Cognitive Adaptation Training for Schizophrenia

This is a review of what's said about schizophrenia in popular media, scientific literature, and other sources. Attention to this information may influence treatment planning and improve patient care.

Signs typically involve speech (or inability to speak), thinking, and movement. They may also include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized or paranoid behaviour, and auditory, visual, and tactile hallucinations.\n

Shorter hospitalizations in schizophrenic patients who take atypical antipsychotics are mainly attributable to other treatment regimens and not only to their antipsychotic effect; this pattern of shorter hospitalizations is not seen in those who take typical antipsychotics.

Psychosis is not curable. The only way to cure is to help everyone experiencing psychosis to feel they have a great future and to be happy. Psychosis can be treated with good psychosocial support but more research is needed to examine which specific treatments are successful.

The incidence per year of those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia is 24.44. This is one of the highest in the world and higher than that of many other Western nations.

The first signs of schizophrenia appear in very young children and young teens. The onset is characterized by hallucinations that may resemble normal childhood experiences, such as seeing a cartoon character that walks backwards to the other side of the screen. Children in the early stages of the condition may be confused due to the hallucinations or simply get lost in it. Some may stop playing and become withdrawn, while others may become aggressive or fearful. The hallucinations soon decrease in intensity and the child is able to tell the difference between a mental illness and the normal childhood experiences. Eventually, the child may be diagnosed, most often by a psychiatrist or a psychologist in the private or public sector.

There is an increased prevalence of schizophrenia in some demographic or socioeconomic groups. There is an inverse relationship between duration of illness and the prevalence of schizophrenia. The cause of schizophrenia remains unknown. The impact of schizophrenia has been a major problem for human society. One of the things that is different between patients, and researchers, is the duration of the lifetime, which plays a very important role in the progress of the illness.

Cognitive adaptation training represents an intriguing therapeutic approach for patients with schizophrenia and may be useful for modifying the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms responsible for relapse after admission.

Cognitive adaptation/response prevention treatment is generally considered to be more effective than standard cognitive-behavioral therapies in the treatment of schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. Patients with schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder who have poor response to standard CBT have a higher likelihood of responding to cognitive-adaptation-based interventions than patients who are responsive to CBT in standard treatment protocols.

Cognitive adaptation training is an effective tool for improving the functioning of chronically ill patients. It can also be used to reduce psychotic symptoms in those patients.

Because the family aggregation of non-affective psychosis (i.e., personality disorder, and schizophrenia) seems to be stronger than that of schizophrenia, family aggregation might be expected to be an important feature of familial transmission of non-affective psychosis. This is inconsistent with the findings of a study on parental and children’s risk factors of schizophrenia that a strong family aggregation of schizophrenia exists in children but not in their parents. It is possible that in family-based research of schizophrenia, the parental generation might not be of appropriate age.