A psychoeducative-cognitive group setting for patients with schizophrenia: Making use of newly gained neuroplasticity

Atypical antipsychotics may support neuroplasticity and improve cognitive functioning in patients with schizophrenia (1,2). However, if these substances increase neuroplasticity and enable for learning systematic additional psychoeducative and cognitive treatment will be needed to exploit this enriched capacity. Therefore, we have been developing a systematic psychoeducative and cognitive group treatment setting easily applicable, dynamic and meeting the individual needs of in- and outpatients with schizophrenia.

Each lesson’s topics are separate elements of a dynamic set of all topics.

Patients choose individual elements each lesson and for the whole course; they mark them in a network-figure of all topics.

The topics include psychoeducative, cognitive and quality of life issues.

Meeting patients’ immediate needs each lesson with following a comparable but individual path thru a controlled and established set of topics combines maximum motivation and responsiveness to patients’ needs with controlled and comparable contents of each lesson. We will present first results on the implementation of this psychotherapeutic concept and the effect on neurocognition.

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Gemperle et al. Neuroscience 2003; 117:681–695