Method of Levels for People Using Community Crisis Service
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Is Method of Levels (MOL) an acceptable and feasible psychological intervention for people using community-based crisis services? A case series.
IRAS ID
316034
Contact name
Sara Goodier
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Manchester
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 7 months, 26 days
Research summary
A mental health crisis is when someone is so distressed, they need urgent help from services, often because their behaviour poses risk to themselves or others. Crisis teams offer community care to support people at home and prevent hospital admissions. The literature supports the effectiveness of psychological intervention within the crisis-care pathway however, current psychological interventions offered by crisis teams tend to be short-term. For example, providing information about presenting difficulties and helping people to develop skills, such as problem solving. This can be useful for some people, however more intensive psychological support has been much more difficult to apply within crisis settings, as teams must use limited resources to focus on managing risk. A therapy, called Method of Levels (MOL) may be helpful to add to treatment offered by crisis services in the community as it is designed to be used flexibly.
MOL aims to help people hold their attention on a problem long enough to view it in differently, and generate new solutions. This works by helping a person to regain a sense of control in their life, reducing distress. MOL is useful for working with lots of different issues, since the therapy is not problem specific. People have control over what is discussed in therapy and session structure.
Research has shown MOL can be useful for people in crisis in places such as inpatient settings. So far, no research has been conducted within the community for people in crisis. This study aims to explore whether MOL can be delivered within crisis services in a way that is helpful and acceptable to people. To do this, we will offer MOL to a small number of people presenting to crisis teams and collect information on whether people take up the therapy, and their experience of receiving it.
Lay summary of study results: A mental health crisis is generally when someone’s distress increases to the point that they need urgent help from professional services; often because they behave in ways that might be a risk to themselves or another person. Crisis teams can offer this support in the community to help people receive treatment at home rather than in psychiatric hospital. Currently, psychological interventions within crisis services are aimed at supporting the person to make sense of their problems, give them information about the difficulties they are having, and work towards improving skills such as problem-solving. Although this is useful at times, it can be hard for these services to provide intensive psychological support, often because the length of time people are in their care is very short, and teams must use their limited resources to focus on risk management. For this reason, we propose that a new therapy, called Method of Levels (MOL), could be a helpful addition to treatment within community services that support people in crisis.
MOL aims to support people in focusing their attention on a difficulty long enough to view it in from different perspectives so that they might generate new potential solutions. This works by helping a person to regain a sense of control in their life and reduce their distress. MOL is suitable for working with a whole range of difficulties because therapy does not focus on just one particular problem or diagnosis – instead, it gives the individual scope to control both what is discussed in therapy and the structure of sessions.
MOL has been used successfully in clinical practice with people experiencing crises in other context such as inpatient settings, but there had been no research carried out within community services that specifically support people in crisis. To achieve this, we offered MOL to people presenting to crisis teams and collected information on the up take of this therapy, and individual experiences of receiving it.
We found that it was feasible to deliver MOL to people presenting to a community crisis service, and the descriptive data from people who received the therapy indicated that further study, with a larger sample size that allows the effectiveness of the therapy to be investigated, would be useful.REC name
East Midlands - Leicester Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/EM/0141
Date of REC Opinion
20 Jul 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion