Apart from drugs, uk clinical guidance is for cbt, arts therapies and family interventions.
That's it. That's all. Cbt doesn't work according to the science but its better than nothing. The high quality trials show it is ineffective compared to control treatments, treatments which are recommended against for some reason.
I don't know enough about arts therapies to say if they're a valuable treatment. Again, they're better than nothing but there's a wide range of "better than nothing" therapies to chose from.
Family therapy is not something I would want when I'm in crisis or perhaps even at any time. It may work for some people and I'm lucky in that though I have no connection with my family they're still caring enough to house me when I'm in need and put up with my bad behaviour when I'm in crisis. Sometimes that is all mental health services care about - not having to provide a service.
There's so much more need though. For a start there needs to be specific recommendations for first episode psychosis as well as repeated episodes and continued treatment. There needs to be recommendations for patients who are hospitalised long term because the occupational therapies just consume time and I don't know how much value they have. There is a desperate need for high quality recommendations for treatment resistant schizophrenia - at the moment doctors kill their patients with the drug clozapine and there are no other recommended treatments of any kind. Clozapine can kill quickly and definitely reduces life expectancy.
Of course the key problem in writing national clinical guidelines is there's no good evidence for any of the treatments apart from the chemical cosh. The science of the cosh is flawed in my opinion and doesn't promote well being nor improve quality of life for many. It certainly doesn't reduce the significant disability of schizophrenia and neither do current clinical guidelines.
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