ABSTRACT
Not all people with psychosis will actively seek help, and professionals such as general practitioners (GPs) are not very well equipped to detect people with a first episode of psychosis or a developing psychosis. Most first episode psychoses (FEP) are characterised by a long duration of untreated psychosis (DUP). In the last two decades, early psychosis programmes have been developed in Australia, the UK and also in Europe and the USA. These early intervention programmes have also led to the detection of people with subclinical psychotic symptoms that do not meet the criteria for a psychotic disorder. Australian researchers in Melbourne were the first to develop criteria for the detection of people who have an ARMS (Yung et al., 1998, 2005). The criteria cover young people (14–35 years of age) in a social decline, with either a genetic risk, or attenuated psychotic symptoms, or a brief limited period of psychotic symptoms in the past year. These criteria have been tested over the last 15 years and have been found to predict the onset of a first episode of psychosis at rates several hundred fold above those in the general population (Cannon et al., 2008; Yung, Phillips, Yuen and McGorry, 2004; Yung et al., 2003).
