This approach is known as assertive community treatment (ACT) and has been shown to achieve positive results in symptoms, social functioning and quality of life. Another more intense approach is known as intensive care management (ICM). ICM is a stage further than ACT and emphasises support of high intensity in smaller caseloads, (less than twenty). This approach is to provide long-term care in the community. Studies show that ICM improves many of the relevant outcomes including social functioning.Some studies have shown little evidence for the effectiveness of CBT in either reducing symptoms or preventing relapse. However, other studies have found that CBT does improve overall psychotic symptoms (when in use with medication) and it has been recommended in Canada, but has been seen to have no effect on social function, relapse, or quality of life. In the UK it is recommended as an add-on therapy in the treatment of schizophrenia. Arts therapies are seen to improve negative symptoms in some people, and are recommended by NICE in the UK. This approach is criticised as having not been well-researched, and arts therapies are not recommended in Australian guidelines for example. Peer support, in which people with personal experience of schizophrenia, provide help to each other, is of unclear benefit. Other
Exercise including aerobic exercise has been shown to improve positive and negative symptoms, cognition, working memory, and improve quality of life. Exercise has also been shown to increase the volume of the hippocampus in those with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia was diagnosed far more in the US than in Europe which used the ICD-9 criteria. The US model was criticised for failing to demarcate clearly those people with a mental illness. In 1980 DSM III was published and showed a shift in focus from the clinically based biopsychosocial model to a reason-based medical model. DSM IV brought an increased focus on an evidence-based medical model. Historical treatment
In the 1930s a number of shock procedures which induced seizures (convulsions) or comas were used to treat schizophrenia. Insulin shock involved injecting large doses of insulin to induce comas, which in turn produced hypoglycemia and convulsions. The use of electricity to induce seizures was in use as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) by 1938.Psychosurgery, including the lobotomy and frontal lobotomy – carried out from the 1930s until the 1970s in the United States, and until the 1980s in France – are recognized as a human rights abuse. In the mid-1950s the first typical antipsychotic, chlorpromazine, was introduced, followed in the 1970s by the first atypical antipsychotic, clozapine. Political abuse
From the 1960s until 1989, psychiatrists in the USSR and Eastern Bloc diagnosed thousands of people with sluggish schizophrenia, without signs of psychosis, based on "the assumption that symptoms would later appear". Now discredited, the diagnosis provided a convenient way to confine political dissidents. Society and culture
In 2002, the term for schizophrenia in Japan was changed from seishin-bunretsu-byō (精神分裂病, lit. mind-split disease) to tōgō-shitchō-shō (統合失調症, lit. integration–dysregulation syndrome) to reduce stigma.