2 - (SYM 91) An Adjunctive Family Intervention for PTSD: Addressing Family Member Goals for Involvement in PTSD Treatment

Recognition of the bidirectional dynamic between social support and PTSD symptom severity has prompted the development of family-inclusive approaches to PTSD treatment. However, these approaches require 8 or more conjoint sessions, which may be unappealing or infeasible for some families. To meet the need for briefer family-inclusive protocols, we have developed the Brief Family Intervention for PTSD (the BFI). The BFI is a two-session intervention, delivered one-on-one to a family member as the person with PTSD is beginning their course of individual trauma-focused treatment. The BFI was preliminarily tested in a pilot RCT (N = 20 dyads) and reduced dropout from patients’ individual treatment by 50% (Thompson-Hollands, Lee, et al. 2021). The protocol is now being tested in a larger multisite clinical trial with Veterans and their family members.

This presentation will provide an overview of the BFI and current implementation. Mixed-methods data from the ongoing larger RCT (current N = 62) will be used to demonstrate family members’ perceptions of acceptability of the BFI and retention rates in the intervention. The BFI has a 100% retention rate across both the pilot and current RCT. Qualitative data from interviews with FMs, analyzed using a rapid coding approach, will be presented to highlight reactions of family members to the BFI.

The presentation has several strengths, including providing an introduction to a brief, feasible model of family involvement in PTSD treatment, presenting data from two RCTs comparing the BFI to a non-family-inclusive control condition, and drawing from mixed methods to more comprehensively describe feasibility, acceptability, and fit with family members’ goals. Limitations include a relatively homogeneous sample of participants (largely cisgender men with PTSD and their cisgender women romantic partners, 95% non-Hispanic, 78% white). These demographic features limit our ability to extend findings to minoritized dyads of various types. The presentation will explicitly address the potential biases in the data given the demographics of the sample and provide background context from prior studies of more diverse samples.