Hypnosis for schizophrenia

Many people with schizophrenia continue to experience symptoms despite the use of conventional treatments. Alternative therapies such as hypnosis, in conjunction with conventional treatments, may prove beneficial to them.

To investigate the use of hypnosis for people with schizophrenia or schizophrenia-like illnesses compared to standard care and other interventions.

We searched the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group's Register (January 2003), contacted the Cochrane Complementary Medicine Field for additional searching, hand searched references of included or excluded studies and made personal contact with authors of relevant trials.

All randomised or double blind controlled trials that compared hypnosis with other treatments or standard care for people with schizophrenia.

Studies were reliably selected, quality assessed and data extracted. Data were excluded where more than 50% of participants in any group were lost to follow up. For binary outcomes we calculated a fixed effects risk ratio (RR) and its 95% confidence interval (CI).

We included three studies (total n=149). When hypnosis was compared with standard treatment no one left between 1-8 weeks (n=70, 2 RCTs, Risk Difference 0.00 CI -0.09 to 0.09). Mental state scores were unaffected (n=60, 1 RCT, MD BPRS by 1 week -3.6 CI -12.05 to 4.8) as were measures of movement disorders and neurocognitive function. Compared with relaxation, hypnosis was also acceptable (n=106, 3 RCTs, RR leaving the study early 2.00 CI 0.2 to 2.15) and had no discernable effect on mental state (n=60, 1 RCT, MD BPRS by 1 week -3.4 CI -11.4 to 4.6), movement disorders or neurocognitive function. Hypnosis was as acceptable as music (Sibelius) by 4 weeks (n=36, RR leaving the study early 5.0, CI 0.3 to 97.4).

The studies in this field are few, small, poorly reported and outdated. Hypnosis could be helpful for people with schizophrenia but to ascertain this requires better designed, conducted and reported randomised studies.