Cognitive enhancement therapy for Schizophrenia

Therapy Improves Social Skills of Schizophrenics

Guang-Shing Cheng

[Clinical Psychiatry News 27(12):30, 1999. 1999 International Medical News Group.

PITTSBURGH -- Cognitive enhancement therapy targeting social cognition may help patients with schizophrenia regain control of their lives, Gerard Hogarty said at a conference on treating psychoses sponsored by the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.

"Patients get into trouble and have failures in their lives, not because their attention span is bad or their working memory is bad," said Mr. Hogarty of the institute. "Something else is going on."

That something, he and others suspect, is a problem with social cognition -- the ability to analyze interpersonal relationships.

Some adult patients with schizophrenia have social skills similar to those of a normal 10-year-old child. These individuals are egocentric, have difficulty taking the perspective of another person, can't read social contexts, and have problems resolving interpersonal conflicts.

Cognitive enhancement therapy aims at jumpstarting an individual's social cognitive ability. The groups of six to eight participants are led by a coach who uses the Socratic method to push the patients to a higher level of abstraction.

Normal adult thinking is also fostered by small-group exercises, such as explaining the social themes of an op-ed article. Participants in the group learn how to give and receive feedback by critiquing each other.

For patients who are withdrawn, cognitive enhancement therapy is a means toward secondary socialization, in which they learn the rules and vocabulary that are important in everyday social interactions. It emphasizes perspective taking and context appraisal.

In a preliminary study of 55 patients with schizophrenia, those who were assigned to receive cognitive enhancement therapy had significant improvement on indices measuring disability -- such as work potential and mental status -- compared with those who were receiving personal therapy, Mr. Hogarty said at the meeting, also sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh.

In addition to making strides in social cognition, these patients also had better scores on the classic neurocognitive tasks, such as attention and memory.

Replies:

Re:Cognitive enhancement therapy for Schizophrenia, by Pyatt, Tamara, 04/04/01 Re:Cognitive enhancement therapy for Schizophrenia, by John Good, 04/19/01

| Behavior OnLine Home Page | Disclaimer |

Copyright © 1996-2004 Behavior OnLine, Inc. All rights reserved.