An Evaluation of Alumni Group Psychotherapy: For Patients Discharged From a Group Living Program

IN RECENT YEARS group psychotherapy has been used increasingly as a treatment modality for discharged psychiatric patients. Coltharp¹ briefly discusses the use of group therapy with patients recovering from psychoses. He reports that mass catharsis is noted, but that discussions tend to be impersonal. Others² have also discussed the use of group therapy in posthospitalization treatment. In this report, formal assessments of the results of a one-year program were minimal, but Blau and Zilbach² felt that patients showed improvement in socialization and marital and job adjustment. Both of these articles date back at least ten years to a period when group psychotherapy was only beginning to exercise its present impact. A more current article by Forer,₃ based on group therapy with outpatient schizophrenics, develops a theoretical rationale and describes a variety of techniques used by the group therapist. He makes