MENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH CENTER STUDY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

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The MHCRC will foster collaborative research ties and serve as a catalyst for investigators pursuing multidisciplinary research on a vulnerability/stress conception of schizophrenia. The MHCRC is structured as a set of core laboratories providing assessment, diagnostic, data management, clinical, and administrative services to 7 core and several affiliated research projects. Core MHCRC laboratories include family assessment and treatment, social skills, cognitive-psychophysiology-neuropsychology, clinical psychopharmacology, and diagnosis/psychopathology assessment. Laboratories and units conduct "R and D" work and offer assessment and diagnostic services to independently funded research projects. The research carried out by core laboratories, units and projects is united by a common vulnerability/stress conception of schizophrenia and guided by multilevel study of environmental, psychological, and biological variables. Intrapersonal vulnerability factors, interpersonal and familial moderating and potentiating factors, and stressors that precipitate or exacerbate symptoms are evaluated in correlational, interactional, treatment, and longitudinal studies. The results of these studies will give information on relapse and remission and permit the design of more focused intervention strategies for prevention and treatment of schizophrenic disorders. The efficacy of at least three innovative treatment methods that combine psychosocial and pharmacotherapy elements will be documented; social skills training and family therapy methods that have been validated will be "packaged" for dissemination in manuals. Procedures will be developed for predicting patients who are at high risk for relpase and would be candidates for specific forms of family education and therapy. Improvements will be made in technology for assessing the construct of social skills. Schizophrenic patients will be identified who are optimally treated with low dose, depot fluphenazine and evaluation of their early response to test doses will be used to predict their long-term outcome. A longitudinal, multilevel study aims to elucidate variables which predict patterns of relapse, remission and quality of life; and disseminate variables which mark trait-like vulnerability from those which are linked to symptoms of schizophrenia.