Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Guided Self-Help Interventions for Psychological Distress After Stroke and Transient Ischemic Attack: a Protocol for a Scoping Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Stroke can have a significant impact on the psychological wellbeing of the survivor and their caregivers. Whilst the psychological needs after stroke have been highlighted, there is a gap in the provision of accessible interventions to support people psychologically after stroke. Guided self-help interventions have shown promise in other health conditions and could be both implementable and scalable in the healthcare system.
Objective:
This scoping review aims to map the existing evidence for guided self-help interventions that support the psychological wellbeing of stroke and TIA survivors and their caregivers. The scoping review will synthesise the characteristics of these interventions, the populations that the interventions have been evaluated amongst, and outcomes used in these studies.
Methods:
The scoping review will follow JBI methodology and be reported according to PRISMA-ScR. Studies evaluating therapist guided self-help interventions for psychological wellbeing in stroke and TIA survivors and their informal caregivers will be considered for inclusion. Searches will be completed in September, 2026, conducted in APA PsycINFO, CINAHL, MEDLINE, and Scopus alongside a grey literature search using CORE and Google search engine. Study selection will involve independent title and abstract screening followed by independent full-text screening, conducted by two independent reviewers. Data will be extracted and analysed narratively relating to each of the research questions.
Results:
Funding for the scoping review was awarded in January, 2026. Database searches were completed in July, 2026, with grey literature searches completed in September, 2026. Title and abstract screening will follow with subsequent full-text screening, data extraction, and synthesis of the findings. The review is expected to be completed in April, 2027.
Conclusions:
This review will provide an overview of existing guided self-help interventions for psychological distress among stroke and transient ischemic attack survivors and their caregivers, and inform future intervention development.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.