There is supporting evidence for this e.g Julien which found that neuroleoptics are effective in relieving positive symptoms and allow patients to be able to live outside insitutional care.This suggests that antipsychotic are effective to an certain extent in allowing schizophrenia sufferers to be able to try and live a normal life. But antipsyhotics arent effective treatment for schizophrenia because it doesnt relieve negative symptoms of schizophrenia which are the symptoms that would prevent from socializing effectively in first place.
A limitation of drug therapy is the side effects that it brings.Research shows that 26% of patients who have undertook a course of antipsychotics have developed tardive dyskenia which is a condition that causes facial tics or unvolunterary facial movements or other side effect like tiredness, weight gain and depression.This shows that the side effects of these drugs can be very severe and life changing when the course of treatment doesnt even treat schizophrenia but controls half the symptoms .This therefore gives more evidence towards why antipsychotic drugs and more importantly why drug therapy isnt an effective form of therapy for treating schizophrenia
The Main type of pyschological therapy for schizophrenia is cognitive behaviour therapy, where it mainly focuses on finding methods of coping with the symptoms of schizophrenia like self-talk, relaxation techniques or distraction techniques.The Coping Statergy enchancement was also developed to educate the patient on methods of dealing with it .Firstly came education and rapport training where the the therapist would find way to improve the coping statergies that patient has , then the therapist tries to apply a different symptom to a coping statergy to make it easier for patient, they then try these statergies in the real life.
There is supporting evidence for this.Tarrier conducted a trial with a group of patients who had undergone CSE and a control group which were on the waiting list, Tarrier found that there was a significant alleviation of positive symptoms found in the CSE group compared to the group that were on the waiting list.This suggest that CSE it is effective way to try and alleviate symptoms for schizophrenia and does make it more possible for schizophrenia patients to be able to deal with society,However on its own CBT isn't an effective form of therapy for schizophrenia because it only helps to control symptoms instead of cure them which means it could be more effective alongside another form of treatment.
A limitation of CBT is that it requires alot of effort on the side of the patient.So for example i the patient is difficult and doesnt turn up to some sessions or doesnt try with the techniques.If this happens then CBT is useless due to the fact that they have to apply and try all the techniques shown whereas in drug therapy it wouldn't be as much of a issue.So therefore the effectiveness of CBT is based on the patient which means that it isnt applicable to everyone who has schizophrenia due to the fact that they might not try as hard as others.
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