There have been two randomised controlled trials of nidotherapy. The first one was carried out in a difficult group of patients who had failed to respond to treatment in an assertive outreach team in central London. The full reference is Ranger et al (2009), Cost-effectiveness of nidotherapy for comorbid personality disorder and severe mental illness: randomized controlled trial. Epidemiologia e Psichiatria Sociale, 18, 128-136. It showed nidotherapy to be very cost-effective.
Please get in touch with Peter Tyrer for the full details.
To download the trial summary please click here
This trial has been deemed sufficiently important to generate a Cochrane Review – the international data base for randomised controlled trials (Chamberlain & Sampson, 2013). Not surprisingly, they conclude that more trials are needed.
The second trial was carried out in people with intellectual disability who showed aggressive challenging behaviour and, unlike the first trial that involved direct treatment with patients, this compared nidotherapy and enhanced care programming in the training of staff in care homes for the intellectually disabled. Details of the outcomes were given at the 2016 Nidotherapy Workshop and will be published shortly.
So keep an eye on this space.
Publications
- Nidotherapy in the treatment of substance misuse
- Nidotherapy: making the environment do the therapeutic work
- Nidotherapy: the expansion of environmental treatment (Peter Tyrer & Helen Tyrer) a forthcoming commentary in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry
Nidotherapy 