Recovery in schizophrenia: focus on neurocognitive functioning.

Recovery encompasses symptom remission and functional elements such as cognition, social functioning and quality of life. Personal recovery is also important in illness management to help the person stay on track with treatment and focus on activities unrelated to taking medication that maintain mental health. In the present study we aimed to identify neurocognitive functioning in two clinically stable groups of patients with personal recovery and non-recovered patients. The results showered generalized cognitive deficits in both groups while the non-recovery group was more impaired in verbal and visual memory, acoustic and tactile gnosis and neurodynamics and executing functioning. Interestingly the recovery group demonstrated lack of programming of actions and sufficient error monitoring and self-correction whereas the non-recovery group was significantly more impaired in all executive domains. The obtained results could be beneficial in identifying a target for psychosocial treatments and specifically cognitive remediation for patients with schizophrenia to facilitate the process of recovery.