Ecological System Theory Under The Social Work Intervention In Patients With Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a set of common and serious mental illness, whose prevalence isabout1%of the world’s population. With the rapid development of industrialization inour country, there is a increasing trend of the prevalence of schizophrenia. Studiessuggest that schizophrenia is a group of high disabling chronic refractory disease, witha morbidity of more than75%.Schizophrenia is the leading cause of mental disability,which accounts for about80%of the mental disability. High incidence and highmorbidity of schizophrenia has severely affected people’s health and the quality of lifein China and all over the world. Therefore, the rehabilitation of schizophreniainevitably becomes the focus of the research in various fields. In so far,there is not aclear statement for the causes of schizophrenia.But the universal consensus is thatschizophrenia is the result of the interaction between genetic factors and socialpsychological environment factors, which genetic factor plays a leading role andsocial psychological environment factors play an important trigger factors.There are alot of researches on the factors that affect patient rehabilitation.Generallyspeaking,the factors that affect the rehabilitation of schizophrenia and lead to mentaldisabilities, including disease factors (including disease subtypes, clinicalsymptoms,duration and recurrence rate, etc.), drug therapy factors (includingtreatment compliance, treatment effect,etc.) and social psychological factors(including the marital status, family economic, family atmosphere, family attitude,caring situation, personal stress event processing capabilities, etc.).According to factors activate the disease and factors that affect diseaserehabilitation, many intervention model was proposed and validated slowly. In earlytimes, people believed that schizophrenia could lead to brain function disorder, so thedopamine research became popular.According to the hyperactivity of dopaminesystem in patients with schizophrenia symptoms, antidepressant drugs were produced.Although it was the main method used in the treatment of schizophrenia, but theresearchers also found that it was only partly useful for patients with positivesymptoms such as hallucinations, fantasy and some curative effect.And it alsorequired patients to get a high drug dependence to achieve such effect. It was uselessfor patients with schizophrenia who got words and deeds troubles, impaired cognitiveand so on. In this case, a lot of psychiatric or scholars in psychological field began to study the patients’ living environment.They found social psychological environmentfactors were also the important factors that affected patients’ rehabilitation. Under theguidance of these theories,new intervention models such as psychologicalintervention, comprehensive rehabilitation, life skills training and family therapymodel appear,as the addition to the single medical model.Under the demonstration in small range, these models are useful for relief of thepatients with negative symptoms,but there are also some disadvantages. First, they arewidely used in the nursing home, mental hospitals with a fixed places and so on, it isdifficult to promote in a wide range of popularization; Second, the patients willultimately go back to the community and society, the effect could not be endure ifthere are no intervention to conducive factors to the rehabilitation in the life system.Moreover, multiple factors affect the patients’ recovering and integrating into thesociety.It can not be solved by personnels in one field.It needs a comprehensiverelated resources in every field and the cooperation with each other.Initially social work was born as a way to solve social problems.Besides it itselfis a resource, it is also good at connecting and integrating various resources to helpthe clients. Disability service is one of the areas of social work involved early.There isa relatively complete set of intervention modes. For schizophrenia patientsrehabilitation intervention, there are mature modes in foreign countries and HongKong.But in China, this service is generally conducted by psychiatric medical staff,psychologists, Physical therapists etc..Social work involves few in this field.But can social work do something in the spirit rehabilitation and socialrehabilitation for patients with schizophrenia? The author did some practice under theperspective of ecological system theory in T town social work center.She linked localrehabilitation resources and intervened into conducive factors to the rehabilitation ofschizophrenia patients in T town from micro and meso systems by case management,family therapy, emotional supporting network building, barrier-free communityadvocacy, mental health knowledge lectures, the Mid-Autumn festival entertainmentactivities and so on.The results show that social work can intervene into the rehabilitation ofschizophrenia patients to improve patients’ medication adherence,extend the patient’sfamily supporting and peer group supporting networks,strengthen family memberssupporting network, rich patients’ life, enhance patients’ social skills and improveliving community environment of the patients in a small scale.