Social skills training and schizophrenia

People with chronic schizophrenia can lack social skills. They find it hard to hold conversations with people, make friends or solve problems. Poor social skills are closely related to repetitive recurrences of schizophrenia and rehospitalizations and have been reported as important factors affecting prognosis. Patients with chronic mental illness can also suffer from low self-esteem which impedes effective interpersonal relationships and negatively affects their abilities to cope with stress and problems. Raising self-esteem is one of the most important ways of preventing recurrence and ensuring long-term success in rehabilitation among patients with chronic schizophrenia. Social skills training has been proven to be effective when delivered by psychiatrists and psychologists but little research has been done into the effectiveness of nurse-led social-skills training. A Korean study divided 66 patients into two groups comparing a nurse-led social-skills training programme with a control group. After 16 sessions those people who had received social-skills training showed a significant improvement in their conversational, interpersonal and assertiveness skills and had higher self-esteem although their problem-solving ability had not improved.

Seo, Ji-Min ... [et al] - Social skills training as nursing intervention to improve the social skills and self-esteem of inpatients with chronic schizophrenia Archives of Psychiatric Nursing December 21(6), 317-326