Background: The "Sveti Ivan" psychiatric hospital in Zagreb, Croatia, offers an outpatient Early Intervention Program for psychotic patients. This program consists of psycho-educational workshops and group psychodynamic psychotherapy. Two important objectives of the program are improving and maintaining adequate cognitive functioning.
Aims: The current study examined changes in aspects of cognitive functioning in young patients with schizophrenia after 18 months and after 3 years of psychodynamic group psychotherapy.
Methods: The study included 28 patients who attended the Early Intervention Program for young patients with psychotic disorders; 10 patients had completed only the psycho-educational part of the program (comparative group), and 18 patients continued with group psychodynamic psychotherapy (experimental group). All patients completed the Revised Beta Examination.
Results: We observed a trend in the experimental group to achieve higher scores than the comparative group. The results for both groups tended to increase with time, and this increase was greater in the experimental group.
Conclusions: While acknowledging the limitations of this preliminary study, we conclude that participating in psychodynamic group psychotherapy is related to increases in the cognitive functioning of patients with schizophrenia, and our results provide a sound basis for future research.
Keywords: Cognitive functioning; Critical period; Early intervention; Group psychotherapy; Schizophrenia.