Therapist ratings of achievement of objectives in psychotherapy with acute schizophrenics

Abstract

Therapist ratings of patients' achievement of objectives in psychotherapy were used to examine the impact of drugs on psychotherapy, to identify attributes of patients who achieve therapy objectives, and to assess the importance of the implementation of a crisis-oriented model of therapy. Patients were part of a project investigating the long-acting phenothiazine fluphenazine enanthate and crisis-oriented family therapy in a 6-week program of aftercare treatment for briefly hospitalized first admission acute schizophrenics. The 44 patients in this study were randomly assigned to the psychotherapy condition and to either a high or low dosage of phenothiazines. Therapist ratings of the achievement of therapy objectives were significantly related to independent ratings on two outcome measures, the Global Assessment Scale and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) factor Thought Disorder, at 6-month followup. Analyses of predictors of the achievement of therapy objectives revealed significant interactions between drug level and Venables and O'Connor ratings of paranoid symptomatology among good permorbid patients and between drug level and BPRS ratings of Hostility for the entire sample.