Many people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia receive support from their family, friends or from mental health services. Typically, after a person is established in the care of mental health services, the only intervention they will receive from a mental health team is general support. Therefore we sought evidence of the effects of support from mental health services for people with schizophrenia; this commonly falls under the umbrella of 'supportive therapy'.
As we were unable to find a widely accepted definition of supportive therapy, we developed our own. We used a wide definition to include any intervention from a single person with the aim of maintaining current functioning or to assist with a person's pre-existing abilities. This includes interventions that require a trained therapist, such as supportive psychotherapy, as well as other interventions that require no training, such as 'befriending'. We did not include interventions that sought to educate, train or change a person's way of coping.
We found 21 studies that met our criteria, although much of the data were rendered unusable because of the way it was collected or presented. We were unable to make specific conclusions or recommendations for clinical practice from the results obtained. All findings are based on very few numbers and therefore have to be interpreted with caution. There does not seem to be much difference between supportive therapy and other treatment options.
We noticed that most of the studies in this review were designed to examine specific psychological therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, and that supportive therapy was uses as the comparison group. We think that future research may have a better chance of demonstrating a beneficial effect if studies are designed to have supportive therapy as the main intervention.