implementation research is needed. Evidence also suggests that the period following hospital discharge is of high risk of treatment dropout for people with serious mental illness, thus interrupting their recovery process. Therefore, this vulnerable population may particularly benefit from more targeted interventions during this transitional period. The research project will conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and implementation of the Critical Time Intervention-Peer Support model, a recovery-oriented based model for people with serious mental illness discharged from inpatient psychiatric treatment facilities in Portugal. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) will be conducted in three psychiatric services in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area and their catchment areas. People with diagnoses of psychotic disorders discharged from inpatient psychiatric treatment facilities will be recruited and randomly divided into CTI-PS intervention or usual care. Those allocated to the intervention group will additionally receive CTI-PS rather than usual care alone over a 9-month period. Outcomes at baseline, 9- and 18-months will be analyzed by multilevel models, considering the observations clustered within sites. Longitudinal analyses will be used to examine trends over time of the outcomes of interest. The implementation of the CTI-PS model will introduce a novel approach to community mental health care that has not yet been tried in Portugal. This study aims to explore to what extent this intervention can be effective and implemented in countries with the characteristics of Portugal. Additionally, the proposed research aims to contribute to the global knowledge about peer interventions by investigating whether the CTI model maintains its effectiveness using peers.
People with psychotic disorders experience a high level of functional disability, and a major contributor to this disability is introspective accuracy, which is defined as inaccurate judgements of one's abilities and performance on tasks. Yet, no intervention has directly targeted introspective accuracy for psychotic illnesses. This trial will evaluate a new intervention, called iTEST, that uses mobile devices to train people with psychotic disorders to improve introspective accuracy and, ultimately, functional outcomes
The purpose of this study is to perform a practice-based research project designed to assess whether cognition and motivated behavior in early psychosis can be addressed as key treatment goals within real-world settings by using a 12-week mobile intervention program. Participants who are receiving care at coordinated specialty care (CSC) early psychosis clinics across the United States will be recruited to participate in this study. A qualifying CSC program will provide comprehensive clinical services such as psychotherapy, medication management, psychoeducation, and work or education support. This study will be conducted remotely, and participants can participate at home with their own electronic devices. The aim of this study is to investigate a well-defined 12-week mobile intervention program specifically designed to target cognitive functioning and motivated behavior for individuals with early psychosis. Participants will complete a screening interview which will include diagnosis and symptom ratings, neurocognitive assessment, and self-reports of symptoms, behavior, and functioning. Then participants will be randomized to receive the 12-week mobile intervention, or an active control of treatment as usual. The investigators will test for differences in the clinical trajectories after training, and at two follow up appointments at 6 and 12 months post-training.
This study aims to provide an evidence-based behavioral intervention to reduce violent behavior for individuals experiencing early psychosis.
The purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between psychotic symptoms and social functioning in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Our goal is to determine whether stimulating the brain using transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) can improve symptoms and daily functioning.
The goal of this clinical trial is to learn about how a digital training platform can enhance implementation and effectiveness of a validated mHealth system, called FOCUS, in people with serious mental illness. The main question this research aims to answer is whether patients obtain similar outcomes to previous FOCUS studies when using FOCUS with clinicians trained on a newly developed digital training platform. Participants will be asked to use the FOCUS smartphone application and receive mobile health coaching from clinicians who have been trained using the digital training platform.
The purpose of this study is to examine state representation in individuals aged 15-40 who have been diagnosed with a psychotic illness, as well as young adults who do not have a psychiatric diagnosis. State Representation is our ability to process information about our surroundings. The investigators will complete some observational tests as well as a cognitive training clinical trial.
Mania is a core symptom of bipolar disorder involving periods of euphoria. Decreased inhibitory control, increased risk-taking behaviors, and aberrant reward processing are some of the more recognized symptoms of bipolar disorder and are included in the diagnostic criteria for mania. Current drug therapies for mania are frequently intolerable, ineffective, and carry significant risk for side effects. Presently there are no neurobiologically informed therapies that treat or prevent mania. However, using a newly validated technique termed lesion network mapping, researchers demonstrated that focal brain lesions having a causal role in the development of mania in people without a psychiatric history can occur in different brain locations, such as the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and right inferior temporal gyrus (ITG). This lesion network evidence converges with existing cross-sectional and longitudinal observations in bipolar mania that have identified specific disruptions in network communication between the amygdala and ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex. The OFC is associated with inhibitory control, risk-taking behavior, and reward learning which are major components of bipolar mania. Thus, the association between OFC with mania symptoms, inhibitory control, risk-taking behavior, and reward processing suggests that this region could be targeted using non-invasive brain stimulation.
This study uses a noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to study how hallucinations work in schizophrenia. TMS is a noninvasive way of stimulating the brain, using a magnetic field to change activity in the brain. The magnetic field is produced by a coil that is held next to the scalp. In this study the investigators will be stimulating the brain to learn more about how TMS might improve these symptoms of schizophrenia.
Patients affected by schizophrenia often present significant deficits in various aspects of social cognition, such as social perception, recognition of one's own and other people's emotional state and the theory of mind. Recent studies investigated the correlation between social cognition and real-life functioning, reporting that greater social cognition deficits determine worse social and occupational functioning in real-life. Therefore, social cognition deficits represent an important target both in therapeutic and rehabilitative treatment in patients with psychotic conditions, especially in the early phases of the disease. Our research group has implemented a new individualized rehabilitation programme for social cognition: the Social Cognition Individualized Activities Lab, SoCIAL. The pivotal study showed that this programme improves specifically social cognition abilities, even when compared to a standardised and validated rehabilitation programme such as the Social Skills And Neurocognitive Individualized Training (SSANIT). However, the improvement in social cognition did not translate in improvement in real-life functioning. Recently, another key aspect that plays a role in quality of life and real life functioning in people with schizophrenia has emerged, the narrative abilities. Available data confirm that this variable has a strong impact on social functioning and quality of life in patients with schizophrenia. Taking into account the above evidence, our group decided to implement a new version of the social cognitive remediation programme in order to overcome the limitations found during its pivotal study. The new SoCIAL programme is characterized by specific modules for training of social cognition and narrative abilities in patients with schizophrenia. The efficacy of this programme, compared to treatment as usual, in individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder will be assessed. The generalization of improvement to real-life functioning domains will also be evaluated in completers and in the intent-to-treat sample.