Failure of antipsychotic treatment in schizophrenia is 80% according to a study by Corrigan and Weiden et al. They reported rates of pharmacologic treatment failure as 50% one year after psychiatric admission and 75% after two years. Between many factors influencing, one is the relationship between the professional and the family. There are different models of family intervention that have been effective in improving relapse rate, symptoms, social and occupational functioning, adherence and knowledge of illness and family burden (Zhang, Yan, Yao, & Ye et al., 1993).

To assess the association and strength between the performance of family psycho education groups and adherence to treatment in a schizophrenic population.

Observational non blinded descriptive study in people with schizophrenia treated in an outpatient service which has 75000 inhabitants of reference population. We divided the patients into two groups whether family psycho education was done or not in the past 5 years. In each group we randomly sampled and reached an n > 30 and then we practiced a 2-year prospective follow-up recording the following variables: diagnosis, disease evolution, comorbidity with affective disorder, GAF and CGI, type of drug treatment both at the beginning and end of follow up, number of therapeutic changes, compliance visits, number of hospital admissions, number of emergency visits and side effects tolerance. After the follow-up we will do a descriptive statistics (Student t, X2, ANOVA) through SPSS version 11.5.

Will be sent at the end of the study.