Tag: relapse rates

Antipsychotic drugs are prescribed on the basis of trials that demonstrate a higher rate of ‘relapse’ in people who are withdrawn from these drugs compared to those who continue to take them. Yet, incredibly, there is no consensus about what ‘relapse’ means in this situation.

While a 2-year outcome study by Wunderink, et al. has been cited as evidence that guided discontinuation of antipsychotics for people whose psychosis has remitted results in twice as much “relapse,” a not-yet-published followup of that study, extending it to 7 years using a naturalistic followup, finds that the guided discontinuation group had twice the recovery rates, and no greater overall relapse rate (with a trend toward the medication group having more relapse.)