'Conditioning' Schizophrenia
- Oliver Harflett
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Foreword — the term ‘schizophrenic’ is in no way meant to dehumanise or disregard any person suffering from schizophrenia. It is meant purely from a scientific perspective and is used for the sake of brevity and readability. Sufferers must be helped as people with difficulties and not treated as ‘subjects’ of observation.
One study shows how an operant conditioning technique called shaping can be effective at treating patients who are severely ill with schizophrenia (Silverstein et al., 2001.) On the one hand, this study is uplifting because it demonstrates that operant conditioning can be an effective intervention for patients who are severely ill with schizophrenia, particularly those with attention deficiency difficulties, something that can exacerbate the symptoms and severity of schizophrenia. One of the pivotal symptoms of schizophrenia is delusional thoughts, meaning that the operant conditioning that was utilised was successfully ‘shaping’ the patient’s behaviour, appearing to reduce their symptoms, including the symptom of delusional thoughts.
On the other hand, such an optimistic conclusion should be treated with scepticism. One problem is that the researchers themselves acknowledged that there is no real way to rigorously see if a schizophrenic’s delusions have been ‘cured.’ One of the difficulties of any mental illness is relapse, and it is not currently known how often relapse from this treatment may occur, or even how to ‘maintain gains’ to take a quote from the article. The researchers themselves state that the literature on these topics is very limited. In other words, to conclude that operant conditioning can mitigate symptoms in severely schizophrenic patients is jumping the gun a bit. Another problem with this study is that because these patients were so poorly, they were not interviewed or asked if their delusional thoughts had been cured from their own perspective: they were only analysed from the researcher’s, i.e., an outsider’s perspective. Whilst it is impossible to truly see into a person’s whole psyche, one should treat an outsider’s observations of a complex and tormented psyche with healthy caution and scepticism, because it can often be inaccurate and incomplete.
A literature review showed how operant conditioning of schizophrenic patients with cerebral cortex problems (also called slow cortical potential) was able to improve and increase self-regulating behaviours in schizophrenic patients (Gruzelier, 2000). It is assumed that schizophrenic patients are much less likely to learn self-regulatory behaviours because of attentional and motivational deficits, but this literature review offers a different perspective. It is more to do with sustaining motivation towards the end of intervention programs, rather than an inherent ‘deficiency’ in the schizophrenic person that interferes with them learning how to self-regulate.
This literature review focuses on very detailed neuroscience studies that analyse very specific parts of the schizophrenic brain. Whilst such a detailed approach is admirable, this literature review doesn’t touch upon the schizophrenic trait of delusions at all. It is more of a broad-based sweep of the research studying cognitive conditioning of mental illness, rather than a specific analysis of ways to treat delusional thoughts in a schizophrenic person.
It is unfortunate that there appears to be a literature gap on curing delusional thoughts in schizophrenic patients through operant conditioning, and it would be helpful to see more research conducted on this topic. Nevertheless, based on the current literature available, and considering the arguably tenuous link between operant conditioning and mitigating delusional thoughts, I would conclude that operant conditioning seems to at least have some sort of positive effect on schizophrenia. My belief is even if such a treatment is not fully understood yet, if it helps mitigate the destructive symptoms of schizophrenia, it should be used, albeit with a healthy sense of responsibility, understanding and caution.
References
Gruzelier, J. (2000). Self Regulation of Electrocortical Activity in Schizophrenia and Schizotypy: A Review. Clinical Electroencephalography, 31(1), 23-29. doi: 10.1177/155005940003100108
Silverstein, S., Menditto, A., & Stuve, P. (2001). Shaping Attention Span: An Operant Conditioning Procedure to Improve Neurocognition and Functioning in Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 27(2), 247-257. doi: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.schbul.a006871
