[Therapy of psychoses in a hospital community]

This study at one Pavilion of Braulio Moyano Hospital allowed an evaluation of the therapeutic community method, applied in a very elastic way due to circumstances like: precarious physical commodities of the pavilion; a typical shortage of everything which became a characteristic of our hospital system; the kind of patients with long evolution psychosis; all this added to the compulsory seclusion of most of them with no friends or relatives relationship established. The pavilion's number of patients is around 110. Statistically, our patients are 67,8% older than 50, with an average age of 56,1 years. Only 19% go out of the hospital with relatives, and 34,8% of them have contact with their families once a week or every 15 days. The most common pathologies are: schizophrenia 54 patients; paraphrenia 20; feeble minded 13; and 9 with reiterative acute polymorphic delusions. Under treatment with neuroleptic drugs we have 94 patients, that is 86%. In occupational rehabilitation they are concerned with monthly luncheon, play entertainment games, go to movies, beauty parlors, ceramics, sewing activities, learning to read and write, and some parties in relevant national dates, all this at the hospital premises. In spite of all these negative facts, we can state that during the period the present study took place, 66% of all the patients released from hospital had been interned less than a year. Besides, between July 1973 and July 1974, 53 patients were released, a figure that shows relevant results for the kind of hospital we are dealing with.