Development of a Talk Therapy Protocol to Help Patients Make Treatment Decisions in MS

Between 15-20% of MS patients decide not to initiate disease modifying therapies after being diagnosed with MS. For this study, we will develop a telephone-based talk therapy intervention and then conduct a randomized controlled trial. Patients will be assigned to either 5 weekly 20 minute telephone sessions of psychotherapy or a brief education control condition. We hypothesize that patients undergoing phone therapy will be more likely to indicate they are interested in initiating disease modifying medications than patients given brief education and treatment as usual.