Clinical Research Network
Children and young people’s mental health research
PRODIGY Study Team
Professor Paul French, Joint Chief Investigator
Professor Paul French is Joint Chief Investigator of the PRODIGY study at Greater Manchester West
Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. He gives us an overview of the study looking at the prevention of
long-term social disability in young people with emerging psychological difficulties…
“
Importance of mental health research
The importance of mental health research is absolutely central to everything we do now in the
NHS.
In the mental health research world, it’s actually quite hard to get people into studies. The
general public seem to have some fear, they worry that we may do something awful to them,
and even lots of the people that we work with are a bit unsure about mental health research.
We absolutely need to raise the game so that when people come to mental health services such
as Greater Manchester West, they ask about research opportunities, our staff are mindful of
research opportunities that can actually be the treatments that get into NICE guidelines and you
get those treatments ahead of the game.
We know it takes seventeen years for a new research idea to get into practice so you may have
the opportunity of getting into those research programmes, getting access to that treatment
seventeen years ahead of other people. What a great opportunity!
About the study
The PRODIGY study that we’re involved with here is a really exciting opportunity. For a long
time what we’ve done is we’ve looked at a real disorder-specific kind of intervention. So, we’ve
looked at interventions specific to anxiety or interventions specific to depression or psychosis or
bipolar disorder.
What we’re doing in the PRODIGY study is we’re identifying young people who have emerging
mental health problems, so they could have anxiety, depression, or an OCD type presentation.
So they’ve got an emerging mental health problem and on top of that what’s also happening is
they’re starting to disengage, somehow, from society. We’re starting to see an emergence of
some social disability, so maybe they’re dropping out of college, maybe they’re dropping out of
university, or work and starting to disengage from families and friends.
What our hypothesis is, is that over time what will happen is because you’re not engaging with
society, the mental health problems and the social disability get worse.
Our hypothesis is we can identify this in the early stages and if you can identify it maybe you
can do something about it. Maybe you can prevent that social disability from actually
progressing to something really problematic.
So, in our trial we are identifying young people who have a combination of these two factors
and we’re trying to offer a psychological intervention of cognitive behaviour therapy. We’re doing
what we can do to prevent long-term social disability by focusing on people’s thoughts and their
behaviours, to try and limit them moving onto a long-term condition with long-term mental health
problems.
The PRODIGY Advisory Team
One of the things that we were very keen to do as part of the research was to set up an
Advisory Team with participants who’ve been involved in the trial. We’ve done this in lots of
research and it’s absolutely central to any research initiative. We need to ensure that what we
do and the questions that we ask are absolutely pertinent to the research that we’re doing. We
as researchers have a rough idea where we’re heading, we know some certain things but if we
don’t check that out with participants, with people who are experiencing those difficulties, we
could be miles apart. We could be missing the mark enormously.
Participating in the study
In the PRODIGY study if you come into the trial there are two groups, so it’s a randomised
controlled trial. That means that by chance you could be allocated to one group where you’re
just monitored throughout the trial or in the other group you’re monitored and you get access to
our cognitive behavioural social recovery oriented treatment CBT.
In the monitoring only group you’re assessed and seen whether you’re suitable but you’re also
given a very comprehensive assessment. You know you go through a good battery of
assessments to see what’s going on and understanding in depth what’s happening. Actually,
lots of people find just that alone can be a really helpful process. Having someone spend a good
couple of hours to go through a whole range of assessments to fully understand what’s going on
in their life can be a real luxury in today’s NHS system.
And then in our other treatment group you have that same monitoring, you have that same
monitoring process but on top of that you’ll also get access to our experimental cognitive
behavioural intervention which is very focused about trying to help people get out and get into a
wider society. They can test out whether some of their concerns actually come true or whether
they actually have more skills that we can nurture to enable them to interact with society.
”