Dr Guy Dodgson, aclinical psychologist at Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Mental Health Trust, is the founder of a NHS funded project named MUSE, which stands for Managing Unusual Sensory Experiences. The project initially started in 2010 but has recently been awarded a £2.5 million funding following its successful implementation in research groups.
The project is a primary prevention tool and focuses on detecting and explaining early stages of psychosis to individual service users.
“The project uses a normalising model to explain why people hallucinate and helps the person to develop and use coping strategies to reduce distress. A normalising model is focused on care that states the fact the person experiencing hallucinations aren’t bad or wrong for experiencing hallucinations, but that it is in fact a normal response from our brains when experiencing extreme stress and is under strain” Dr Dodgson said.
The MUSE project uses digital intervention, run on National Health Service (NHS) laptops, which provide clear and concise information about hallucinations. The project uses audio, video and animated content in short engaging sessions. However most crucially, it is designed for use by non-specialist staff like community psychiatric nurses rather than only psychologists and therapists which can be difficult to access. This project could be used by mental health professionals in NHS primary care such as GP surgeries and when in its final stages may becoming a public facing model, so any member of the community can utilise the project.
This will allow for a substantial increase access to treatment by service users in the early stages of psychosis and reduce waiting times significantly for care. When an individual gets psychosis, it can cost up to £300,000 per person to treat effectively and the project aims to reduce the number of individuals that will need this level of care by using early intervention.
“The project shows how your brain changes under threat but more importantly here is what you can do about it” Dr Dodgson said.
Rose Watkins, a Mental Health Practitioner and Community Psychiatric Nurse based in Leeds, has previously worked within the early intervention in psychosis community team and believes the NHS need more psychoeducational tools at their disposal to ensure a more consistent and person-centred care.
“From my experience cognitive behavioural therapy has been helpful in treating people with psychosis, however as outlined in this study can be hard to access. Through my involvement of working with people experiencing a first episode of psychosis their main goal was to understand why this was happening”. Rose said.
Angela Lockwood, a care navigator working in a GP surgery in Leeds, thinks all members of staff at every band of the NHS would benefit from tools such as MUSE. “It would be great if service users and staff had more access to psychoeducational tools such as MUSE and we could signpost them more effectively to receive the care they need, preventing worsening mental health symptoms such as hallucinations. The waiting times for the right care can be very long and it is frustrating we can’t offer more” Angela said.