The appearance of this work marks a milestone in the systematic, controlled evaluation of the efficacy of home care as a substitute for hospitalization for acute and chronic schizophrenics used at, or shortly after, admission to a typical state hospital and involving patients having a degree of illness typically and usually treated in a state hospital incare setting. The overall finding is that, given the willingness of the family to participate, home care of serious degrees of schizophrenia is feasible, and even superior, to the incare hospitalization method usually used.
The structure of the study includes the random assignment of 152 schizophrenic patients to three treatment methods: 77 to home care with drugs; 41 to home care with placebo; and 54 to inpatient hospital care (receiving whatever care they would have gotten ordinarily in the hospital).
The overall results were dramatic, indicating that the home care with drugs