Flower arranging and schizophrenia

Schizophrenia can affect people as much from the losses - of memory and cognition - it causes as from the delusions and hallucinations it inflicts upon them. The severity of these losses predicts quality of life, social functioning and how independent people remain so anything that could restore them would have a very beneficial effect. Researchers from the National Institute of Floricultural Science in Japan have been testing out whether flower arranging can help improve cognition in people with schizophrenia. They carried out a small study comparing people who went to flower-arranging classes with a control group. The study found that the group who had done flower arranging had a better working memory and were better at copying complex figures than the other group. This was a very small-scale study though and will need to be replicated in a much larger group of patients to really prove flower-arranging's effectiveness.