What do people who experience first episode psychosis want and what do antipsychotics provide?

I should go look for the research into what people want from
healthcare when they experience a crisis. Instead I'm going to guess.
I'm going to guess that most people who experience delusions or
hallucinations for the first time want them to go away, for example a
person who experiences hearing voices wants them to go away.

I just wonder if that's something that healthcare services are able to
offer? Clinical practice would be to start the patient on antipsychotic
medication. Doctors would tell the patient that this would help their
condition and reduce the voices or the delusions. However I'm not sure
that antipsychotics do that for everyone or for most people. I'm not
sure how much of the effect is from the effect of a doctor telling a
patient a drug will work.

A doctor may say to a patient that there's lots of evidence to support
the idea that antipsychotics treat psychosis. And there is in a way. The
problem is the research is actually into psychiatry's idea of
psychopathology, i.e. it's not just about the voices or the delusions.

The PANSS scale is one of the measures used in research into psychosis.
The positive and negative scales have 7 items each. Delusions is just
one of those items. Hostility, suspiciousness, grandiosity, excitement,
hallucinatory behaviour and conceptual disorganisation are the other
items on the positive scale. Blunted effect, emotional withdrawal, poor
rapport, passive-apathetic social withdrawal, difficulty in abstract
thinking, lack of spontaneity and flow of conversation, stereotyped
thinking.
There's some info on this in an old paper I read.
http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/13/2/261?view=long&pmid=3616518

I'm sure the other things are very important. I think the most important
thing is the reduction of the delusions for most people experiencing
unshared perceptions for the first time. That may be a reason why people
may willingly choose to take clozapine if given the opportunity.

This really fucks things up in a way. If people want to take a drug that
helps them and they know the risks then it's their choice. If it's true
that most people want to be rid of the delusions then I'm not sure that
a non-pharmacological therapy could do that (short of an exorcism
according to DSM-IV-TR).

I would guess that clozapine is the best at reducing the delusions
though I think it has other useful properties (which patients don't
want) which is also why it is used.

I read somewhere that 50% of patients discontinue treatment within the
first year. I'll have to find the reference for that. I don't need the
reference to guess that a high number of people taking antipsychotics
like clozapine would prefer an alternative.