Cognitive Approaches to Combatting Suicidality

We are recruiting people who:

• are 18 or over
• have experience of psychosis
• have experience of suicidal thoughts and/or behaviours in the past three months
• are under the care of a mental health services clinical team (community or inpatient)
• are English-speaking, only because the therapy is delivered in English

We are not recruiting people who have an organic brain disorder, dementia, bipolar disorder, or who cannot speak English.

If you would like to take part in this project, please contact our Trial Manager, Charlotte Huggett, on 0161 271 0729.

You can also ask somebody from your mental health team to contact us on your behalf if you would like to know more.

We will need to speak to your mental health team as well as you and may need to ask you some questions to make sure the project would be helpful and appropriate for you.

If you are a care co-ordinator, clinician or support worker and know someone who you think might be appropriate for this project and might like to take part you can contact our Trial Manager, Charlotte Huggett, on 0161 271 0729 after having discussed it with the person concerned.

We will require consent to contact the person you are referring and may need to ask you some questions to make sure the study is the right fit for them.

The CARMS project team works in collaboration with a group of service users who called themselves the CARMers group. The members include a group of about 7 or 8 people of various ages, who have lived experience of suicidal ideation and/or suicidal behaviour and in some cases also experience of psychosis.

The CARMers group have liaised with the project team and provided a valuable contribution since prior to the official study start date (back in January 2017). The group meets approximately every 1-2 months with the project leaders, alongside providing input in between meetings.

The CARMers have contributed to and guided the development of various study documentation, such as, recruitment and treatment allocation leaflets, the participant information sheet, consent forms and this website. They are involved in training all of the research assistants involved with the study by conducting role plays and providing feedback. The CARMers have also contributed to the analysis of the CARMS qualitative studies. They are regularly provided with study progress updates and are actively involved with coming up with dissemination ideas.

The second pilot study assessed whether our suicide-focused talking therapy reduced suicidal behaviours in male prisoners in the north-west of England. Results showed that more than half of those who were in the treatment group had clinically significant recovery level by the end of therapy (six months) compared to a quarter in the control group.

Read the published findings here.

The third, and most recently completed, pilot study assessed the acceptability and feasibility of our suicide-focused talking therapy in psychiatric in-patient settings. As with the previous two pilot studies, the therapy was found to be acceptable to participants and feasible to deliver.

Read the published findings here.

If you decide to take part, you will talk to a researcher for about two hours. Questions will be asked about your mental health, thoughts, feelings and related experiences. You can take breaks and don’t have to answer all the questions in one go. These researchers have been trained to conduct interviews sensitively.

You will be randomly allocated to ONE of the treatments below. Each person is put into a group by chance by a computer. The only difference between the two groups is the offer of up to 24 CARMS talking therapy sessions. 

– OR –