Social Skills Training for Schizophrenia?-Reply

In Reply.—  We are grateful to Drs Bel- lack and Mueser for their interest in our work and for their generally supportive comments. They raise the following two apparent concerns: (1) our alleged view that psychosocial treatment, particularly social skills training (SST), is "overly pessimistic," and (2) the possibility that patients experiencing late relapses might not develop the social skills needed for survival, an indictment of our "particular intervention," rather than SST itself.First, we know of no SST application among schizophrenic patients that has ever demonstrated persistent effects relative to controls for more than 9 months after discharge, including the important study by Bellack et al.¹ In fact, the least equivocal effects of SST with schizophrenic pa- tients seem best identified immediately after termination of brief treatment, most often among hospitalized male patients.² As such, our results indicating an effect on relapse at 1 year, as well as effects