Can this strategic plan promote better well-being for people who suffer from psychosis?

Psychosis is a little understood mental health condition whose sufferers often face stigmatization and marginalization.

At Northeastern, professor Alisa K. Lincoln and student TaKaya McFarland are working together on multiple projects that raise awareness of psychosis and challenge the stigma so that people who have experienced psychosis get appropriate help sooner rather than later.

“We forget about prevention all the time. We focus on treatment, but there’s a lot of amazing and powerful work that shows that prevention and early identification really matter,” says Lincoln, director of Northeastern’s Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research.

“There’s just a tremendous amount of misinformation and lack of knowledge about people’s experiences of psychosis, even though psychotic thought processes or symptoms are more common than we think,” she says.

Lincoln led a paper published in November in Psychiatric Services that describes the process of working with community members and mental health experts to develop one of the nation’s first statewide strategic plans for early psychosis.

“People can have symptoms of psychosis in association with depression, anxiety, PTSD, substance abuse” and other conditions, Lincoln says.

What is psychosis?

The term psychosis is used to describe a mental health condition in which sufferers experience a break with reality and may have difficulty recognizing what is real and what is not, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

They may have auditory or visual hallucinations and experience delusions, confused thinking, disordered speaking, suspiciousness or emotional changes such as social withdrawal.

“This is just an experience people have,” says McFarland, a fourth-year psychology major who helped with the marketing for a 45-minute documentary, “Breaking the Silence,” that tells the stories of young adults experiencing early psychosis.

“I don’t think there are a lot of films out there that really focus on psychosis in such a humanizing way,” says McFarland, who did a co-op with 2BEpic, a program to build a more racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse early psychosis workforce.

The film, which had a debut screening on Northeastern’s campus in July, is a reminder that with treatment and support people who have experienced psychosis “can and often do go on to live full and meaningful lives,” Lincoln says.

Often beginning in young adulthood, psychosis develops in 15 to 100 people out of 100,000 people each year, according to the NIMH.

The strategic plan that Lincoln helped develop in conjunction with the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health and others recommends developing a public awareness campaign around the symptoms of psychosis as well as a statewide triage system to ensure rapid delivery of care.

The plan promotes training of community members including police, school employees and EMTs in the early signs and symptoms of psychosis and the development of early psychosis treatment teams to deliver high-quality, evidence-based care.

The goals outlined in the strategic plan, which is available online, were developed from focus groups involving young adults who have experienced psychosis and their families, as well as panels of international experts in mental health.

“What was exciting about the way Massachusetts approached it is they really wanted to think about it as a community-driven plan,” Lincoln says.

Both the strategic plan and “Breaking the Silence” address the experiences of Black, Indigenous and people of color and members of the LGTBQ community, and the barriers they face in getting care.

“We see time and time again that people with marginalized identities have longer durations of untreated psychosis, which exacerbates their symptoms,” says McFarland, who plans to get her doctorate in clinical psychology and currently works as a clinical research student at the Response to Risk Research program in Boston.

“We know from the literature that experiences of discrimination and marginalization and social exclusion can contribute to psychotic symptoms,” Lincoln says.

“So at a population level we know that people who experience racism and discrimination have higher rates of psychosis,” she says.

“That does not mean they are diagnosed more often or receive appropriate treatment more often,” Lincoln says. “There is evidence that there are strong racial inequities in access to quality treatment and support for recovery.”

Stigma can also be a barrier to seeking care, which is why the education of community members, health professionals, educators and people across sectors around psychosis is so important, Lincoln says.

“Oftentimes when groups do programming on mental health, they’ll focus on anxiety and depression,” to the exclusion of psychosis, she says. A big part of the strategic plan is promoting understanding through “a wide range of mental health education and intervention programs and focus on recovery.”

Early intervention is key, Lincoln says. It’s important to work “with folks early before things develop into more serious or challenging problems.”

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.