What's a medication group?
For therapists interested in a didactic model, a Medication Group can be an ideal vehicle for patient education. Our patients are remarkably well informed on dopamine, tardive dyskinesia, side effects, types and levels of drugs, early symptoms, individual stressors and coping mechanisms. They request and titrate drug levels according to their own identification of symptom distress. There is no question that the ability to control their symptoms and medications is a positive and important experience for them. The focus for this paper, however, has been an exploration of a group therapeutic strategy which deals with the phenomenological needs of chronic schizophrenics to address the residual or negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and not their educational needs.