Brief App-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety Symptoms in Psychiatric Inpatients: Feasibility Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Psychiatric inpatients often have limited access to psychotherapeutic education or skills for managing anxiety, a common transdiagnostic concern in severe and acute mental illness. COVID-19-related restrictions further limited access to therapy groups on inpatient psychiatric units. App-based interventions may improve access, but evidence supporting the feasibility of their use, acceptability, and effectiveness in psychiatric inpatient settings is limited. MindShift CBT is a free app based on cognitive behavioral therapy principles with evidence for alleviating anxiety symptoms in the outpatient setting. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to recruit 24 participants from an acute general psychiatric inpatient ward to a 1-month randomized control study assessing the feasibility and acceptability of providing patients with severe and acute mental illness access to the MindShift CBT app for help with managing anxiety symptoms. METHODS: Recruitment, data collection, analysis, and interpretation were completed collaboratively by clinician and peer researchers. Inpatients were randomized to two conditions: treatment as usual (TAU) versus TAU plus use of the MindShift CBT app over 6 days. We collected demographic and quantitative data on acceptability and usability of the intervention. Symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress were measured in pre- and poststudy surveys for preliminary signals of efficacy. We conducted individual semistructured interviews with participants in the MindShift CBT app group at the end of their trial period, which were interpreted using a standardized protocol for thematic analysis. RESULTS: Over 4 weeks, 33 inpatients were referred to the study, 24 consented to participate, 20 were randomized, and 11 completed the study. Of the 9 randomized participants who did not complete the study, 7 were withdrawn because they were discharged or transferred prior to study completion, with a similar distribution among both conditions. Among the enrolled patients, 65% (13/20) were admitted for a psychotic disorder and no patient was admitted primarily for an anxiety disorder. The average length of stay was 20 days (SD 4.4; range 3-21) and 35% (7/20) of patients were involuntarily admitted to hospital. Small sample sizes limited accurate interpretation of the efficacy data. Themes emerging from qualitative interviews included acceptability and usability of the app, and patient agency associated with voluntary participation in research while admitted to hospital. CONCLUSIONS: Our study benefitted from collaboration between peer and clinician researchers. Due to rapid patient turnover in the acute inpatient setting, additional flexibility in recruitment and enrollment is needed to determine the efficacy of using app-based psychotherapy on an acute psychiatric ward. Despite the limited sample size, our study suggests that similar interventions may be feasible and acceptable for acutely unwell inpatients. Further study is needed to compare the efficacy of psychotherapeutic apps with existing standards of care in this setting. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04841603; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04841603.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".