Decision Making About Pathways Through Care for Racially and Ethnically Diverse Young Adults With Early Psychosis

Objective: This study elicited factors that shaped treatment decision making for young adults and their key supporters after an initial hospitalization for psychosis to generate hypotheses about how to improve service engagement.

Methods: This prospective, longitudinal, ethnographic study (using home visits, interviews, and hospital-based fieldwork) asked what mattered to 18 young adults primarily from racial-ethnic minority groups and 19 of their self-identified key supporters (N=37) as they made decisions about treatment during the 12-week critical period after an initial hospitalization for psychosis. The analytical approach used inductive coding and constructivist grounded theory methods to analyze interview transcripts and field notes from home visits and generate hypotheses about key factors that seemed to affect treatment decision making. Factors were ranked in order of frequency across all participants (overall, young adults only, and key supporters only).

Results: Among the 37 total participants (young adults and key supporters), more than two-thirds were concerned with getting back to normal, the insufficient mental health care on offer, police involvement in their pathway to care, feeling worse, and needing help with repairing strained relationships. More than one-half were concerned with how young adults would be able to live independently in the future, paying for mental health care, distrusting mental health diagnoses, managing social pressure to use substances, feeling disempowered by hospitalization experiences, and managing transportation challenges.

Conclusions: To better engage young adults with early psychosis in care, including those from racial-ethnic minority groups, there is a need to design services that address the specific concerns of their everyday lives in the context of the initial hospitalization and posthospitalization period.