MARTY MOSS-COANE: And Dr. Anthony Salerno is with us as well, director of rehabilitation services at Rockland Psychiatric Center in New York. Nice to have you with us, as well.
ANTHONY SALERNO, PH.D.: Thank you.
MARTY MOSS-COANE: Dr. Battaglia, perhaps I'll begin with you. What is the common treatment for schizophrenia?
JOSEPH BATTAGLIA, MD: The mainstay has been medication. There have been some recent developments, but prior to the last 10 years, the mainstay was medications that blocked dopamine. What they would do was reduce hallucinations and delusions. But they didn't improve someone's cognitive abilities. They didn't improve their emotional feelings. If anything, dopamine is in the reward system, so if you block dopamine in someone, they actually feel less of a reward for something that would make you happy if you did it. There was a realization that just by reducing hallucinations and delusions didn't guarantee someone was going to get better.
The newer medications may improve, or at least don't make cognitive functions worse, but there's an appreciation now that that just brings them to be able to participate and get more from therapies. There's evidence to show that cognitive therapies are very helpful, vocational, reintegration with work, family therapies -- that the three combined actually give someone the best chance of continuing to do well.
MARTY MOSS-COANE: Let me turn to you, Dr. Salerno, about the rehabilitation process and what you find works with someone with schizophrenia.
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