14 - Social support and psychiatric disorder: recommendations for clinical practice and research

Summary

In this, the concluding chapter of this volume, intervention, both its practice and its evaluation, will be discussed further. Evidence that social support influences psychiatric disorder and thus outcome, which was discussed in the first and intervening chapters, will be reconsidered throughout this final chapter in relation to the present and future scope for the evaluation and practice of intervention work. Second, building on the previous chapter, the general field of psychotherapy research will be considered, including studies that evaluate psychosocial interventions, in order to consider the relevance this body of work may have to the topic of social support interventions, and because most evidence for clinically proven effectiveness, and thus treatment recommendation, comes from this field. Third, the lessons available at present for current clinical practice and for future directions in clinical evaluation research, directly addressing the social support hypothesis, will be considered. This section will cover the extensive variety of psychosocial interventions, many of them not yet formally evaluated, ranging from community interventions to individual (traditional) psychotherapeutic interventions, which may exert benefits through positive alterations in the provision and the use made of social support to individual client/patients. Some principles that can currently be tentatively set down for clinical practice and intervention planning and evaluation will be discussed in the final section.

In the first chapter of this volume I summarised evidence concerning the relationship between social support and psychiatric disorder.