Mindfulness is a packaged intervention with current popularity in East Sussex, and this study explores how it is embedded in mental health services, the processes of the gathering and presentation of evidence, how the experience of patients is organizationally shaped and the importance of indirect interventions. These forms of interventions are what has been termed ‘choice architecture’ by proponents of the ‘nudge agenda’, describing the way that decisions and behaviour are influenced by how the choices are presented or designed . I want to explore the feasibility of applying indirect interventions to mindfulness in order to increase take-up rates, evaluative mechanisms and follow-up support, based on the patient perspective. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) was recommended by NICE in their guidelines in 2004, was brought fully into the mainstream and has now been specifically adapted for psychosis. My research is on the interaction between mindfulness as an innovative therapy, a marginalised group of people who experience psychosis, and the currently popular behavioural economics (nudge) agenda. The nudge agenda is being promoted on the basis of cost-effectiveness, the aptness of its ideology to the current political climate, and its evidence base in particular case studies. The use of creative indirect interventions such as nudge, ‘when carefully crafted and applied’, can be ‘a positive means of communication between physician and patient’
