Efficacy of a novel, accessible, transdiagnostic, compassion-focused ecological momentary intervention for enhancing resilience in help-seeking youth

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Reininghaus
• Subject Area: Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389626655

Most mental disorders first emerge in youth and, as such, contribute substantially to global disease burden. In recent years, this has become particularly evident for psychotic disorders, for which risk manifests already at a developmentally earlier stage in the form of subclinical psychotic experiences. Contemporary research further suggests that subclinical psychotic experiences often co-occur with anxiety, depression and mania, reflecting a transdiagnostic phenotype associated with a range of subsequent psychopathological outcomes. Elevated stress sensitivity is one of the most widely studied psychological mechanism underlying psychotic and affective mental health problems. Thus, screening for, and targeting stress sensitivity as an underlying mechanism of, this transdiagnostic phenotype in youth is a promising indicated and translational strategy for preventing adverse outcomes later in life. Psychological help, however, remains difficult to access for youth and has limited efficacy under real-world conditions, calling for novel approaches. Compassion-Focused Interventions (CFIs) offer a wide range of innovative therapeutic techniques for targeting stress sensitivity and enhancing emotional resilience in psychosis, especially when co-occurring with affective disturbances. What is more, the recent rapid technological advances provide a unique opportunity to deliver youth-friendly, accessible, personalized, real-time, mobile health (mHealth) interventions, most prominently, ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) that enable youth to access interventions that are tailored to what a young person needs in a given moment and context in daily life. EMIs further allow for investigating several causal criteria of candidate underlying psychological mechanisms, but robust, trial-based evidence on these interventions remains very limited. The proposed research aims to examine the efficacy and clinical feasibility of a novel, accessible, transdiagnostic, ecological momentary, compassion-focused intervention for improving emotional resilience to stress (EMOCOMPASS) in help-seeking youth. In an exploratory randomized controlled trial, youth aged 12-25 with psychotic, depressive, anxiety, and/or manic symptoms presenting to mental health services of the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, will be randomly allocated to the EMOCOMPASS intervention in addition to treatment as usual (TAU) (experimental condition) or a control condition of TAU only. Stress sensitivity, emotional resilience, psychotic, depressive, anxiety and manic symptoms will be the primary outcomes obtained at baseline, post-intervention, and 4-week follow-up. Ecological interventionist causal models will be tested to improve our understanding of several causal criteria of underlying psychological mechanisms and contribute to enhancing efficacy of mHealth interventions for promoting resilience in youth, with the ultimate goal of preventing adverse outcomes later in life.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants