Implementation and Evaluation of a Family-based Intervention Program for Children of Mentally Ill Parents
Condition: Schizophrenia and Disorders With Psychotic Features; Mood Disorders; Neurotic Disorders; Personality Disorders; Substance-Related Disorders
MeSH terms: Substance-Related Disorders; Schizophrenia; Personality Disorders; Mood Disorders; Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders; Neurotic Disorders
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      In order to identify psychological stress in children and adolescents of mentally ill parents
      as early as possible, a special intervention program (CHIMPs = Children of mentally ill
      parents) was developed. The study at hand will implement this intervention program at five
      sites in Germany and will further evaluate its effectiveness. The CHIMPs intervention is
      assumed to reduce children's psychopathology and enhance their health related quality of
      life.
    

Detailed description: 
      The main purpose of this study is to implement the manualized family intervention CHIMPs
      (Children of mentally ill parents) for children and adolescents of psychiatrically ill
      parents aged between 3 and 19 years at the seven participating centres in regular care. The
      intervention aims at reducing children's psychopathology and enhancing their quality of life
      in a sustainable way and, moreover, aims at introducing especially remarkable children and
      adolescents to an early intervention.

      The study represents a prospective, randomized and controlled multicenter study (RCT),
      contrasting one intervention group and one control group (TAU = Treatment as usual) by
      measurements at baseline and after six, 12 and 18 months. Within the data collection, the
      perspective of the psychiatrically ill parent, the partner, each child and the therapist will
      be considered. Children between 3 and 9 years of age will be evaluated only by the parents
      and the therapist, from 10 years on, an additional self-report form will be filled out by the
      child. The measurement will be ruled out indirectly (for the pre-post-measurement) as well as
      directly (at the end of treatment).

      For each endpoint, one comprehensive mixed model will be fitted to the data containing the
      baseline value and further relevant patient characteristics as covariates, the random group
      as factor and cluster (center, therapy group, family) as random effect. Missing values will
      be treated by direct imputation to allow an intention-to-treat analysis.
    

Intervention name(s): CHIMPS intervention
Intervention type(s): Behavioral
Intervention description(s): CHIMPs intervention (Family-Intervention composed of 8 Topic-related sessions over a period of 6 month, based on the evaluated manual: a preliminary talk with the family, two sessions with the parents, one session with each child, three sessions with the family).
The sessions are semi-structured and cover the topics illness and coping, education, family relationships and trusting attachement figures, social network and support of the Family. A detailed description of the procedure is found in the Manual (Wiegand-Grefe, Halverscheid & Plass, 2011).
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Treatment
Keywords: children of mentally ill parents; family intervention; randomized controlled trial