Employment experiences of 127 discharged schizophrenic men in London.

The information on the work histories of discharged schizophrenic patients presented in this paper was collected as part of a wider study of the effects of family relationships on the course of the illness in patients with schizophrenia (Brown, Monck, Carstairs, and Wing, 1962). An important detail of the design enabled a common defect of follow-up studies to be partly overcome; the clinical condition of each patient was assessed at the time of discharge and could therefore be taken into account in the analysis of events in the follow-up period. This paper has two purposes: to describe the employment history of these patients in the year after discharge, and to discuss the relationship of their work performance to clinical condition at discharge, to aspects of the past course of the illness, and to re-admission and deterioration in clinical condition during the follow-up period.