Several principles of mental disorder treatment

  Mental disorder is not an incurable disease, and most patients can be relieved and some can be cured through treatment. Treatment of mental disorders, not only can relieve the patient’s suffering, promote the patient to return to society, and reduce the burden on the family and interference with society, so easily give up is a big mistake.  Treatment generally includes the following principles: 1, comprehensive treatment: medication is the most effective treatment, the total effective rate of up to 70%, especially the efficacy of new antipsychotic drugs, with few side effects. Chinese medicine can only be used as an adjunct to Western medicine, electro-convulsive therapy is effective for refractory patients, and psychotherapy, behavior modification therapy and industrial recreation therapy can also be used as an adjunct to the maintenance period.  2. Continuous treatment: Since many mental disorders are difficult to cure, for schizophrenia even if the symptoms disappear completely, the patient’s treatment time should not be less than 3-5 years. Relapsing patients are best treated for life, and giving up medication after the initial remission of symptoms will immediately lead to relapse. The annual relapse rate for those taking medication is 20-30%, while those not taking medication is as high as 70-80%.  3, individualized treatment: because the cause of the disease is unclear, the current treatment is symptomatic, no one drug can solve all types of mental illness, so we should take into account age, weight, disease duration, symptoms and other factors, until we find an effective drug with few side effects.  4, early detection and early treatment: schizophrenia has the best efficacy at the early stage of onset and is most likely to be completely cured. However, early detection requires family members to be keenly observant and to seek medical treatment decisively without blindly delaying and avoiding reality.  5. Treatment endings: There are four endings for schizophrenia: healing, mild impairment of social functioning, and severe impairment of social functioning. The disappearance of symptoms, the patient is able to live a self-care life and willing to cooperate with treatment in medical terms is considered cured. The worst ending is mental decline, which refers to multiple episodes of symptoms, increasingly obvious symptoms such as poverty of thought, emblematic, indifference, loss of feelings and self-care ability, and complete dependence on family.