Self-harm contagion in psychiatric inpatients
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Contagion of self-harming behaviour in psychiatric inpatients: Identifying the endogenous social effect
IRAS ID
273278
Contact name
samuel altmann
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford / Clinical Trials and Research Governance
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
The aim of this study is to quantitatively investigate this phenomenon of contagion of self-harming behaviour in a psychiatric inpatient setting. This will involve estimating the magnitude of the contagion effect – for every incident of self-harm, how many more incidents do we expect to be caused by the contagion? To assess this, we will perform a retrospective analysis on de-identified incident data that has already been collected by Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust concerning self-harm incidents on psychiatric inpatient wards. Data will be included for all patients that have received inpatient psychiatric care from 04/01/2015 to the present date. We will only exclude patients older than 65 and those with organic mental health issues. This is to ensure that the results are generalisable to a wider range of psychiatric inpatients.
In addition to isolating this effect for broad self-harming behaviour, we will investigate the factors influencing the social effect. We will investigate which factors predict whether a patient is likely to be very influential or particularly influenced. This analysis will include factors such as patient demographics, medical diagnoses, and type of unit. Furthermore, we will investigate heterogeneity of effects by self-harm method, allowing the contagious effect to differ by type. This is of further interest given that analysis into different methods of self-harming can speak to the mechanism by which contagion takes place. This question is highly relevant for suggesting how the effect of contagion might be diminished in future. For this analysis we will also look at various measures introduced by the individual units to reduce self-harm, investigating whether these measures similarly affect the degree of contagion.REC name
N/A
REC reference
N/A