SZ psychological Treatment: ACT (assertive Community Treatment) Flashcards
ACT SZ
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Assertive community therapy involves a multi-disciplinary ( psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors and social workers)
team of professionals with a staff patient ratio of 1:10 to increase the frequency of staff patient contact
Patients live at home and staff visit them at least 120 minutes per week for individualized help on meeting goals such as:
making friends, doing the shopping list, living independently and reminding them to take their drugs
The staff are available 24/7 the patient entire lifetime
The program aims to get patients functioning as a member of the communicity to reduce rehospitalizations and to live independently without aid (tho this rarley occurs)
And is primarily used for the patients who need this therapy the most as they have the worst symptoms
ACT SZ
individualised + holistic
Act is not a one size fits all approach like antipsychotic drugs but it is a bespoke and individualized treatment focused on the needs of that individual patient throughout their entire life
big ol strength as more likley to work
ACT SZ
reduces rehosp and no side effects and willingness +
Act reduces rehospitalisations and has no side effects than like all anti-psychotics have various side effects that vary from major motorc side effects to blurry vision toAgrannlocytosis
Meaning it is more likely between courage schizophrenic patients to stay on the app to treatment in comparison to the anti-sychotics due to be lack of side effects
ACT SZ
encorages independance and re into comunity+
It encourages independent living within the community directly
not just being able to be able to do it with other treatments such as antipschotics
but ACT actively helps SZ patients integrating the back into the community
Therefore it encourages independence and re-admittance into the community
ACT SZ
long term good+
It is effective long-term as act is ongoing for the rest of the patient’s life
with only the goal of them being independent despite this very rarely occuring
staff are available 24/7 even in emergencies to the rest of their life
which is a staple to the treatments longevity
Also similar to antipsychotics which can be taken for the rest of the patient’s life
But this is individualized help forever
ACT SZ
Limited access to act in a rural areas -
Limited access to act in rural areas
either due to a lack of funding or a lack of cases being diagnosed as there is usually more in an urban hospital than a rural clinic
either way this means that schizophrenic patients in rural areas have no access to act
whereas they would be able to actually access to anti-psychotic drugs
showing how it is a more widespread treatment and act with a weakness of act
ACT SZ
Self-report is bad- SDB
The successive act treatment is measured on a self-report general assessment of thinking scale or Gaf
self-report data is usually susceptible to social desirability bias
as schizophrenic patients may lie and say their treatment is working to get off of it as they don’t really like it
meaning it is difficult to validlly know if the treatment is effective or not
this is a weakness of assertive community therapy
ACT SZ
social control -
Act maybe considered as a method of social control
as it imposes a social Norm as a threshhold to aspire to during treatment
molding patients to society not moulding Society to them
this is apparently considered to be unethical
ACT SZ
forever -
While one of the main goals act is to get patient living independently within the community
it is often more likely than not that they will continue to be treated for the rest of their lives
this could be considered as a failure of the treatment as its main aim is never achieved
ACT SZ
expensive as Fuck fr fr no cap -
It can be incredibly expensive to implement ACT especially for multiple patients for their entire lives
as you have to pay many many different staff and among other payments it’s increases over time
therefore it is far more expensive than antipsychotics which are mass produced very cheaply
ACT SZ
doesnt realy treat SZ -
not know if this or antipsy effective -
It doesn’t actually treats gets freely or any of its symptoms it just Focuses on adapting patients to live in the community independently and we hospitalizations
This can be considered as a weakness of the treatment
To counteract this, act is often taken alongside antipsychotics and therefore it is difficult to know whether act or antipsychotics or both
are the ones showing the improvement in the patient’s condition
meaning that you cannot accurately establish the cause in cause and effects meaning that the treatment lacks internal validity
ACT SZ
CBT as an alt -
CBT or cognitive behavior therapy
is a better treatment as it can help patients thinking patterns and give them skills in dealing with their symptoms in situations that are likely to provoke them
unlike act which doesn’t do anything along the lines of coping with schizophrenia
meaning that CBT is a better treatment than acts which is a weakness of act
ACT SZ
poor communication in team bad-
It is important that the small multi-disciplinary team of professionals work well together
as Poor communication between them leads to ineffective support of the 10 times larger number of patients they support
which is a burden on the staff’s mental health which may lead to burn out
which limits the treatment effectiveness on patients more
and may be detrimental to staff health
ACT SZ
Van Vugt et al 2011 +
Study of act in the Netherlands wanted to look at the outcome of individual using act programs and see how closely the original model of programs they have to do to get good outcomes
they studied 530 patients from 20 different outpatient treatment teams
collecting data 3 times in the study
collected information of the number of hospital days and homelessness in a two-year follow-up study
they found that team structure was the most important factor for better outcomes
and it was better to stick to the original model about which depends strongly on the structure of the team
Therefore van vugt et al 2011 support acts as a treatment of schizophrenia
ACT SZ
van vugt 2011 complement
When they compared act with over variants and it was found to be most likely to have good effects
is good evidence as it directly Compares it to other similar variations of the same kind of treatment of schizophrenia
this shows it to be better than the alternatives and therefore a valid comparison between different versions of common psychological treatments of schizophrenia
via Direct comparison in objectively measured quantitative tests for example
the days of re-hospitalized and the days spent homeless which was objective and valid
Therefore van vugt et al 2011 is good evidence to support act as a treatment of schizophrenia
