Subjective effects of antipsychotic drugs and their relevance for compliance and remission

Abstract

Only recently, success criteria became more ambitious and include a more thorough consideration of negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction. The most important change within the last decade is the long overdue consideration of the patient's perspective. His/her subjective well-being, often unchanged or even worsened by typical antipsychotics, was neglected for a long time. One reason was the prejudice that schizophrenic patients are not able to self-rate their quality of life. Another reason was the belief that such data are not necessary because the psychiatrists' perspective, "objective" psychopathology, includes these domains. Among other scales, a self-report instrument has been constructed to evaluate "subjective well-being under neuroleptics" (SWN). This scale was used in numerous open and controlled trials, indicating: a) patients, if no longer acutely psychotic or suffering from severe cognitive deficits, are able to reliably assess their subjective well-being, b) high SWN is correlated with high compliance, c) atypical antipsychotics increase SWN, and d) individual improvements of SWN and of PANSS are not strongly related. Moreover, several studies found that early improvement of subjective well-being is a major predictor for the chance of remission. All these data indicate that a better consideration of the patient's perspective is possible and necessary.