Examining the Relationship Between Subjective Experience and Outcomes in Individuals with Mental Illness and Substance Abuse

The proposed research project will assess psychiatric patients shortly before hospital discharge and then conduct follow-up assessments once a month in the community for three months. Assessment will include data collected from interviews as well as file reviews and will focus on the effect of patient perceptions on therapeutic and adverse outcomes. Specifically, the intern research team will target the degree to which participants perceive their hospital admission and subsequent treatment as forced upon them, how much of a say they feel they have in what happens to them in a hospital and during post-discharge treatment, how fair they perceive their hospitalization and subsequent treatment to be, how forced and threatened they feel, and their perception of their daily quality of life. Analyses will attempt to determine how these perceptions influence adverse and therapeutic outcomes, including measures of substance use, violent perpetration, victimization, medication compliance, treatment adherence, therapeutic alliance symptom severity and return to hospital.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Kevin Douglas

Student:

Elizabeth Nicholson

Partner:

BC Mental Health & Addictions Research Institute

Discipline:

Psychology

Sector:

Life sciences

University:

Simon Fraser University