Patients with chronic schizophrenia have increasingly diminished social functioning due to prolonged hospitalization and social disconnection. Therefore, with prolonged hospitalization, patients with chronic schizophrenia develop varying degrees of social functioning deficits and psychiatric disability. Social functioning mainly includes individual family life functioning, interpersonal skills, work execution and planning, and learning ability, and different disorders can lead to social functioning deficits in different aspects or across the board. In the schizophrenic patients we studied, the deficits in social functioning were highlighted by decreased interest in the external environment, social withdrawal, and lack of responsibility and planning. Univariate analysis showed that the degree of social functioning deficits in schizophrenia patients with long-term hospitalization was significantly and positively correlated with the patient’s duration of illness, total length of hospitalization, total score on the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, total score on the Positive Symptom Rating Scale, and total score on the Negative Symptom Rating Scale; in terms of the strength of the association, the patient’s negative symptom presentation played the most significant role, followed by the total score on the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, i.e., the schizophrenia patient’s overall severity of illness, while the degree of positive symptoms had a relatively weak effect on social functioning, and two factors, the number of days of annual leave from hospital and the number of days of participation in work and recreational therapy per year, had a protective effect on social functioning. This suggests that it is very beneficial for schizophrenic patients to increase their contact with society and to receive long-term recreational therapy activities. This also suggests that open management of recreational therapy, enrichment of patients’ recuperative life, and changes in the mode of operation of psychiatric hospitals may have a positive effect on the improvement of patients’ social functioning deficits in hospitals. Similar findings were suggested by the results of multiple regression analysis, which showed that, on the one hand, the main influencing factors leading to the decline of social functioning in long-term hospitalized schizophrenic patients originated from the characteristic manifestations of the disease. The severity of the patient’s illness, especially the negative symptoms, had a greater role in influencing social functioning. On the other hand, in terms of psychosocial factors, the above long-term hospitalized chronic schizophrenia patients were predominantly male patients, accounting for 71.3%, and were older, less educated, and more than half were unmarried or divorced. At the same time, these long-term inpatients’ illnesses were prolonged, and they failed to recover well due to untimely treatment, unsatisfactory treatment results, social prejudice affecting treatment, or social and family acceptance, and were finally “arranged” by society and families for long-term treatment in psychiatric hospitals. Patients with schizophrenia who are hospitalized for a long time are separated from society for a long time and live in a closed or semi-closed psychiatric hospital environment, losing the opportunity to participate in social and productive work, and the progress of mental decline is accelerated by increasing age and physical illness. Therefore, patients’ sham discharge and participation in work recreational therapy are better for restoring or delaying the social function of schizophrenic patients. From the results of the study, we see that the causes affecting the social functioning of schizophrenia patients are both characteristics of the disease itself and psychosocial factors. This suggests that preventing and delaying social function decline or deficits in schizophrenia patients requires both strengthening the treatment of the disease, especially reducing negative symptoms; and also strengthening psychosocial rehabilitation, increasing opportunities for patients to participate in society, and increasing the time patients spend in contact with society. In addition, society and families should care more about patients, which is helpful in improving the negative symptoms of schizophrenia patients, and thus also important in improving their social functioning, improving their quality of life, and preventing their social deficits. The negative impact of the inpatient setting on mental status and social functioning has long been studied abroad, and patients who were discharged in a timely manner obtained better outcomes than those who were hospitalized for long periods of time. Although antipsychotic drugs are effective in controlling psychiatric symptoms, they have no significant effect on the symptoms of chronic schizophrenia and on social deficits and psychiatric disability. The country should be allowed to return to society in a timely manner after the remission of psychiatric symptoms. Long-term inpatients’ instincts are better preserved, while the impairment of social independence, thinking is more serious. Most of them passively obey the orders of staff and family members, cannot express their feelings, and their personal life skills are degraded, which is caused by the mechanical repetition of various dull procedures in long-term hospitalization. The stricter these procedures are, the more serious the inpatients’ social dysfunction is, and the mental activities gradually decline. The longer a patient is hospitalized, the less likely he or she is to be discharged, and the more indifferent his or her request for discharge becomes due to the severe deterioration of social functions and life skills that occurs as a result of the long-term lack of stimulation by external life events. The improvement of the overall level of social functioning, in addition to the possibility of restoring the stimulation of the realistic environment to enable patients to recover and perform family and social functions, family interventions and community rehabilitation measures also played a role, not only enhancing patients’ compliance with medication, but also significantly changing their social functioning and family functions. However, there was no significant difference in the overall level of social functioning between patients at 3 and 6 months after discharge, indicating that improving the quality of life of discharged psychiatric patients is a difficult and long-term social issue that still requires the concerted efforts of family, society, and hospital to reduce or delay the social dysfunction of patients as much as possible.