Cognition intervention for persons experiencing first episode psychosis in Nigeria

Cognitive impairment is common in psychosis and is a great contributor to functional impairment in the illness. Interventions for cognitive and functional impairment need to be applied early during psychosis to prevent debilitating outcomes. A large proportion of first-episode psychosis (FEP) cases in need of cognitive intervention are in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The effective cognitive intervention programs in high-income countries (HICs) are not immediately transportable to LMICS clinical settings. There is a need for an evidence-based intervention that is culturally acceptable, paper-based, and easy to deliver by trained health workers in the routine clinical settings in LMICs. It will also be necessary to evaluate such developed interventions for effectiveness, the feasibility of implementation, and scale-up. Also, there is a scarcity of involvement of people with lived experiences who are potential end-users in the intervention design and project implementation in LMICs. Using the participatory action research (PAR) approach, we aim to involve end-users to co-design, pilot test and assess the feasibility and strategies for successful implementation of a contextualised cognition intervention that is based on the core principles and treatment techniques of cognitive remediation approaches. The-36 month project will involve seven work packages.