Co-morbidity of alcohol use disorders and mood disorders presents great challenge to health systems and exact a tremendous toll world-wide. Individuals with the dual disorder have more severe symptoms, greater disability and poor quality of life than those with either diagnosis alone, and pose a greater economic burden to society due to their higher use of treatment services. We seek to develop a new, enhanced, efficient, innovative and cost effective treatment strategy aimed at reducing the burden that the disorders impose on the suffers and their families as well as the community and health systems. In a pilot trial of supportive text messages for patients with alcohol use disorders and comorbid depression, we established that patients who received twice daily supportive text messages for three months had significantly less depressive symptoms than those who did not receive such messages. There was also a trend to finding that patients who received the supportive text messages were more likely to have higher cumulative abstinence duration than those who did not receive any supportive text messages.
This research seeks to extend the knowledge gained from the pilot trial. We will conduct a randomised trial on a larger sample size of patients with an alcohol use disorder and a comorbid mood disorder (including bipolar depression) for an extended duration (6 months supportive text messages and 1 year follow-up instead of 3 months text messages with 6 months follow-up in the pilot trial). We hypothesis that patients receiving supportive text messages would report significantly greater cumulative abstinence duration as well as significantly less relapses, hospitalizations and mood symptoms than those not receiving such messages. The technology would also be acceptable to patients as well as cost effective.
