Family Counseling & Talk Therapy More Cost-Effective Schizophrenia Treatment: Study

A new study, published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, suggested that family counseling and talk therapy are more cost-effective in treating early schizophrenia.

Schizophrenic individuals suffer from a sudden break from reality. They tend to have their own world and getting along with them can be a struggle, especially when they start to be violent.

Sending a family member suffering from the condition to a treatment program is costly but there are new approaches that prove to be cost-effective in handling schizophrenia.

Aljazeera America reported that there is a new government-funded schizophrenia treatment program that involves talk therapy and case management. A new study about this program revealed that it is more cost-effective than the traditional treatments.

According to The New York Times, the traditional outpatient care only provides those services covered by the insurance including drugs and some psychotherapy. This new program, which is called Navigate offer other forms of supports in school, job hunting, and family counseling.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) backed up this new program. It also involved what researchers called as coordinated specialty care for people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which affected an estimated 3 million people in the United States.

An October 2015 study examined Navigate's effectiveness against the traditional schizophrenia treatment. The researchers learned that those patients under the new program showed better outcomes in their interpersonal relationship and participation in work or school.

The earlier the patients were enrolled, the better their condition has become -- especially when they started the treatment soon after their first episodes of psychosis.

In the new study, the researchers from Yale School of Medicine examined the cost and treatment outcomes of 404 patients who were randomly assigned to Navigate or a standard community program from July 2010 to July 2012.

The researchers learned that, while Navigate costs about $3,600 more annually compared to the standard care, the patients enrolled in the program had shown "significantly greater improvement" in their lives in those two years than those who received standard care.

"Health service costs are, not surprisingly, somewhat higher when the mental health system provides the full range of services these young people need at a very vulnerable time in their lives," said Robert Heinssen, director of the division of services and intervention research at NIMH. "But these additional expenses have now been shown to be worth the investment in improving individuals' health and functioning."

The researchers added that the Navigate program cost could be lessened by roughly $2,000 annually if the patients can access generic anti-psychotic drugs.

"The value of the achieved clinical benefit [of coordinated specialty care programs] appears to justify these additional expenditures, especially for clients with shorter [duration of untreated psychosis] and when generic prices for anti-psychotic medication are applied," the researchers wrote.