Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Sep 17, 2020
Date Accepted: Nov 3, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Mobile-Assisted Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Negative Symptoms: A Blended Intervention for Schizophrenia
ABSTRACT
Background:
Negative symptoms are an important unmet treatment need for schizophrenia. The present study is a preliminary open trial of a novel hybrid intervention called mobile-assisted cognitive behavior therapy for negative symptoms (mCBTn).
Objective:
The primary aim was to test whether mCBTn was feasible and could reduce severity of the target mechanism, defeatist performance attitudes, which are associated with experiential negative symptoms and poor functioning in schizophrenia.
Methods:
Participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (N=31) who met prospective criteria for persistent negative symptoms were enrolled. The blended intervention combines weekly in-person group therapy with a smartphone app called CBT2go. The app extended therapy group skills, including recovery goal setting, thought challenging, scheduling of pleasurable activities and social interactions, and pleasure savoring interventions to modify defeatist attitudes and improve experiential negative symptoms.
Results:
Retention was excellent (87% at 18 weeks) and severity of defeatist attitudes and experiential negative symptoms declined significantly in mCBTn with large effect sizes.
Conclusions:
The findings suggest mCBTn is a feasible and effective treatment for experiential negative symptoms and justify a larger randomized clinical trial. The findings also provide support for the defeatist attitude model of experiential negative symptoms and suggest that blended technology-supported interventions such as mCBTn can strengthen and shorten intensive psychosocial interventions for schizophrenia. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03179696
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.