Cognitive-behavioural therapy for bipolar disorder.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to P Kinderman.
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BACKGROUND: How insight, paranoia and depression evolve in relation to each other during and after the first episode of schizophrenia is poorly understood but of clinical importance. METHOD: Serial assessments over 18 months were made using multiple instruments in a consecutive sample of 257 patients with first episode DSM-IV non-affective psychosis. Repeated measures of paranoia, insight, depression and self-esteem were analysed using structural equation modelling, to examine the direction of relationships over time after controlling for confounds. RESULTS: Depression was predicted directly by greater insight, particularly at baseline, and by greater paranoia at every stage of follow-up. Neither relationship was mediated by self-esteem, although there was a weak association of lower self-esteem with greater depression and better insight. Paranoia was not strongly associated with insight. Duration of untreated psychosis and substance use at baseline predicted depression at 18 months. CONCLUSIONS: In first-episode psychosis, good insight predicts depression. Subsequently, paranoia is the strongest predictor. Neither effect is mediated by low self-esteem. Effective treatment of positive symptoms is important in preventing and treating low mood in early schizophrenia.
BACKGROUND: Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) improves persistent psychotic symptoms. AIMS: To test the effectiveness of added CBT in accelerating remission from acute psychotic symptoms in early schizophrenia. METHOD: A 5-week CBT programme plus routine care was compared with supportive counselling plus routine care and routine care alone in a multi-centre trial randomising 315 people with DSM-IV schizophrenia and related disorders in their first (83%) or second acute admission. Outcome assessments were blinded. RESULTS: Linear regression over 70 days showed predicted trends towards faster improvement in the CBT group. Uncorrected univariate comparisons showed significant benefits at 4 but not 6 weeks for CBT v. routine care alone on Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale total and positive sub-scale scores and delusion score and benefits v. supportive counselling for auditory hallucinations score. CONCLUSIONS: CBT shows transient advantages over routine care alone or supportive counselling in speeding remission from acute symptoms in early schizophrenia.
Persecutory (paranoid) delusions are a frequently observed clinical phenomenon. In recent years, an increasing volume of research has attempted to explain these types of beliefs in terms of psychological mechanisms. Theories have emphasized early experience, perceptual abnormalities, motivational factors, and information-processing deficits. In this article we review relevant findings, including our own studies of the role of causal attributions and theory of mind deficits. We propose a new integrative model that builds on this work. The core of the model is an account of the way that causal attributions influence self-representations, which in turn influence future attributions: the attribution--self-representation cycle. We argue that biases in this cycle cause negative events to be attributed to external agents and hence contribute to the building of a paranoid world view. These abnormalities are amenable to investigation by functional neuroimaging, and recent studies have implicated specific areas of neuroactivation. However, these findings do not necessarily suggest that paranoid delusions are entirely biological in origin, and there is evidence that adverse early experience may play a role in determining the development of a cognitive vulnerability to paranoid thinking.
Theory of mind (ToM) deficits are central to autistic spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome. Research in psychotic disorders has developed a cognitive model of paranoid delusions involving abnormal causal attributions for negative events. Possible aetiologies of these include deficits in social reasoning, specifically ToM. The present study investigated this attributional model of paranoia in Asperger syndrome. Participants diagnosed with Asperger syndrome scored significantly higher on a measure of paranoia and lower on a measure of ToM, compared with the control group. They did not differ in self-concept and causal attributions, contrary to the attributional model of paranoia. A regression analysis highlighted private self-consciousness as the only predictor of paranoia. The theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
The self-concept and causal attributions are both centrally implicated in psychological disorders including depression and paranoia. In two investigations of the dynamic relationships between causal attributions and self-representations, non-patient participants completed questionnaires derived from Higgins' (1987) Self-Discrepancy Theory before and after completing a measure of causal attribution. In Study 1, consistent with cognitive models of depression, external attributions for negative events were associated with reductions in self-actual:self-ideal discrepancies. Study 2 revealed significantly different effects on self-discrepancies of three types of causal attributions. Internal attributions led to increased self-actual:self-ideal discrepancies as well as increased discrepancies between self-perceptions and the believed views of others about the self (self-actual:other-actual discrepancies). External situational attributions led to no changes in either self-actual:self-ideal or self-actual:other-actual discrepancies. External personal attributions led to no changes in self-actual:self-ideal discrepancies but increased self-actual:other-actual discrepancies. These findings point to the value of distinguishing between different kinds of external attributions. They show that self-representations and causal attributions are closely coupled cognitive domains. The results also suggest that paranoid ideation might be specifically associated with external-personal attributions for negative events.
