Self-Management of Longer-Term Depression: A guide for carers and professionals

Our training packs for carers and professionals living or working with people with long term depression are now available for download.

These have been produced and piloted in collaboration with our partners, Sheffield User Survivor Trainers and are based on the research findings from our research 'Work Package Two:'Understanding self-management: learning from the patient.'

The packs are available free of charge here

We do ask you to register your name and organisation/ location before downloading so that we can track usage and demonstrate this to our funders. The information collected is confidential and will not be used for anything other than monitoring purposes.

We hope you find the packs helpful, and would welcome feedback via Lindsey Bishop-Edwards if you wish to give it.

Testing service improvements

The Sheffield based research clinic has now started. We have recruited clinicians and provided tailored training to enable them to deliver the service improvement interventions that were developed through Work Packages 1 and 2. We have started to recruit patients who are being seen within the Focussed Depression Team to take part in testing the interventions. We are looking for 36 people in all to complete at least one full intervention each. All six of the interventions we are testing were agreed upon through a consensus workshop and Delphi exercise (described in more detail on the next pages). The interventions are additional to the regular psychotherapy treatment patients are receiving, and are as follows:

Pre-therapy interventions

• Better management and prevention of drop-out

Alongside therapy interventions

• Building your own support network
• Work for well-being
• Help to get started and continue doing things

After therapy interventions

• Mindfulness based relapse prevention
• Self-referral back to therapist after discharge

Currently, all but the ‘help to get started and continue doing things’ service improvement idea are up and running, with the last intervention due to become available within the next few months. We’re aiming to offer every patient accepted in to the service the choice of at least 4 options, and they may combine more than one sequential option if timing allows.

We have already started collecting information from patients and therapists so that we can track their progress over time and we will be gathering more detailed feedback from everyone taking part over the coming months. These activities will continue until Autumn 2013, when we will prepare our end of project report.

In addition to the research clinic, work has started on the planning and production of an IQuESTS film, which aims to bring together the voices, opinions and experiences of service users, therapists, service user researchers and project leads, who have been involved at various points throughout the IQuESTS journey. We hope that this film will provide a personal and informative insight on the lived experience of longer term depression and of being involved with research that aims to improve services, therapies and self-management of depression.