The goal of psychiatric rehabilitation is to restore each person’s ability for independent living, socialization and effective life management. With proper treatment and psychiatric rehabilitation, patients in the mental hospitals can come back
to the community and ex-patients recover from their mental illness to live their own life. For this purpose, antipsychotic drugs, which are effective to treatment of positive, negative and cognitive symptoms with least side effects, are essential.
The recent introduction of novel antipsychotic medication has renewed hopes and expectations that outcomes for persons with schizophrenia will be improved. More attention should be given to maximizing functioning and recovery of chronic psychotic patients rather than mere symptoms improvement. Mental health professionals must consider 4 major dimensions of outcomes by NIMH, which are the clinical, rehabilitative, humanitarian, and public welfare domains, when they treat people with chronic psychotic illnesses. Also the outcomes of antipsychotic drugs can be divided into proximal and distal outcomes. Intervention effects for a treatment are likely to be stronger and more immediate on proximal rather than on distal outcomes. Nevertheless, distal outcomes may be of major interest of patients and their families. Clinical data indicate improvement in proximal and distal outcomes, psychiatric symptoms and functions, in patients treated by novel antipsychotics combined with psychosocial
rehabilitation.
For the strategy of deinstitutionalization and restoring normal life of chronic mentally ill patients, psychiatrists should think of recovery-oriented psychopharmacology and for the maximal outcomes of this strategy, atypical antipsychotic drugs
and psychosocial rehavilitaton should be integrated.
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