The effect of involuntary antipsychotic medication: protocol for a systematic review

Summary

Most of what we know about the effect of antipsychotics comes from studies in which patients receive medication voluntarily.  In a real life setting, there are also patients who receive antipsychotics involuntarily. The purpose of this systematic review is to shed light on whether and how the treatment effect of antipsychotics is altered when treatment is involuntary, in people diagnosed with psychotic disorders.

To identify relevant publications, a research librarian will search databases such as MEDLINE, EMBASE and PsycINFO after the development of an appropriate search string. We will include studies published between 2010 and 2020 that investigate the effect of antipsychotics in involuntary treatment versus voluntary treatment in people with psychotic disorders. Two researchers will independently evaluate titles and abstracts of the identified research papers against the selection criteria. Then, two researchers will independently evaluate the full text of all papers that are considered relevant for inclusion after reviewing titles and abstracts. We will extract and analyse data from the final included papers, assess their methodological quality, and assess  our confidence in the results with appropriate checklists and tools. The overall results will be presented and published in a report.