RESEARCH

DISAP-INSERM

The DisAP team's objective is to promote multidisciplinary health research on psychiatric and cognitive disabilities to provide evidence to guide health decisions and the choice of therapeutic strategies in real-life (ecological) situations. The final aim is to improve the health, capacities, and community integration of people with disabilities. The team's project is framed from the perspective of Health Outcomes and Health Services Research and implementation science.

The team's main areas of expertise include severe and persistent mental disorders (schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, autism spectrum disorders), common mental disorders, and head injury/stroke with a longitudinal life-course perspective (child-adolescent-adult).

The team is structured around 4 main methodological axes:

  1. Improving diagnostic (e.g., developing tools for measuring cognitive impairment, disability, and functional consequences of disorders, predicting future outcomes, and supporting compensatory measures). We are particularly interested in improving the assessment of social cognition, metacognition (introspective accuracy) functional capacity, and everyday functioning in severe and persistent mental disorders and traumatic brain injuries.

  2. Therapeutic innovations (in particular in the field of cognitive rehabilitation and remediation, development and evaluation of innovative care),

  3. Study of the healthcare pathways of the populations of interest (setting up clinical cohorts to study the determinants of disabilities and analyzing existing databases),

  4. Evaluation of health interventions and care devices for the populations of interest (measures of impact and efficiency indicators).

Lab history

DisAP is the continuation of our former team EA 4047 HANDIReSP at Versailles Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines University. We extend the founding work of Pr Hardy-Baylé about Theory-of-Mind deficit and disorganization in schizophrenia.

Impact

Our work has had several major impacts. In the field of cognitive neuropsychiatry, we contributed to the acknowledgment of deficits in theory of mind as an associated feature supporting the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the last version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM-5). Our works have also led to the development of a cognitive remediation technique for individuals with schizophrenia which is employed by a dozen of teams in France. To facilitate the dissemination and implementation of psychiatry research, we have created the Evidence Centre in Psychiatry and Mental Health (Centre de Preuves en Psychiatrie et en Santé Mentale) in France.


ECPDS_english.docx

Evaluation of psychiatric disability

We have created and evaluated several scales to help the clinician in evaluating psychiatric disability in severe and persistent mental disorders. ECDPS - Evaluation of Cognitive Processes involved in Disability in Schizophrenia (in French: EPHP - Echelle d’évaluation des Processus cognitifs impliqués dans le handicap Psychique dans la schizophrénie) is a scale measuring psychiatric disability, which can be filled out by anyone in the immediate circle of the patient, be it a family member, a close friend, or a staff member (social worker, care worker, etc.). V-MSEQ (Versailles Metacognitive Strategies Evaluation Questionnaire) is an auto-questionnaire that assesses the use of metacognitive and help-seeking strategies in three key domains of impaired daily functioning in schizophrenia.


Clinical cohorts in psychiatry

We participate in three nationwide cohorts of the Fondamental centers of expertise: FACE-BD (bipolar disorders), FACE-SZ (schizophrenia spectrum disorders), and FACE-Asp (Asperger syndrom). We investigated several clinical dimensions in these longitudinal cohorts, such as neurocognition, social cognition, metacognition, disorganization, clinical insight, functioning and quality of life.


METACTION

MetAction is an ERC funded project led by Nathan Faivre, a CNRS scientist at LPNC in Grenoble. We collaborate on the workpackage dedicated to understanding metacognitive deficit in schizophrenia.


MOSAIQUE

MOdèle de soins collaboratifs en SAnté mentale : une évaluation de l’Implémentation d’un pilote dans QUatre maisons de santE - Collaborative Mental Health Care Model: An Evaluation of the Implementation of a Pilot in Four Health Homes. This project aims to evaluate the implementation for the first time in France (in the Yvelines department) of a collaborative care model, with nurses as care managers.

Several dimensions will be documented:

1) participation (or refusal) in collaborative care

2) factors that facilitate/block this implementation at different levels (organizational, nursing home teams, professionals, patients and families....)

3) new coordination and interaction between the protagonists

4) impact according to the intensity of the implementation in terms of compliance, symptom evolution and patient and professional satisfaction

5) cost of the intervention



extrait_entretien_SIVIPSY.mp4

SIVIPSY

SIVIPSY is a pedagogical research project in health sciences involving a serious game to teach psychiatry. It involves an emotionally reactive 3D avatar allowing a virtual simulation of a psychiatric interview. It is developed with Pr Jean-Claude Martin, at the LIMSI.