Enhancing work functioning in early psychosis

Abstract

Introduction The period since the mid 1980s has seen the development of a new paradigm aimed at early intervention in first-episode psychoses (FEP). Central to this change in approach has been a discarding of the pessimistic neo-Kraepelinian picture of schizophrenia as a biological disease with inevitable decline, which was not borne out by the findings of long-term outcome studies (Rees et al., 1998). Instead, premised on vulnerability-stress models (Nuechterlein et al., 1992; Zubin & Spring, 1977), the importance of early intervention and the delineation of a ‘critical period’ (Birchwood & Fiorillo, 2000), in which there was potential to limit the extent of disability caused by the psychot..