Developing an unguided internet intervention for emotional distress in primary care patients: applying common factor and person-based approaches

Abstract

Background: Developing effective, unguided internet interventions for mental health represents a challenge. Without structured human guidance engagement with these interventions is often limited and effectiveness reduced. If their effectiveness can be increased, they have great potential for broad, low-cost dissemination. Improving unguided e-mental health interventions requires a renewed focus on the proposed underlying mechanisms of symptom improvement and the involvement of target users from the outset.

Objective: To develop an unguided e-mental health intervention for distress in primary care patients, drawing on meta-theory of psychotherapeutic change and utilising the person-based approach to guide iterative qualitative piloting with patients.

Method: Common factors meta-theory informed the selection and structure of therapeutic content, enabling flexibility whilst retaining proposed necessary ingredients for effectiveness. A logic model was designed outlining intervention components and proposed mechanisms underlying improvement. The person-based approach provided a framework for systematically incorporating target-user perspective into the intervention development. Twenty primary care patients who had consulted with emotional distress in the last 12 months took part in exploratory qualitative interviews, and a subsample (n = 13) undertook think-aloud interviews with a prototype of the intervention.

Results: A flexible intervention was developed, to be used as and when patients need, diverting from a more traditional, linear approach. Based on the in-depth qualitative findings, disorder terms such as depression were avoided, and discussion of psychological symptoms was placed in the context of stressful life events. Think-aloud interviews showed that patients were positive about the design and structure of the intervention. On the basis of patient feedback, modifications were made to increase immediate access to all therapeutic techniques.

Conclusions: Detailing theoretical assumptions underlying e-mental health interventions, and integrating this approach with systematic in-depth qualitative research with target patients is important. These strategies may provide novel ways forward for addressing challenges of unguided delivery. The resulting intervention, ‘Healthy Paths’ will be evaluated in primary care-based randomised controlled trials, as well being deployed as a Massive Open Online Intervention (MOOI).

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Identifiers

ORCID for Adam Geraghty: orcid.org/0000-0001-7984-8351

ORCID for Lucy Yardley: orcid.org/0000-0002-3853-883X

ORCID for Michael Moore: orcid.org/0000-0002-5127-4509

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