Recorded mental health recovery narratives for people with mental health problems and informal carers: the NEON research programme including 3 RCTs (Priebe, 2025)
Mike Slade, Stefan Rennick-Egglestone, Yasmin Ali, Chris Newby, Caroline Yeo, James Roe, Ada Hui, Ashleigh Charles, Laurie Hare-Duke, Luke Paterson, Sean P Gavan, Emily Slade, Yasuhiro Kotera, Stefan Priebe, Graham Thornicroft, Jeroen Keppens, Rachel Elliott, Kristian Pollock, Julie Repper, Dan Robotham, Donna Franklin, Rianna Walcott, Julian Harrison, Scott Pomberth, Melanie Smuk, Clare Robinson, Tony Glover, Fiona Ng, Joy Llewellyn-Beardsley
Programme Grants for Applied Research, Vol 13, Iss 09 (2025)
Background Personal narratives describing recovery from mental health problems are widely available to the public. We developed theory on the characteristics and impact of recovery narratives, developed curation procedures for the NEON Collection of 659 recovery narratives and developed and evaluated the NEON Intervention, a theory-informed web application providing access to the NEON Collection. Objectives To evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the NEON Intervention as compared to usual care and whether this varies by prior health service usage. Design Three pragmatic parallel-group randomised controlled trials of the NEON Intervention. Intervention arm participants received immediate access. Control arm participants received access after a 52-week follow-up. The effectiveness analysis was a linear regression model of outcome at 52 weeks. The cost-effectiveness analysis compared the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio to the £20,000–30,000 threshold defined in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence reference case. All analyses were intention-to-treat and baseline-adjusted, with multiple imputation for missing data. Setting England. Participants All trials recruited people who were aged 18+ years, resident in England, capable of accessing or being supported to access the internet, able to understand written and spoken English and capable of providing online informed consent. NEON Trial participants also had experience of mental health-related distress in the last 6 months, and psychosis in the previous 5 years. NEON-O (i.e. non-psychosis) Trial participants also had experience of mental health-related distress in the last 6 months, but with no psychosis in the previous 5 years. People identifying as informal carers for people affected by mental health problems but not eligible for the NEON Trial or NEON-O Trial were recruited to the NEON-C feasibility trial. All inclusion criteria were self-rated. Recruitment was from March 2020 to March 2021, through public communications by the central study team, and the work of clinical support officers at 11 secondary care research sites.