The Female Experience of Early Phase Psychosis and Perceived Barriers to Accessing Early Intervention Services: A Qualitative Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Early intervention services (EIS) are crucial for improving outcomes in psychotic spectrum disorders but are less accessible for females. The disparity has been attributed to a sex and gender-specific presentations of psychosis as well as social factors. The aim of this study was to conduct an exploratory qualitative analysis of female-specific barriers to accessing EIS for psychosis. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 cisgender female participants enrolled in the Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program (NSEPP) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Retrospective chart reviews were also conducted for each participant to gather information about their referral pathways and clinical history. The interview data was analyzed using reflexive inductive thematic analysis methodology. Results: The analysis revealed four superordinate themes and ten subordinate themes of female experiences accessing EIS. (1) Clinician preconceptions or dismissal : descriptions of multiple interactions with the healthcare system, clinician preconceptions of presentation and feeling dismissed. (2) Interpersonal relationships : male romantic partners delayed access to care and support of family and friends accelerated access to care. (3) Masking symptoms : participants hid symptoms out of fear of external perceptions and apparent high functioning at onset affected care (4) Trust and communication with the medical team : reports of a lack of understanding, distrust and unclear communication from clinicians. Conclusions: These themes underscore the importance of improving clinical awareness of sex and gender-specific characteristics of the presentation of early psychosis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".