PANSS and BPRS are two of the measures of effectiveness of treatment in trials for schizophrenia. Only one of the measures within those supra-measures is delusions and hallucinations.
I think so anyway. I have to double check PANSS and check BPRS.
This idea may be obvious to a psychiatrist wh understands the multifaceted treatments and what they actually achieve based on the research evidence.
It's a guess on my part and perhaps their part that if a review of trials was done which drilled into the measures to pick out the sole measure patients who accept psychiatric treatment for mental illness want - the reduction of the specific symptom of hallucinations, delusions or alterntive experiences of consciousness - it would show consdierably less effectiveness to the point of insignificance comapred to placebo.
Why I'm so sure is I've read two stufies which I'm sort of join together as an effect. Medication works on a biomedical model backed by placebo controlled high quality studies. One piece of evidence is clozapine, the most dangerous psychiatric medication, only reduces the delusions in some patients. This is from a qualitative paper, hence the quantification using the word sum, written by the company which makes the drug and was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
The other bit of evidence is the Rosenthal study into expectations and teacher effects. What I took from the study is not what's commonly known. What's disseminated about this study is the author's conclusions. The effect of telling teachers kids were smart made them smarter. This is true. Except in older kids in the study. They seemed to be indifferent to this effect.
What if the effect on delusions is not what's achieved by major tranquilisers. What if this effect is only achieved by the effects of expectation by doctor and patient? What if it is a placebo effect and the sole purpose of 'antipsychotic' medication is to subdue a person to remove behaviour rather than treat the concept people know as psychosis?
And where are my chocolate salty balls? Oh. Sorry. Firmly in the mouths of the RCPsych.
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