Research Article The Effect of an Educating versus Normalizing Approach on Treatment Motivation in Patients Presenting with Delusions: An Experimental Investigation with Analogue Patients

Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Until recently a widespread recommendation for clinicians was not to respond to the content of patients ’ delusions but to stress at an early time point that the patient has a mental illness (educating approach). An opposed recommendation is to validate the patients ’ symptoms and normalize them (normalizing approach). This study used an experimental design to compare the impact of these two approaches on treatment motivation (TM). A cover story about a person who develops persecutory delusions was used to guide a sample of 81 healthy participants who served as analogue patients into imagining experiencing delusions. This was followed by a random assignment to either an educating or a normalizing consultation with a fictive clinician. Consultations only differed in content. Finally, we assessed the participants ’ motivation to accept medication (Medication TM), psychological treatment (Psychological TM), and treatment offered by this particular clinician independent of the kind of treatment (Clinician-related TM). Participants in the normalizing condition showed higher Clinician-related and Psychological TM than those in the educating condition. Medication TMwas unaffected by condition. Following our results using a normalizing approach seems to be advisable in a first-contact situation with patients with delusions and favourable to a simple educating approach. 1