We went to many cities in Scandinavia, talking, training and working with patients to demonstrate an active treatment approach to the psychotherapy of schizophrenia. Even though the treatment in these counties, as far as psychotherapy was concerned, was from a historical point of view, psychoanalytic, we found that our presentations stirred up a great deal of interest in active approaches and were gratified in seeing that many of our Scandinavian colleagues began to see that passivity and neutrality were no longer useful. I must also state that some other professionals initiated their own active treatment approach and several developed training centers to help interested professionals and students learn some of these more active treatment techniques. So it is impressive to see people who have had a more traditional approach to treatment change their system of delivery after long periods of time. This includes biological and psychosocial treatment.
Medications often fail to remove symptoms especially the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
It seems that all effective treatments are effective only as long as they are actively used. However, McGlashlan does indeed talk about some of the successes he acheived as a psychotherapist. I wonder if he is referring to much of the treatment failures of inadequate treators. That isn t mentioned very much. If you are familiar with the work of Robert Liberman, William Anthony, Julian Leff in England and a number of other contributors to the psychosocial rehabilitation efforts, no one in my opinion, has integrated any kind of psychotherapy with their psychosocial efforts.