How Do Occupational Therapists Work with Cognitive Interventions in Psychiatry and Mental Health? A Systematic Literature Review

Background: While cognition is the dominant view of understanding in psychology, there appear to be few occupational therapy interventions within this field that are cognitive. Objective: A systematic literature review was conducted to identify how occupational therapists work with interventions that are cognitive in the field of psychiatry and mental health internationally. Methods: Searches were conducted in the Academic Search Elite, CINAHL, PubMed, OVID Medline, Google Scholar, AMED, OTSeeker, PsycInfo and Cochrane Library databases between the years 1997 to 2017 and identified 21 publications for inclusion. Results: Three themes were identified and consequently discussed: Occupational therapy as a cognitive intervention, specifically named as cognitive interventions used by occupational therapists and multi-professional cognitive interventions. Conclusions: The findings indicate that interventions used by occupational therapists on a broad range of psychiatric diagnoses contain everyday occupations such as cooking, grocery-shopping and occupations meaningful to the client. These occupations are the notion of occupational therapy while simultaneously improving the cognition and can be considered to be cognitive. This connection needs to be researched further in the future. Significance: Occupational therapy interventions can be considered to improve on cognition and are therefore important in psychiatry and mental health.