Psychotherapy and recovery from schizophrenia: A review of potential applications and need for future study.
- 1 January 2010
- journal article
- review article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Psychological Services
- Vol. 7 (2), 75-91
- https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019115
Abstract
Recovery from schizophrenia has been conceptualized to involve not only symptom remission of symptoms and achievement of psychosocial milestones but also subjective changes in how persons appraise their lives and the extent to which they experience themselves as meaningful agents in the world. In this paper we review the potential of individual psychotherapy to address these more subjective aspects of recovery. Literature on the effectiveness of psychotherapy for persons with schizophrenia is discussed and two different paths by which psychotherapy might modify self-experience are described. First we detail how psychotherapy could be conceptualized and tailored to help persons with schizophrenia to construct richer and fuller narrative accounts of their lives including their strengths, challenges, losses and hopes. Second we explore how psychotherapy could target the capacity for metacognition or thinking about thinking, assisting persons with psychosis to become able to think about themselves and others in a generally more complex and flexible manner. The needs for future research are discussed along with a commentary on how current evidence- and skill-based treatments may contain key elements which could be considered psychotherapeutic.Keywords
This publication has 84 references indexed in Scilit:
- Mentalization: Ontogeny, Assessment, and Application in the Treatment of Borderline Personality DisorderAmerican Journal of Psychiatry, 2008
- Emotion word use in the conversational speech of schizophrenia patientsCognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2008
- Mental state decoding v. mental state reasoning as a mediator between cognitive and social function in psychosisThe British Journal of Psychiatry, 2008
- Self construction in schizophrenia: A discourse analysisPsychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 2008
- A meta-analysis of controlled research on social skills training for schizophrenia.Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2008
- Reflective-functioning during the process in brief psychotherapies.Psychotherapy, 2006
- Scientific and Consumer Models of Recovery in Schizophrenia: Concordance, Contrasts, and ImplicationsSchizophrenia Bulletin, 2005
- The Danish National Schizophrenia Project: prospective, comparative longitudinal treatment study of first-episode psychosisThe British Journal of Psychiatry, 2005
- Dimensions of Premorbid Functioning in Schizophrenia: A Review of Neuromotor, Cognitive, Social, and Behavioral DomainsGenetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 2004
- Why Do People With Delusions Fail to Choose More Realistic Explanations for Their Experiences? An Empirical Investigation.Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2004