Participation in family psychoeducational programs for schizophrenia has been found to reduce patient relapse rates and reduce relative distress. Nevertheless, participation rates are often low, reflecting both family impediments to attending sessions (e.g. transportation difficulties, time constraints, sensitivity to stigma) and limited professional dissemination of the interventions. To address these difficulties, we are proposing a test of a novel intervention -- a private, secure educational internet website with family-to-family chat capabilities, streaming video mini-lectures on the management of schizophrenia, written materials on topics pertinent to key issues in schizophrenia management, professionally facilitated online discussions of the material, and additional resource links. Recent technological advancements in video conferencing, online communication, and streaming audio/visual presentations, which are increasingly easy to use and gaining widespread acceptance among mental health professionals, make the test of this intervention feasible. Equally important, the widespread growth of Internet access makes a test of such an intervention particularly timely. In this developmental project, we propose a randomized trial of 72 relatives of outpatients with schizophrenia to 18 months of customary care alone, or 18 months of customary care with access to the website for the first year. We hypothesize that participation in the website will reduce patient symptom exacerbations by increasing family knowledge of illness management, and reduce family burden by increasing perceived social support. This project involves an extension of our 15 years of work in psychosocial family interventions for schizophrenia into a new dissemination/communication medium. We intend our end product to be a set of empirically-validated low-cost materials which has the potential to be exported to multiple sites, used by families unable to attend face-to-face meetings, and adaptable to other psychiatric disorders.
| Glynn, Shirley M; Randolph, Eugenia T; Garrick, Thomas et al. (2010) A proof of concept trial of an online psychoeducational program for relatives of both veterans and civilians living with schizophrenia. Psychiatr Rehabil J 33:278-87 |
