An examination of components of recovery after five years of treatment in an early intervention program for psychosis

Recovery from psychotic disorders includes both symptomatic and functional components. Progress in understanding recovery requires careful replication and extension of findings using comparable measures. In the current paper, we present a study of five year recovery rates in an early intervention program in London, Canada with the same operational criteria as those used in a previous report from the OPUS cohort in Denmark. Our analysis extends the OPUS reports by including additional potential predictors of overall recovery, such as cognitive functioning, adherence to medication and early social support, and examining rates and predictors of individual components of recovery at five year follow-up. Consistent with reports from OPUS, we found younger age of onset and lower initial severity of negative symptoms to predict greater likelihood of overall recovery. Different patterns of predictors emerge when we examine individual components of recovery. Adherence to medication during the first year was the sole independent predictor of remission of positive symptoms, while early social adjustment and social support were more likely to predict negative symptom and functional aspects of recovery at five years. Cognitive functioning, as represented by IQ, did not predict any aspects of recovery. Our findings suggest the importance of examining the predictors of individual components in the quest to improve overall recovery.