Assessing disability in schizophrenia: tools and contributors.

Patients with schizophrenia experience disability in areas of everyday life, such as employment, relationships, and independence, even after they achieve symptom remission. Clinicians can assess patients' functional disability by using information from multiple sources (patient, family member, case worker), collecting objective information, and evaluating real-life skills and cognitive abilities with performance-based assessment tools, such as the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery or the University of California, San Diego, Performance-Based Skills Assessment (UPSA). Factors that contribute to functional disability include cognitive impairments and negative symptoms, which appear to have different effects on domains of functioning and likely require separate treatment interventions. © Copyright 2014 Physicians Postgraduate Press, Inc.