BEATVIC, a body-oriented resilience therapy for individuals with psychosis: Short term results of a multi-center RCT.

Background: Individuals with a psychotic disorder are at an increased risk of victimization, but evidenced-based interventions are lacking.
Aims: A body-oriented resilience therapy ('BEATVIC') aimed at preventing victimization was developed and its effectiveness was assessed in a multicenter randomized controlled trial.
Methods: 105 people with a psychotic disorder were recruited from six mental health centers. Participants were randomly allocated to 20 BEATVIC group sessions (n = 53) or befriending group sessions (n = 52). Short term effects on risk factors for victimization (e.g. social cognitive deficits, inadequate interpersonal behavior, low self-esteem, internalized stigma, aggression regulation problems), physical fitness and secondary outcomes were expected. At six-month follow-up, the effect on victimization (either a 50% reduction or an absence of victimization incidents) was examined.
Results: Intervention-dropout was 28.30% for BEATVIC and 39.62% for befriending. In both conditions the majority of participants (60.5% BEATVIC vs 62.9% befriending) showed a reduction or absence of victimization incidents at six months follow-up, which was not significantly different according to condition. Multilevel analyses revealed no main effect of time and no significant time x group interaction on other outcome measures. Per protocol analyses (participants attending ≥ 75% of the sessions) did not change these results.
Conclusions: Although a reduction or absence of victimization was found at short term follow-up for the majority of participants, BEATVIC was not more effective than the active control condition. No short-term additional effects on risk factors of victimization were found. Analysis of the data at 2-year follow-up is warranted to investigate possible effects in the long-term.
Trial Registration Number: Current Controlled Trials: ISRCTN21423535.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2022 van der Stouwe et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)