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Cochrane Collaboration: Critical Review of Evidence for Treatment for Delusional Disorder
The topic describes the delusional disorder as the mental disease with the main symptoms being strange beliefs. Strange beliefs are also the only and the primary symptoms of the disease, which can be observed from different people with the delusion illness. The illness is of different types, in which, one of them being that a victim feels like he or she is persecuted (Vicens et al., 2016). Others can make an individual affected by the illness to feel as if they have a disease. In addition, some of the people with the delusion illness may feel as if they are famous or they are the most respected in the society. It can also involve strange beliefs about the body image where an individual assumes that he or she has a body defect.
However, based on the observation in the topic, the illness is said to have no actual treatment. The illness is considered difficult to treat. Because the disease involves the moods and the mental functioning of an individual, antipsychotic drugs are often used as a remedy. Antidepressants can also be used alongside the mood stabilizing drugs so as to minimize the symptoms of the illness. According to the excerpt, numerous psychological therapies have attracted the interests of the specialists in the delusion illness. Psychotherapy and CBT, the cognitive behavior therapy has been widely accepted and tested to help in the management of the illness.
The review on the delusional disorder was purposefully intended to assess the effectiveness of all the existing treatments for patients with the delusional illness. The research was carried out in 2012. Only one trial was discovered out of 141 citations identified. The two methodologies currently being used in the management of the delusional disorder were the cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and psychotherapy. The two strategies were measured in people who had the delusional disorder. The selected participants in the study were those who had started medication. The scope of the study was that the study could not employ any other trail or study before them, but mainly relief on their study.
The study failed to make a comprehensive conclusion citing limited data to use in the study. A comprehensive and also a firm conclusion was not achieved as the evidence available were not fully used in answering the research hypothesis. Additionally, there is no evidence of improving the behavior of people as well as their overall mental health. The study also experienced some challenges one of them being that people in the psychotherapy group left the group earlier before the conclusion of the schedule. Nevertheless, a positive effect for the category of CBT was discovered for the self-esteem of people. The topic was a trial and that, the main weakness is evidence as there were few data and trails carried out in the issue of delusion.
The findings of the study that the CBT may be an effective remedy to the delusional illness may not be used practically. The cognitive behavior therapy cannot fully help in the management of all mental illness, but generally for the cognition behavior of an individual. Thus, the evidence may not be used in practice as there is no solid evidence. The CBT is an approach, according to (Steinert et al., 2017), that can be used in treatment and management of how people think and their behaviors. However, the healing and the total cure of the delusional illness have not been linked with CBT in any trial.
- Skelton, M., Khokhar, W., & Thacker, S. (2015). Treatments for delusional disorder. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Cochrane. Retrieved 14 December 2017, from http://www.cochrane.org/CD009785/SCHIZ_treatments-for-delusional-disorder
- Steinert, C., Munder, T., Rabung, S., Hoyer, J., & Leichsenring, F. (2017). Psychodynamic Therapy: As Efficacious as Other Empirically Supported Treatments? A Meta-Analysis Testing Equivalence of Outcomes. American Journal of Psychiatry, appi-ajp.
- Vicens, V., Radua, J., Salvador, R., Anguera-Camós, M., Canales-Rodríguez, E. J., Sarró, S., … & Pomarol-Clotet, E. (2016). Structural and functional brain changes in delusional disorder. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 208(2), 153-159.