Berk Michael (Orcid ID: 0000-0002-5554-6946) The Staged Treatment and Acceptability Guidelines in Early Psychosis (STAGES) Study: A randomised placebo controlled trial of intensive psychosocial treatment plus or minus antipsychotic medication for first episode psychosis (FEP) with low-risk of self-harm or aggression. Study pr otocol and baseline characteristics of participants. Brian O’Donoghue 1,2,3 , Shona M Francey 1,2,3 , Barnaby Nelson 1,2 , Aswin Ratheesh 1,2,3 , Kelly Allott 1,2 , Jessica Graham 1,2 , Lara Baldwin 1,2 ,Mario Alvarez-Jimenez 1,2 , Andrew Thompson 4 , Alex Fornito 5 , Andrea Polari 1,2,3 , Michael Berk 1,2,6 , Craig Macneil 3 , Kingsley Crisp 3 , Christos Pantelis 7 , Hok Pan Yuen 1,2 , Susy Harrigan 1,2 and Patrick McGorry 1,2 1 Orygen, The National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health 2 Centre for Youth Mental Health, The University of Melbourne 3 Orygen Youth Health, Parkville, Melbourne 4 Department of Psychiatry, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK 5 Brain and Mental Health Laboratory, Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences, School of Psychological Sciences and Monash Biomedical Imaging, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3800. 6 Deakin University, School of Medicine, IMPACT Strategic Research Centre, Geelong, Australia 7 Florey Institute for Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Australia This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/eip.12716