The place for nidotherapy in psychiatric practice

On the clinical utility and empirical verification of nontraditional interventions: Nidotherapy as exemplar

“…Nidotherapy appears to be a useful intervention for patients wherein aspects of the environment maintain or exacerbate their pathology. To date the majority of evidence bearing on the effectiveness of nidotherapy has taken the form of case reports, or qualitative studies examining therapist and patient perspectives on the strengths and limitations of nidotherapy . Although controlled clinical trials have produced somewhat mixed results, preliminary findings regarding reductions in health care cost savings are promising, and continued exploration of the clinical utility of nidotherapy is clearly warranted.…”

From the Editor's desk

“…Society is unfair and discriminatory. Last month I was trying to improve a patient's home environment as part of the treatment called nidotherapy (Tyrer et al , 2007) and was attempting to talk to a well-built neighbour whom my patient had identified as difficult and interfering. She did not particularly want to engage with me and after a few minutes, in what I remember as an unnecessarily loud voice, threatened to ‘knock me down’.…”

Nidotherapy compared with enhanced care programme approach training for adults with aggressive challenging behaviour and intellectual disability (NIDABID): cluster‐randomised controlled trial

“…Nidotherapy is a new treatment approach that attempts to treat the problems of aggressive challenging behaviour in a different manner, not by treating the behaviour directly, but by changing the environment to create a better fit between the person and society (Tyrer et al 2003). It can be applied to many different mental health problems (Tyrer et al 2007a) and is normally well accepted by people with chronic mental health problems when other interventions have failed (Spencer et al 2010). The evidence base for the efficacy of nidotherapy comes from case reports (Tyrer 2002), qualitative and cohort studies Spencer et al 2010), and a randomised controlled trial (Ranger et al 2009;Tyrer et al 2011).…”