About the Study

Approximately 1 in 100 people will experience severe mental health problems. This most commonly starts in adolescence and the majority will be living at home with families. This can be very frightening time for relatives who often have little knowledge of what is happening or how to manage it. The NHS has commitment to support relatives in order to reduce their distress, but also because research studies have shown that this can lead to a better outcome for patients as well. Unfortunately, many relatives do not get the kind of support they need. This is often because of lack of appropriate resources in local services.

This study aims to develop a self-help package that relatives can use at their convenience with low level support from the NHS. This would contain the important information and guidance we know can be helpful to relatives in understanding what is happening and how best to manage it.

In the first phase of the study we look at past studies to make sure we identify the essential things that the package needs to cover. We will ask groups of relatives for their views on what forms the package needs to cover. We will ask groups of relatives for their views on what forms the package needs to take to be most useful to them (e.g. written/audio/video/web etc.) and ask them to help us design it.

In the second phase we will invite relatives to try out the package and give us lots of feedback about their experiences and difficulties. We will test whether distress and other measures of negative impact can be reduced by the intervention by comparing a group of relatives who were given it, with a similar group who did not receive it.

In the final phase we will modify the intervention in light of the feedback, draw up guidelines on how to use this in the NHS services based on our experiences, and share our findings as widely as possible. If the intervention does help relatives and they like using it, we will offer the intervention to other NHS services/voluntary groups and apply for further funding to test it more rigorously.