Treatment patterns and short‐term outcomes in an early intervention youth mental health service

AIM: Early intervention mental health services tailored for young people are being developed across the world, yet reports on service use patterns and short-term clinical outcomes for the clinically diverse group accessing these services are very limited. The current study employed the clinical staging model to examine whether young people within the two clinical stages that precede full-threshold disorder (stage 1a and stage 1b) differed in terms of treatments received and short-term symptomatic and functional outcomes. METHODS: Eight hundred ninety young people aged 12-25 years seeking mental healthcare within a 12-month period were analysed in this study. RESULTS: Attenuated syndrome (stage 1b) patients used significantly more services than help-seeking (stage 1a) patients, including significantly higher rates of psychotropic medication prescription (9.3% vs. 43.6%). Stage 1a patients started with significantly lower levels of psychological distress and significantly higher levels of functioning at service entry and showed improvement only in psychological distress over 10 sessions. Despite using significantly more services, stage 1b patients remained impaired on both measures after 10 sessions; however, they showed some modest improvements in their levels of psychological distress and functioning over this time. CONCLUSION: Patients with attenuated syndromes have treatment patterns and clinical outcomes not dissimilar to those with more severe mental disorders and therefore require more intensive interventions provided over a longer time period in order to achieve recovery. The staging model allows services to selectively allocate their limited resources towards those patients with greater care needs. More research into the unique treatment needs and longer term outcomes of this diverse patient group is supported.