Thesis (Ph. D. (Nursing))--Chulalongkorn University, 2009

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effect of the symptom selfmanagement program on psychotic relapse for patients with chronic schizophrenia. This study was randomized control-group pretest-posttest design. The sample included 80 patients with chronic schizophrenia at a psychiatric hospital. The experimental group received the symptom self-management program together with the conventional nursing care, while the control group received only the conventional nursing care. The psychotic relapse was measured by the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). The Kolmogorov Smirnov Z was conducted to data analysis. The findings revealed that the psychotic symptoms in experimental group in 1 month after receiving intervention were lower than that of the control group. The psychotic relapse rate of the control group was 69.2% (9 cases) as compared to 30.8% (4 cases) in the experimental group. In addition, the proportion of patients in the experimental group after receiving the intervention had lower psychotic relapse than the control group (Kolmogorov Smirnov Z=4.52, p-value=0.05). The findings have implication for clinical practice for prevention of psychotic relapse for patients with chronic schizophrenia through changing their cognitive perceptions and encouraging them to use their own management strategies