Psychosis Risk: Time to Look Empirically at a First-step Economical-pragmatic Way to Examine Anomalous...

Area of Science:

• Psychiatry
• Clinical Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Global interest in the pre-psychotic phase has increased since the late 1990s.
• Clinical tools for early psychosis detection have limitations in predictive accuracy.
• The EASE manual offers a model for understanding the generation of psychotic experiences via pre-reflective subjectivity distortion.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a brief screening tool for psychosis risk assessment.
• To evaluate the clinical relevance and psychometric properties of the SQuEASE-11.
• To facilitate wider adoption of the EASE perspective in psychosis risk assessment.

Main Methods:

• Developed SQuEASE-11 by selecting key items from the EASE manual.
• Administered SQuEASE-11 as an interview in the STEP intervention trial with 328 clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P) patients.
• Assessed psychometric properties, factor structure, and relationships with gold standard instruments and the full EASE.

Main Results:

• SQuEASE-11 demonstrated moderate internal consistency and a two-factor structure.
• Significant correlations were found between SQuEASE-11 and established instruments (CAARMS, BPRS, SANS, MADRS, DACOBS, SOFAS).
• A very strong correlation was observed between SQuEASE-11 and the full EASE interview.

Conclusions:

• SQuEASE-11 is a clinically relevant and brief supplementary first-line interview for CHR-P subjects.
• The instrument may indicate the need for a full EASE interview.
• SQuEASE-11 can inform treatment planning for individuals at risk for psychosis.