Schizophrenia Research Trends

176M. Nieznański, A. Chojnowska, W. Duński, M. Czerwińska and S. Walczakobserved improvements following participation in vocational rehabilitation. It also seems thatpsychological interventions may be more successful for patients with shorter illness duration,and, when two consecutive interventions are given, for patients participating in the secondintervention.CONCLUSION• Our findings support the hypothesis that impaired insight in schizophrenia isassociated with low learning capacity. It was demonstrated in Study 1, whereunawareness of mental disorder and unawareness of effects of medication correlatedsignificantly with low learning potential, and in Study 2, where patients with lowlearning potential were less able to improve insight scores after participation inpsychological intervention.• General ability to retrieve verbal information appeared to be unrelated to illnessawareness. Moreover, the relation between the immediate recall and awareness ofpast mental disorder seemed opposite to the expected one. This finding remainsunclear and requires further investigation.• This study also pointed out the importance of illness duration as a variable affectingpatients' insight. It was showed that patients with shorter illness duration are bothmore aware of the illness and more prone to improve their awareness afterpsychological intervention.• The data from this study suggest that the relationship between symptoms and insightis rather a correlational than cause-effect relationship. Study 1 indicated thatnegative and positive symptom severity are correlated with unawareness of illness,however in Study 2 the severity of symptoms did not predict insight changes afterpsychological intervention. It is consistent with other studies that have found noassociation between changes in psychopathology and changes in insight in patientsrecovering from acute psychotic episode [Armstrongh, Chandrasekaran, and Perme,2002; Cuesta, Peralta, and Zarzuela, 2000].• The multidimensional nature of illness awareness was pointed out in both conductedstudies. It was especially apparent in case of the dimension of understanding of thesocial consequences of illness. This variable did not correlate with any of thestudied variables and did not change after psychological interventions. It is possiblethat this component is related to patients' emotions and social experiences, whileother insight dimensions are more connected with patients' knowledge about illness,and more liable to improvement following psychological intervention.• The main limitation of this study is small sample size, therefore most of our resultsshould be considered as exploratory. Moreover, we have to emphasize that ourinferences are mostly restricted to a population of outpatients with schizophreniaspectrum disorders in the remission phase of the illness, and could not begeneralized on acute patients.