Family intervention may reduce the number of relapse events and hospitalisations and would therefore be of interest to people with schizophrenia, clinicians and policy makers. However, the treatment effects of these trials may be overestimated due to the poor methodological quality. Further data from trials that describe the methods of randomisation, test the blindness of the study evaluators, and implement the CONSORT guidelines would enable greater confidence in these findings.
Schizophrenia: a study comparing a family therapy group following a paradoxical model plus psychodrugs and a group treated by the conventional clinical approach.
A 'short family therapy' in schizophrenia, according to a specific systemic model (the 'Elementary Pragmatic Model' or EPM) with a strong paradoxical structure is presented. A total of 38 schizophrenic patients, randomly allocated, were treated according to the EPM model combined with psychotropic drugs (19 cases, each of whom underwent 10 weekly sessions of family therapy) or a traditional clinical-pharmacological approach (19 cases). With regard to all measures (number of drop-outs, symptoms according to the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, social activity according to the Strauss-Carpenter Outcome Scale and an interactive test) the EPM group showed better results. It is suggested that the systemic approach could be used not only as an effective therapy model in schizophrenia but also as an intervention in addition to or integrated into an ongoing psychoeducational family therapy.