Special Section on Implications of CATIE: NAMI Perspective on CATIE: Policy and Research Implications

Abstract

The Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) was designed to assess effectiveness of antipsychotic medication for people with schizophrenia. The authors, who are administrators of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), discuss CATIE and related policy and research studies and their implications. CATIE has answered some important questions for consumers and their families and raises many more. The prevalence of medical risk factors in the population with schizophrenia is an important part of advancing prevention. Poor adherence to medications randomly prescribed by CATIE physicians in a blinded procedure is also a key finding and points to the need for individually tailoring medication regimens. Policy makers may be tempted to oversimplify the results of CATIE by restricting access to the costlier second-generation medications. However, doing so will hurt clinical care, and any savings to state and community mental health programs may be illusory. Policy can be constructed to focus on clinical outcomes and not merely restrict access to medications on the basis of cost. Research is urgently needed on a new generation of medications with benign side effects and greater efficacy than their predecessors for people with schizophrenia.