The relationship between trauma, attachment, and recovery from psychosis

Schizophrenia is a public health issue with huge costs to the sufferer, and society. The annual cost of schizophrenia is around £12 billion. Both biological and environmental factors have been shown to play a part in the development of schizophrenia. Key features include psychotic symptoms (hallucinations, delusions and negative symptoms) with accompanying poor personal and social functioning.

Associations between early life trauma and later life psychosis have been reported. However, there is a need to understand how early life trauma might contribute to the development of psychosis, to help in the treatment of psychosis. One mechanism proposed to explain the association between trauma and psychosis is disruption of childhood attachments. Attachment theory proposes that an individual's attachment style is established through the infant-caregiver relationship which influences later life relationships and ability to regulate distress in adulthood. There is significant evidence that individuals with psychosis experience difficulties in adult relationships and that these are associated with poorer outcomes, such as maladaptive recovery styles, poorer social functioning, more severe symptoms and higher relapse rates. However, most research investigating trauma, attachment, and psychosis is cross sectional and has not looked in detail at how it relates to particular symptoms over the course of the recovery period.

This PhD will explore the role of trauma, adult attachment and their relationship with specific psychotic symptoms and explore how these variables relate to each over time. It is hypothesised that trauma experiences will relate to adult attachment styles and that these will be associated with specific types of psychosis. The PhD will use qualitative and quantitative methods and will have the potential to help in the development of treatment programmes to improve recovery in people with psychosis.