The Effectiveness of Psychosocial Rehabilitation in Reducing Negative Symptoms and Improving Social Skills of Chronic Schizophrenia Patients

This study examined the effectiveness of psychosocial rehabilitation in reducing negative symptoms and improving social skills in chronic schizophrenia patients.

In this experiment 30 subjects were selected as the experimental group and 30 subjects were selected as the control group. The subjects were matched, and examined in a quasi-experimental study. To examine negative symptoms and social skills, the Scale for Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) and Social Skills Checklist were used respectively. The applied interventions (psycho-social rehabilitation) were evaluated using pretest and post-test and a three months follow-up.

After three months of rehabilitation, the experimental group demonstrated a significant decrease (p<0.001) in negative symptoms as well as a significant improvement (p<0.001) in social skills in comparison with the control group.

Compatibility of the rehabilitation program, intensive intervensions, extensive use of tokens, providing a social learning milieu, and activating the patients are among the critical factors of the effectiveness of the mentioned interventions. The results also suggest that psychosocial rehabilitation can be an effective intervention for patients with schizophrenia in Iran.