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Category: Project

Description: Background: Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) leads to functional impairment and a decrease in the quality of life for those affected. Treatment strategies involve trauma-focused psychotherapies. Intensive treatment with therapist rotation is a novel and effective approach for treating CPTSD. This approach has been tested in European countries, but we do not know whether it will be accepted in Chile, a Latin American country. Aim: To assess the local acceptability of a two-week intensive treatment program for adult inpatients diagnosed with CPTSD in a Chilean acute psychiatry unit and the need for a cross-cultural adaptation. Methods: This will be a pilot clinical trial without a control group in which eight adults diagnosed with CPTSD, hospitalised in an acute psychiatry inpatient unit, will be treated with a two-week intensive program of daily Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), psychoeducation, and physical exercise with therapist rotation. Based on the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability (i.e., affective attitude, burden, ethicality, intervention coherence, opportunity costs, perceived effectiveness, and self-efficacy), the patient’s acceptability will be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively at the end of the intervention with a semi-structured-interview-, a thematic analysis, and a self-administered Likert-scale questionnaire. We expect that participants’ opinions regarding “affective attitude” (i.e., how an individual feels about the intervention) and “ethicality” (i.e., the extent to which the intervention has a good fit with an individual’s value system”) will be informative regarding the need of cross-cultural adaptation of intensive treatment.