Social skills training for chronic psychotic patients: A French study

Abstract

SummaryThe aim of this article is to describe the cognitive-behavioral methods for social rehabilitation and psychotherapy of chronic psychotic patients which are nowadays available in French-speaking countries, then to propose a theoretical framework to help integrate these various methods for use in our duly pratice and, finally, to expose our research in this field, especially concerning the topic of quality of life and social skills training programs. We present a study we designed in order to assess the impact of a comprehensive social skills training program upon quality of life of chronic schizophrenic patients. Starting from the point of view that a good psychosocial rehabilitation program is one that improves social skills and social functioning without negative effects on quality of life, we tried to show such qualities in a quite comprehensive rehabilitation program using social skills training methods corresponding to the social readaptative “modules” from Liberman and Wallace's Social and Independant Living Skills Program — “medication management module” — followed by “basic conversational skills module”, and finally, a brief adapted version of “interpersonal problem solving skills module”. We were able to observe the evolution of social skills and functioning of eight schizophrenic patients having benefited from this program, over a one year period, and we compared results regarding quality of life with two control groups made of schizophrenic patients, one of them having benefited from a supportive group therapy in order to study the impact of non-specific factors. The results indicate a clear dissociation between direct benefits of social skills training (knowledge, social skills, social functioning and symptomatology) which all showed a significant improvement in the experimental group, and subjective benefits (self-esteem, sense of self-efficacy, quality of life) which showed no change, as well when consider no intra-group as well as between group comparisons.