Psychological Causes of Schizophrenia

New psychological treatments in schizophrenia

The first line of treatment for patients with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia is neuroleptic medication. Neuroleptics have provid ed substantial benefits to patients with this type of severe mental illness since their discovery as a treatment for psychosis in the 1950s. Despite this, there are still a large number of patients who do not respond fully to neuroleptic medication or who a...

Stages in the psychological resolution of schizophrenia

From the work of Dr. Michael Robbins in Massachusetts, USA, it is known that nine schizophrenic patients out of a series of 18, and a further schizophrenic patient, treated by him achieved positive outcomes using psychoanalytic methodology. Four of these had strikingly successful outcomes, for example completing their treatment without a need for further medication, and also becoming happily ma...

Learning Causes: Psychological Explanations of Causal Explanation

I argue that psychologists interested in human causal judgment should understand and adopt a representation of causal mechanisms by directed graphs that encode conditional independence (screening off) relations. I illustrate the benefits of that representation, now widely used in computer science and increasingly in statistics, by (i) showing that a dispute in psychology between ‘mechanist’ and...

Compliance and psychological reactance in schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVES Non-compliance with neuroleptic medication in schizophrenia is a major cause of relapse. A number of sociodemographic variables, and illness, attitudinal and treatment variables, have been demonstrated to be associated with non-compliance. The present study examined a range of these variables and their predictive value in determining past and current compliance. METHODS Thirty-nine...

Understanding what causes schizophrenia: a developmental perspective.