Social-skills Training Improves Negative Symptoms in Psychosis

NEW YORK—Social-skills training (SST) is effective for improving negative symptoms in schizophrenia, according to a new systematic review and meta-analysis.

“In terms of psychosocial interventions for negative symptoms of psychosis, social-skills training seems to perform the best,” Dr. David T. Turner of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, one of the new study’s authors, told Reuters Health in a telephone interview.

SST, offered in a group setting, is intended to develop and improve interpersonal skills, and is usually offered to people with psychosis or schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, Dr. Turner and his team note in Schizophrenia Bulletin, online November 14.

The psychological intervention was developed in the 1970s to assist psychiatric patients returning to the community, they add, and was shown to be effective for reducing social anxiety. Since then, several different types of SST have been developed, and some incorporate techniques used in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).

Negative symptoms in people with psychosis include social withdrawal, difficulty in communicating, blunted affect, and rigid or stereotypical thoughts. Most interventions and research have focused on positive symptoms, such as delusions and racing thoughts, rather than negative symptoms, Dr. Turner and his colleagues note.

The UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines recommend against SST for psychosis, and some U.S. guidelines state that SST is not effective for symptom reduction. CBT is widely used in the UK for psychotic patients, they add, but focuses on addressing positive symptoms.

Dr. Turner and his colleagues looked at 27 randomized controlled trials of SST including 1,437 people in all. Using Hedges’ “g” to measure effect size, they found SST was significantly superior to treatment as usual (TAU, g=0.3), active controls (g=0.2-0.3), and comparators pooled (g=0.2-0.3) for improving negative symptoms; it also outperformed TAU and pooled comparators for improving general psychopathology (g=0.4 and 0.3, respectively). SST had no significant effect on positive symptoms.

The effect sizes seen for SST on negative symptoms was roughly similar to that seen for CBT and positive symptoms, the researchers note, “although unlike CBT, SST is not routinely recommended in treatment guidelines for psychological intervention.”

“Further high-quality outcome research may help clarify doubts regarding the applicability and durability of SST in practice,” Dr. Turner and his team add. “At the very least, a randomized controlled trial with stringent methodology applying SST for negative symptoms in a routine mental healthcare setting is warranted.”

https://www.psychcongress.com/news/social-skills-training-improves-negative-symptoms-psychosis

2 Likes

In my opinion the worst thing to allow a schizophrenic do is to socially withdraw and isolate themselves. The more social interaction, the better coping skills they will learn to deal with stressful social situations and eventually rejoin society. That’s what happened with me.

3 Likes

Ya, I lost my ability to understand people talking right as well as reading. I’d have to constantly check back with people on what I thought I heard them say, and read the same things over and over and over.

I then made it my life’s obligation to correct those things. The 4 biggest things I did to correct this:

  1. Business for myself. I had two businesses one after the other. I got to see new customers, service agents to help my business, and my business funder on a regular basis.

  2. Joined the leagues, and I stayed in the leagues. I played in ball games all of the time, and eventually began my own teach. I coached and trained them.

  3. I put clock radios in every room of my house, and I listened to political talk AM news and interviews every single day no matter what room I was in. I stopped listening to fictional anything such as songs, TV shows, movies etc unless it was a factual documentary. I liked CSPAN. I listened to the same station in my trucks to and from work sites etc.

  4. When I got myself put back together enough I leaped out, and I found a girlfriend of 5 years on the craigslist psychology forum. She was bi-polar and stuck in life, and she had a bout of scz in the past that landed her in the hospital twice. I life coached her more than anyone else could possibly dedicate to someone. Once she was living at her mom’s house in the ghetto, fat and chubby, would never leave the house except to by food, and collected coupons online for everything, and now 6 years later she has a nice new car, works at a medical product manufacturer full time, offered management job the last I heard, and is dating someone a lot more her speed than me. They are a good match, and I’m glad she found him because of the character of his nature. He’ll protect her, and make a road to marriage I think.

Ultimately my experiment is to become rich, and measure the effects of that.

My hypothesis is that if I can eliminate the insecurity, and attract dozens of people around me as I mingle with the city, state, nation, and world, then my social skills will advance. By the way internet and travel is what the world is these days, and there are millions of millionaires made around the world every year maybe every month.

I also hypothesize that through advancing socially as I have limitations as far as expense to expend on supporting such a venture, the stress decreases, so the actual positive symptoms of scz decrease. I’ve experienced this before at times, so I’m hopeful.

Also I hypothesize that through less stresses, and more interesting things I’m doing on a regular basis, coupled with more people I’m communicating with that my mental proprioception wall will be built much more solidly. This is what I’m missing as far as my scz deficits or negative symptoms go. And I think that this is the case because of mind theory. When the only other minds you have to socially develop mind theory with are the scz apparitions, then you live out the life in delusions. Those kinds of personality traits that stem from that kind of radio head closet life wind up showing when you are out and about with other people because you don’t react to people and things like you don’t live in a world of delusions where scz apparitions are a main event every day all day.

The problem is that if you are already scz, then you have all of the delusional apparitions in your life. Once you have those, you have no more mental proprioception to determine what information is of your brain what information is from outside of yourself, and other people see that in you. They intuitively know it, and most people steer clear of this person.

That avoidance further isolates the scz, so that the scz delusional apparitions become a main staple as far as “social food” goes. The avoidance by other people simply reinstates the need for those apparitions, and it is a physical need and a deeply embedded paradigmatic world view…

…which doesn’t shut off until you have day and day after day of cars, planes, business things, people, dates, events, travel, restaurants, inviting guests for dinner and things, so that you forget about that delusional world that scz’s are in. Once you can enter the world of other people and other things, then you tend to forget about the scz delusion world. Eventually what I have noticed happening in prior long term experiments on myself was that this eventually developed a sense of mental proprioception like a wall in me.

The effects of the mental proprioception wall is like this. You would never ever be phased or believe in the garbage that you used to believe and have to deal with like it was real life when you were an scz delusional. They shrink to nothing compared to being overwhelming and all controlling of your life before.

So I’ve spent a lot of hard working years on this from the roots up as you can see, and I’m looking forward to the big experiment I outlined here at the bottom.

1 Like

What meds are u On?

The serious kind.

Do you understand my post? Talk about that instead please.

Thanks