Grant: Project Grant

Palliative care for mental illness - also known as palliative psychiatry - is an approach centered on the quality of life (QoL) and suffering concerns of patients and their families in situations of treatment-resistant severe and persistent mental illness (TR-SPMI). Despite the growing acceptance among clinicians toward palliative approaches to psychiatry, that ongoing 'aggressive' psychiatric interventions may not provide all patients with meaningful clinical or psychosocial benefits, or are consistent with patients' values, clinical models related to palliative care for mental illness are scarce. This project will develop practice guidance for providing palliative care for mental illness by 1) exploring the attitudes of key affected groups towards the ethical and clinical acceptability of palliating mental illness for people experiencing TR-SPMI; 2) building expert consensus surrounding the goals, clinical approaches, and access criteria for palliating mental illness for people experiencing TR-SPMI; and 3) creating a clinical practice guideline for the application of palliative approaches to TR-SPMI. All aspects of the research will be co-produced between researchers, healthcare professionals, and persons with lived experience of mental illness and their families. This project will create guidelines for palliating mental illness and have academic, clinical, policy, and public-facing deliverables. These practice guidelines will advance an innovative service model within mental health care that has the potential to address population mental health equity and promote collaboration across interdisciplinary health professions. The goal of the project is to improve the quality of care for an underserved population in health services research and health care systems.