“Symptom” Remission Unrelated to Social or Functional Recovery

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/201/3/215.abstract

“The study provides an ecological validation for the symptomatic remission criteria, showing that patients who met the criteria reported fewer positive symptoms, better mood states and partial recovery of reward experience compared with those not in remission. However, remission status was not related to functional recovery, suggesting that the current focus on symptomatic remission may reflect an overly restricted goal.”

“However, the patient groups did not differ on time spent in social company and doing nothing, and both the remission and non-remission groups had lower scores on functional outcome measures compared with the control group.”

It has been my observation, and should be obvious to any casual observer, that taken as a group, individuals who have been subjected to neuroleptic drugs will not function in society (whatever that means) at the same level as a group of controls who have never ingested such substances. It is important to note that neuroleptic drugs are never administered long term in double-blind studies to “normal” controls, because that would be unethical. For those to whom they are prescribed, neuroleptic drugs always come with lots of other “baggage”, like a dire diagnosis and prognosis, hospitalizations, curtailment of liberties and other very real forms of abuse, unpleasant and possibly permanent side effects, brain and physical damage, etc. The playing field for those who have taken any significant amount of neuroleptic drugs is not and will never be level.

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