Minimal-medication approaches to treating schizophrenia

Abstract

UK guidelines for treating people diagnosed with schizo phrenia currently emphasise the primacy of antipsychotic medication, with or without psycho-socially based interventions as circumstances dictate. We now see increasing calls, most notably from mental health service users, for the provision of ‘whole-person-based’, minimal-medication approaches to treating people with this diagnosis.

This article is intended to locate the development of such approaches within the history of modern and pre-modern psychiatry and, in doing so, summarise the available evidence base that underpins their efficacy.