Clinical High Risk for Psychosis Syndromes Among Swiss and German Youth and Young Adults: Early Identification and Intervention

Abstract

Within the past two decades, early detection and intervention in psychosis—specifically, indicated prevention in clinical high risk (CHR) persons seeking help for mental problems—has become a topic of great clinical and scientific interest across Europe. This became apparent in the rapidly increasing number of publications on this topic between 1980 and 2008, which increased by a factor of nearly five within the first 7 years of this century. This chapter presents a case report demonstrating several factors that had to be taken into account at the early detection and intervention of psychosis service. The wide scope of early identification of a CHR state in Germany and Switzerland, that is, the consideration of BS criteria in addition to ultrahigh risk criteria, has led to a number of novel approaches that have also been adopted on a global level. With regard to early detection itself, consideration of the two approaches and their combination inspired the first symptomatic staging model of the CHR state, with Cognitive-perceptive basic symptoms describing an early stage and the emergence of attenuated psychotic symptoms and/or brief intermittent psychotic symptoms a late CHR state. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)