EDITORIAL

摘要

Issues of IJPCP traditionally contain a broad range of reports from around the world, and this issue is no exception, being concerned with the outcome of psychosis, the introduction of electronic medical records into routine clinical practice, the problems experienced in general hospital settings, and a series of intriguing biological investigations.To start, Wolter and colleagues (Bad Zwischenahn, Germany) describe a naturalistic prospective evaluation of the one-year outcome among 106 patients with schizophrenia, which found that whilst almost 30% were significantly improved, only 13.2% met criteria for symptomatic remission at follow-up. This rather stark finding is balanced by the report from Wolstencroft and colleagues (Wollongong, Australia), which describes the development of a structured interview schedule to assess the stage of psychological recovery from enduring mental illness: in-depth interviews with 18 users of mental health services provide some support to the arguments of those who espouse a 'recovery' model, emphasising the need for affected individuals to accommodate to persistent psychotic symptoms.