Attachment-focused iMAgery Therapy for PSychosis (A-iMAPS)

Overview

The relationships we have in childhood affect how we relate to others across our life, including how safe or secure we feel. If our caregivers do not meet our needs well enough in childhood, this can lead to an 'insecure attachment style'. This means we may push others away or cling to them, but never feel fully safe or secure with them. This style is common in people who have mental health problems. This includes psychosis, when people have unusual experiences such as hearing voices others cannot hear. A lot of people with psychosis have difficult experiences with mental health services. This includes involuntary treatments, traumatic interactions and hospital stays, where they may think staff are trying to harm rather than help them. As a result they may not feel safe working with staff and they might re-experience the negative memories of these events. This is known as psychosis-related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PR-PTSD) and can lead to ongoing problems. Imagery is often defined as mental pictures but it includes imagining our senses (smell, touch, taste) too. It can be a useful therapy tool to help people to work with difficult memories and can help them to feel more safe and secure. Research shows that this is helpful for people with psychosis and people who have been through trauma. Hence, it may be helpful for people with PR-PTSD. The study aims to see if it is viable to do a 6-session therapy using imagery to target PR-PTSD memories. The study will use a case series design where up to 12 people with psychosis will be able to try the therapy. They will be asked to complete questionnaires to understand any potential benefits of the therapy. The findings could inform the research and allow for further development of therapies in this area.

Attachment theory underpins human interpersonal experience: it suggests that our early relationships, typically those with our primary caregivers in infancy, have a profound effect on how we learn to relate to the others across the lifespan. Attachment styles in adulthood, particularly insecure styles, have been associated with mental health problems, and it has been noted that improving attachment security can improve mental health. In the last decade, there has been an increase in research around the role of attachment in psychosis, with an over-representation of insecure attachment patterns seen in individuals with such diagnoses (76% in psychosis compared to 38% in non-clinical samples). A number of studies have identified links with insecure attachment in several aspects of psychopathology, including voice-hearing, persecutory delusions, social functioning and negative symptoms, though the mechanisms between such remain poorly understood. Attachment insecurity is significantly associated with paranoia and recent research has focused on reducing this using the concept of "felt security", which is defined as "a sense of interpersonal safety associated with secure, protective relationships". In childhood, this sense of safety and security constitutes a 'secure base' from which the child is able to explore. Priming felt security through imagery (i.e. undertaking an imagery exercise focused on secure attachment with another individual in the image) has been found to reduce paranoia in non-clinical adult samples. Moreover, 'felt security' imagery has been deemed effective in engendering a sense of security and reducing paranoia prior to rescripting trauma memories with an individual with psychosis. Imagery interventions have been long established for use as part of therapy for individuals with psychosis, and have been recognised as a frontier in therapeutic intervention across disorders, including working with negative imagery (e.g., imagery rescripting) and positive imagery. A case series was completed and subsequently a protocol published for a six-session imagery intervention, iMAgery focused psychological therapy for persecutory delusions in PSychosis (iMAPS), targeting intrusive mental imagery and negative beliefs about self and others in psychosis with a combination of negative and positive imagery techniques, which indicated feasibility of combining various imagery techniques in a short intervention for psychosis. Individuals with psychosis may not only experience intrusive images as a component of their psychotic symptomology, but also as a consequence of their psychosis itself. Psychosis-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PR-PTSD) is an under-researched area but a recent review suggested that between 14% and 47% of individuals with psychosis may have PR-PTSD, with associated factors including symptomology of psychosis, treatment factors (involuntary admissions, traumatic inpatient events, restraint) and attachment style. However, there appears to be minimal published literature on this beyond first-episode psychosis. Anxiety in attachment relationships has been identified as positively correlated with psychosis-related and hospital-related PTSD symptoms. The present study aims to add to the limited literature on PR-PTSD by evaluating the feasibility of a short six-session attachment-focused imagery intervention for psychosis, based upon the iMAPS protocol, which will be adapted to include 'felt security' imagery and the imagery rescripting will focus on psychosis-related trauma. It is anticipated that this would reduce PTSD symptomology. Moreover, by using attachment security primes in conjunction with rescripting, paranoia may also be reduced.