Family psychosocial interventions are recommended as first-line treatments to reduce stress in families that have a member experiencing psychotic illness. Clinical strategies to be taught and practised include goal setting, problem solving, communication training, information provision and relapse prevention.

With live supervision, there is little or no separation between the mechanisms of teaching, learning, supervising and applying learning to skills deployed in the tight situational context that is the family environment. Two findings of this pilot study were that a new schema of learning was required for such training and that anxieties on all sides should be taken into account as well as evident benefits.

The discussion includes implications for researchers and future family intervention training and commissioning.