Factors Influencing the Personal Recovery in Outpatients With Schizophrenia

Abstract

Objectives: This study aims to quantitatively investigate factors influencing personal recovery in patients with schizophrenia.Methods: This study included 168 outpatients treated for schizophrenia. Patients’ sociodemographic factors (sex, age, education, and marital status), clinical factors (duration of illness, number of hospitalizations, and dose of drug), symptoms, behavior and symptoms, physical and mental health, family attitude, social support, attitude toward drug therapy, insight, self-esteem, hopelessness, and self-stigma were analyzed. The analysis included these 17 factors as explanatory variables for personal recovery to perform regression analysis.Results: Backward elimination was used to select variables, and multiple regression analysis was performed. The five factors (symptoms, self-esteem, insight, physical, and mental health, and social support) accounted for 75.8% of the variance in patients’ perceived willingness for personal recovery.Conclusion: Personal recovery in schizophrenic patients is very important because it means subjective satisfaction and quality of life in society. In this study, social support was the most important variable in predicting personal recovery. These results imply that not only symptoms but also various factors including social support should be emphasized when establishing a recovery strategy for schizophrenic patients.