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The Influence of Group Therapy on Schizophrenia
Author(s) -
Malm Ulf
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
acta psychiatrica scandinavica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.849
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1600-0447
pISSN - 0001-690X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0447.1982.tb00288.x
Subject(s) - schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , medicine , group psychotherapy , anhedonia , adverse effect , psychiatry , social skills , pediatrics , psychology , clinical psychology
ABSTRACT The purpuse of this study was to test the hypothesis that addition of one year of communication‐oriented group therapy to a regime of neuroleptics and social skills training leads to greater improvement than neuroleptics and social skills training alone. The design was a controlled comparison over two years. Diagnostic criteria were autism, thought disturbances and ego‐disturbances and the patients’disorders were probably representative of a fairly broad spectrum of semi‐chronic schizophrenic syndromes. Eighty patients entered the study, and by randomization they were allocated to the therapy or the control group. Of the 40 patients in each group 34 completed the two‐year study. Of the 34 patients in the therapy group 23 completed‐the one year of group therapy. Treatment started in residential care and continued in open care. All patients received fluphenazine depot and social skills training. The assessment concerned symptoms and signs, social function in the community, life events, course of illness variables such as relapse rate, and a global evaluation of remission. The effectivity of neuroleptics in reducing symptoms and signs in the acute episode was confirmed. The two year outcome showed that the addition of group therapy had increasd the improvement in factors and items related to emotional communication and anhedonia, increased free‐time activities, and entries and reentries into the social field. There were more remissions in the therapy group among patients without continuous psychotic symptoms. In patients with continuous psychotic symptoms the remission rate was low in both groups. No adverse effects were shown. Despite absence of remission in more than half of the patients nearly all could be discharged. Communication‐oriented group therapy as used here, may be considered as an elementary, unsophisticated form of psychotherapy that can be applied at almost any psychiatric treatment center both in hospitals and outpatient care. The outcome pattern suggests that this kind of group therapy cannot replace neuroleptic drugs, but increases the improvement from drugs and social skills training.