Performance of long-stay schizophrenics after drug withdrawal on matched immediate and delayed recall tasks

Both anticholinergic and neuroleptic drugs were withdrawn from eight long-stay hospitalized chronic schizophrenics. These patients and normal controls were then tested on Calev, Venables & Monk's (1983) immediate and delayed matched recall tasks to evaluate their rate of forgetting of verbal well-encoded materials. The results showed rapid forgetting in schizophrenics. This finding suggests that a post-encoding deficit characterizes long-stay schizophrenics after drug withdrawal. Cognitive and brain pathologies that may explain these results are discussed.