Young people with social disability and severe and complex mental health problems have poor outcomes, frequently struggling with treatment access and engagement. Outcomes may be improved by enhancing care and providing targeted psychological or psychosocial intervention.

We aimed to test the hypothesis that adding social recovery therapy (SRT) to enhanced standard care (ESC) would improve social recovery compared with ESC alone.

A pragmatic, assessor-masked, randomised controlled trial (PRODIGY: ISRCTN47998710) was conducted in three UK centres. Participants (n = 270) were aged 16–25 years, with persistent social disability, defined as under 30 hours of structured activity per week, social impairment for at least 6 months and severe and complex mental health problems. Participants were randomised to ESC alone or SRT plus ESC. SRT was an individual psychosocial therapy delivered over 9 months. The primary outcome was time spent in structured activity 15 months post-randomisation.

We randomised 132 participants to SRT plus ESC and 138 to ESC alone. Mean weekly hours in structured activity at 15 months increased by 11.1 h for SRT plus ESC (mean 22.4, s.d. = 21.4) and 16.6 h for ESC alone (mean 27.7, s.d. = 26.5). There was no significant difference between arms; treatment effect was −4.44 (95% CI −10.19 to 1.31, P = 0.13). Missingness was consistently greater in the ESC alone arm.

We found no evidence for the superiority of SRT as an adjunct to ESC. Participants in both arms made large, clinically significant improvements on all outcomes. When providing comprehensive evidence-based standard care, there are no additional gains by providing specialised SRT. Optimising standard care to ensure targeted delivery of existing interventions may further improve outcomes.