Early Intervention in Psychiatric Disorders Across Cultures

This volume emerges as a result of a dialogue that involves leading proponents of early intervention and global mental health in a variety of contexts. Since the revival of early intervention for psychotic disorders two decades ago, the early intervention paradigm has been elaborated and consolidated in a number of different cultural and clinical settings, and has also been developed to address other mental health conditions. The paradigm for early intervention involves addressing barriers to early detection of illness, the identification of early risk states, as well as the provision of specialized intervention to steer the psychopathology trajectory away from an adverse outcome in a timely fashion. This volume starts with a discussion of relevant cultural factors involved in these endeavours. Current ideas about brain changes in the different stages of the illness trajectory are then reviewed. This is followed by a discussion of real-life implementations of early intervention for psychosis in a number of different cultural settings, highlighting how the basic paradigm for early intervention has been adapted to different populations in diverse service settings to improve outcome. The second major theme of this book is about the application of this paradigm to other mental health conditions that share an onset around the youth developmental period. These disorders include personality disorders, substance use disorders, and bipolar disorder. Each of these disorders has a different early presentation trajectory, which brings specific challenges. Current approaches and future prospects in addressing these challenges are discussed.