I.Q. CHANGES IN CHRONIC SCHIZOPHRENIA.

Abstract

The question of the long-stay mental hospital population has recently received a great deal of attention. Proposals, based on the statistics of mental hospital admissions and discharges over the last few years, the increasing development of day hospitals, out-patient clinics, psychiatric units attached to general hospitals, and community services for the mentally ill within the general framework of new and improved methods of treatment, have led to considerable thought as to how best to reintegrate former mental hospital patients into the community. The process of discharging long-stay patients has, of course, been continuous, but the numbers involved have been comparatively small in the past. A policy of reducing considerably the number of mental hospital beds depends partly on aiming at the highest possible maintenance capacity of discharged patients. For long-stay female patients this would involve, among other aims, the re-training in domestic skills to adequate levels, while in male patients the aim would have to be some form of industrial resettlement. The general aim of increasing the activity and skill level of long-stay mental patients has found its expression in the establishment of industrial workshops. From its early beginnings (Baker, 1956) this form of therapy has developed into the establishment of production workshops or factories both inside and outside the walls of mental hospitals. (Wadsworth, Scott and Tonge, 1958; Early, 1960; Cooper and Early, 1961; Wadsworth et al 1961, 1962.)