Efficacy of open-system social skills training in inpatients with mood, neurotic and eating disorders.

Open-system social skills training (SST) was performed in an open psychiatric ward of the hospital of Yokohama City University. Between June 1998 and March 2000, 223 patients were being treated for various mental disorders and 136 of these patients voluntarily participated in the open-system SST at least once. The SST participants' ages were 37.2 +/- 16.9 years and the admission period was 102.6 +/- 61.4 days, while non-participants' ages were 49.8 +/- 18.8 years and the admission period was 71.8 +/- 55.6 days. The correlation between participation time and the admission period showed a ratio of approximately 0.5. As for diagnoses, schizophrenia, eating disorder and personality disorder patients tended to participate in SST, while organic mental disorder patients tended to be non-participants. After October 1998 there were 26 patients continuing to attend SST who participated in the evaluation study that compared social skills estimation before SST with that after SST by self-evaluation and by the staff using a social skills questionnaire. After SST sessions, the average staff evaluation score was 43.9% in schizophrenia, 64.4% in mood disorder, 64.9% in neurotic disorder and 55.3% in eating disorders, while they were 29.1%, 33.8%, 44.4% and 34.5% before the sessions, respectively. After the SST sessions, mood disorder patients showed a 25-30% increase of both self-estimation and staff estimation in all subcategories of social skills. These findings suggest that SST was effective for all patients motivated to improve their social skills despite diagnoses and that the SST program had different effects in each diagnosis group.