Neuroleptic side-effects adversely affect clinical outcome in schizophrenic patients. Clinicians therefore require an understanding of the impact of such side-effects. This study compared psychiatrists' estimates of the prevalence of neuroleptic side-effects and associated distress with schizophrenic patients' reports of side-effects and distress. Psychiatrists were asked to estimate the likelihood of informing patients about side-effects. Psychiatrists' estimates of prevalence but not of distress correlated significantly with patients' reports. Psychiatrists' avowed decisions to inform patients about side-effects were significantly correlated with their estimates of prevalence and distress, but not with patients' reported levels of distress. Patients were unlikely to attribute side-effects to neuroleptic medication. These results indicate that patients and psychiatrists share similar views about the prevalence and implications of neuroleptic side-effects. However, psychiatrists' apparent lack of understanding of which side-effects are most likely to cause distress to patients may adversely affect the therapeutic alliance between prescribers and consumers.
Causal attributions for positive and negative hypothetical social events made by paranoid patients, depressed patients, and nonpatient participants were examined via a novel measure of causal locus, the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire. Depressed patients tended to attribute negative social events to internal (self-blaming) causes. Nonpatient participants and patients with delusions of persecution tended to avoid such self-blame. However, whereas nonpatient participants tended to choose situational or circumstantial external attributions, paranoid patients tended to choose external attributions that located blame in other individuals. These findings support R. P. Bentall, P. Kinderman, and S. Kaney's (1994) defensive attributional model of persecutory delusions, suggest some modifications to that model, and have implications for the understanding of the relationship between causal attributions and social and self-perception.
The self-discrepancies of paranoid patients, depressed patients, and nonpatients were examined using a modified version of Higgins's Selves Questionnaire (E. T. Higgins, 1987). Nonpatients showed high consistencies between all domains of the self-concept, whereas depressed patients showed marked self-discrepancies. Paranoid patients alone displayed a high degree of consistency between self-perceptions and self-guides together with discrepancies between self-perceptions and the believed perceptions of parents about the self. Paranoid patients also believed that their parents had more negative views of them than did other participants. These findings are consistent with R. P. Bentall, P. Kinderman, and S. Kaney's (1994) model, which assumes that persecutory delusions are a product of attributional processes serving to maintain a positive explicit self-concept.
Although the inclusion of the teaching of clinical communication skills is common in the training of health professionals, few published papers exist which either describe the theoretical basis of such teaching or provide comprehensive assessment procedures. This paper highlights the contributions of behavioural analysis and, centrally, the development of cognitive scripts or schemata to the understanding of the teaching of clinical communication skills. A model for a course designed explicitly to develop such scripts is described and the implications of such an understanding are discussed.
In this paper we review a series of recent investigations into cognitive abnormalities associated with persecutory delusions. Studies indicate that persecutory delusions are associated with abnormal attention to threat-related stimuli, an explanatory bias towards attributing negative outcomes to external causes and biases in information processing relating to the self-concept. We propose an integrative model to account for these findings in which it is hypothesized that, in deluded patients, activation of self/ideal discrepancies by threat-related information triggers defensive explanatory biases, which have the function of reducing the self/ideal discrepancies but result in persecutory ideation. We conclude by discussing the implications of this model for the cognitive-behavioural treatment of paranoid delusions.
Recent studies of cognitive processes associated with persecutory delusions suggest that such delusions are associated with abnormalities in the processing of information relevant to the self. Attention to positive and negative trait words was studied in subjects suffering from persecutory delusions, matched subjects with depressed mood and normal controls using an emotional Stroop task. Subjects were required to name the ink colours of: (i) meaningless strings of Os, (ii) low self-esteem personal adjectives, (iii) high self-esteem adjectives and (iv) neutral adjectives. subjects were also asked to rate the degree to which they endorsed as self-descriptive these and other personally descriptive adjectives. The subjects with persecutory delusions demonstrated a significantly higher rate of endorsement for positive adjectives than negative adjectives, but showed a marked degree of interference when colour-naming both positive and negative words. The relevance of these findings to a model of persecutory delusions involving the self-concept is discussed.
A data set of Attributional Style Questionnaire responses collected by Kaney & Bentall (1989) from persecutory deluded, normal and depressed subjects was added to a similar data set collected by the first author. The attributions made for hypothetical positive and negative events by the combined pool of subjects were then blind rated for internality by five independent judges. Whereas the internality ratings made by the subjects for their own attributions showed evidence of an exaggerated self-serving bias in the case of the deluded subjects, and an absence of such a bias in the case of the depressed subjects, the independent ratings showed no such group differences. These findings suggest that the differences in internality for positive and negative events observed on the ASQ between deluded, normal and depressed subjects may not reflect differences in the types of causal statements made by these subjects but differences in their attributions about their attributions. The relevance of this observation for attribution theory in general and attributional accounts of psychopathology in particular are discussed.