Brief description of the IPT approach

Integrated Psychological Treatment (IPT) is a cognitivebehavioral group program intended for persons suffering from schizophrenia. The goal of IPT is to enhance psychosocial functioning and patients’ abilities to cope with environmental stressors in their everyday lives.

It consists of 6 modules of increasing complexity that are delivered to groups of 8 to 12 participants, a facilitator and co-facilitator over 9 to 12 months (in 2-hour sessions twice weekly). The facilitator and co-facilitator are health professionals trained in the IPT approach. They are usually occupational therapists, psychologists, nurses, social workers or doctors-psychiatrists. They must have significant experience of customers’ psychotic disorders and a thorough knowledge of the principles and approaches to psychosocial rehabilitation.

The 6 modules are designed so that each builds on the previous module. Learning gradually takes place through a series of progressive and well-framed situations that are cognitively simple, have few social or emotional requirements, and direct the patient toward experimenting with increasingly complex situations with progressively greater relational and emotional demands. In this way, participants are gradually given exercises and placed in situations that require ever-greater skills and that increasingly approximate real life.