A new tool designed by psychiatrists to help guide nutritional counseling in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) has been released.
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The worksheet and clinician guide were developed using results from a recent scoping review on the relationship between diet and mental health in patients with SSD, and a feedback process involving a focus group with psychiatrists and individuals who had lived experience with psychosis.
“Mental health clinicians already have the training to help our patients make behavioral changes,” lead author Laura LaChance, MD, lecturer, department of psychiatry, and a psychiatrist at St. Mary’s Hospital Centre, McGill University, Montreal, said in an interview.
“We work every day with patients to help them to reduce their substance use, improve their sleep, take medications, etc., and nutrition should be added to the radar [since] eating well for mental health is part of self-care and can be included in mental health treatment plans,” she said.
The paper was published online Nov. 10 in BMC Psychiatry.
Nutrition frequently ignored
Dr. LaChance noted that “nutrition is largely absent from mental health training programs and often ignored in clinical practice.”
The investigators “wanted to create a tool to help incorporate basic nutritional counseling into the care of individuals with severe mental illness.” They wanted the tool “to be simple enough to understand for patients and simple enough to use for mental health care professionals who don’t have any official nutrition training.”
The team developed a worksheet that includes dietary recommendations, the majority of which are supported by the scoping review and consistent with Canada’s Food Guide. The review “identified all of the published literature related to the relationship between diet and psychiatric symptoms of SSD,” synthesizing the results of 822 prior articles.
and does not contradict generally accepted recommendations for weight management. It is suitable for all patients including those with low or normal body mass index and provides psychoeducation about the importance of quality nutrition as a determinant of mental health.
Positive tone
The worksheet was informed by social cognitive theory, which “highlights the important role of goal setting and behavior contracting, reinforcement, self-control, social norms, attitudes, and self-efficacy.”
It provides “basic education about important nutrition principles” as well as “very simple recommendations to increase knowledge about healthy eating” and “actionable tips for individuals to incorporate.” The researchers used a “positive” tone and included motivational interviewing questions.
“Delivery of the intervention by the patient’s mental health care provider is by design, in an attempt to address the widely held misbelief that nutrition intervention is of limited importance to mental health care and begin to change norms,” Dr. LaChance said.
The worksheet addresses monetary barriers to healthy eating; offers practical tips to “increase perceived control and self-efficacy”; is written in simple, accessible, nontechnical language; and includes foods from a range of cultural backgrounds.
To ensure that the worksheet and clinical guide met the needs of the target population, the researchers conducted a focus group with five psychiatrists and individual phone interviews with people who live with psychosis (n = 6).
Participants with psychosis were evenly divided between male and female and six age groups were represented: younger than 20 years; 21-30 years; 31-40 years; 41-50 years; 51-50 years; and older than 60 years. Of these participants, half scored in the “limited literacy” range, based on a nutritional literacy assessment tool (the Newest Vital Sign [NVS]).
A revised version of the worksheet, taking participants’ feedback into account, was mailed to all participants, who then provided further feedback on the revised version.