Managing mental health after therapy
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Understanding how patients recently discharged from psychological therapy manage their mental health problems
IRAS ID
171400
Contact name
Claire Howarth
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, 17 days
Research summary
The research is a student project for the award of Doctorate of Clinical Psychology. The research aims to gain a qualitative understanding of how clients use the resources of psychotherapy to manage their mental health problems once discharged from psychological therapy and how they incorporate them into their daily life.
At present there is little understanding of what people recently discharged from psychological therapy take from therapy in order to manage their mental health problems. It is essential to gain an understanding of this to improve the long term effectiveness of psychological therapy, to enable people to maintain improvements, to reduce the likelihood of relapse and to improve quality of life. The wider implications are in reduced costs to the NHS and the economy. This research also takes a co-production approach (Gillard, Simons, Turner, Lucock & Edwards, 2012) in which service users experience will add to the body of knowledge to understand how improvements can be maintained following therapy.
The age range of participants will be 18-65 years. Participants will have had a planned discharge from therapy within the past 3-6 months at secondary care level across multiple bases of the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Trust Adult Psychological Therapies Service (APTS). Participants will be invited if they believe they have benefited from therapy and completed a clinical outcomes in routine evaluation (CORE) questionnaire when they began therapy. Participants must have attended a minimum of 6 sessions, which can include an assessment sessions.
Participants will take part in an interview lasting approximately 60 minutes where they will be asked how the therapy they had is helpful to them at present. They will then complete a further CORE questionnaire. Interviews will then be analysed using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006).
REC name
North of Scotland Research Ethics Committee 1
REC reference
15/NS/0097
Date of REC Opinion
9 Sep 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion