For the last few decades, clinical research has focused on improving early detection and treatment for young people with psychosis. Finding effective psychosocial treatments, designed to improve coping and assist in stress reduction, has been a crucial goal in this context. In particular, current evidence supports the effectiveness of two kinds of interventions: psychotherapy (mainly CBT, Family Therapy, and Psychoeducation) and cognitive remediation. However, some controversial questions still remain: Within psychotherapy, there is some debate about the differential effectiveness of discrete psychological interventions as compared with early intervention services. In contrast, within cognitive remediation, the debate revolves around the different methods of work, fundamentally the classic ones (paper-and-pencil task/top down) vs. other more basic ones (bottom-up processing). The differential effectiveness of these interventions in different age groups (e.g., adolescents vs. adults) also remains unclear. This symposium aims to provide a global vision of the different psychotherapeutic approaches for the young population with psychosis. We will present data from a discrete psychoeducational intervention (the PIENSA program), exploring its long-term benefits; from a specialized clinical center “the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC),” searching for the differential therapeutic needs in adolescents vs. young adults; and from two discrete, methodologically different cognitive remediation therapies (one top-down and one bottom-up), exploring their effects on both cognition and functioning in adolescents and young people with early-onset psychosis.
