Also, when we look at the entire picture of treatment with this condition, it is quite evident that treatment is either inadequate, begun too late, or both. Some years ago at Chestnut Lodge a well known American institution, Thomas McGlashlan did a retrospective study and found that psychodynamic psychotherapy failed to resolve the schizophrenic episode in more than seven percent of the population that were treated there. I think that the efforts at that hospital have been quite successful but have been not discussed well enough to identify and define what represents success. As I mentioned, one of the significant issues in treatment failure has to do with not recognizing the need to institute treatment quickly enough when the early stages of schizophrenia are recognized. In a recent addition of the Schizophrenia Bulletin, which is published by the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States, McGlashlan stated, that current treatments for schizophrenia are extracting diminishing results, they are also limited and palliative, this includes biological and psychosocial treatment.
Medications often fail to remove symptoms especially negative symptoms.
It seems, he says, that all effective treatments are effective only as long as they are actively used. Once you remove the treatments, patients according to him, tend to regress. That is his point of view, I do not think that he is right. What he stated in his article appears to be in conflict with some other remarks that he made, to the effect that he has successfully treated schizophrenic patients with a long history of that condition using psychotherapy. It seems that McGlashlan's recent interest in concert with Faloon of New Zealand, along with a number of other distinguished researchers, from Australia and Norway who are making efforts to find the predictors of schizophrenia, could be responsible in further diluting the necessary concentration on better treatment and rehabilitation measures that will enable the professional world to focus their efforts on the many millions of patients throughout the world, who have been abandoned and forgotten because of the severity and length of their mental illness.