Serious Mental Health and Sexual Health

Serious Mental Health and Sexual Health

Lead: Professor Elizabeth Hughes

Collaborators: Simon Gilbody, Tim Doran, Noreen Mdege, Ijeoma Onyekwe

Background:

People with serious mental illness engage in sexual activity
there is evidence that they experience higher rates of exploitation and violence, as well as STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and blood borne viruses

Theories proposed to explain this include:

acute exacerbation of psychiatric symptoms
co-morbid drug and alcohol problems
previous experience of sexual abuse
sexual stigma
lack of social skills (assertiveness, negotiation re condoms etc)

Year 1 research plan:

No UK research into sexual behaviour in people with SMI
We need to understand the sexual behaviours in order to start to design interventions to promote sexual health
We also need to understand how mental health clinicians screen, assess, signpost, provide education re sexual health.
Work Plan
focus groups with clinical staff
focus groups with service users
pilot the NATSAL-3 (UK general population sexual behaviour survey) with a sample of service users (acceptability, feasibility and validity of this survey) (can then compare with
normative data

CLAHRC YH PhD Studentship

Samantha Gasgoigne was awarded a full time studentship January 2014- end 2016. Her aim is to explore and understand the intersection between having a serious mental illness and sexual health and behaviour.

External Funding

NIHR HS&DR application 2015: The aim of this research will be to understand the NHS current response to sexual health and mental health, identify gaps and needs, and develop care pathways and training resources to address those gaps to ensure that people with mental health problems have parity of access to sexual health information, advice, screening and if need be treatment. (£500K)

NIHR PGfAR (or HTA) application 2016: aim to develop an intervention to promote sexual health amongst people with mental illness and problems of addiction. This will form the basis of a trial which will recruit across CLAHRC-YH (£2million).