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Research Article: Family in Crisis: Do Halfway Houses Perform Better Than Families with Expressed Emotion toward Patients with Schizophrenia? A Direct Adjusted Comparison

Date Published: 2024-02-01

Abstract:
Expressed emotion (EE) toward patients with schizophrenia is typically reported to be lower in psychiatric halfway houses than in families. This is the first study directly comparing EE between these settings and investigating the pathways mediating EE differences. We included 40 inpatients in halfway houses and 40 outpatients living with their families and recorded 22 psychiatric nurses’ and 56 parents’ EE, respectively, through Five Minutes Speech Samples. Each inpatient was rated by 2–5 nurses and each outpatient by 1–2 parents. As EE ratings had a multilevel structure, generalized linear mixed models were fitted, adjusting for patient-related confounders and caregiver demographics. Mediatory effects were investigated in multilevel structural equation models. Outpatients were younger, less chronic, and better educated, with higher negative symptoms and perceived criticism than inpatients. Nurses were younger and better educated than parents. Before adjustment, EE rates were equally high across settings. After adjusting for patient-related confounders, emotional overinvolvement was significantly higher in parents. However, after also adjusting for caregiver demographics, only criticism was significantly higher in nurses. Patients’ age, negative symptoms, and perceived criticism and caregivers’ age and sex significantly mediated EE group differences. Our findings highlight pathways underlying EE differences between halfway houses and families and underscore the importance of staff and family psychoeducation.

Introduction:
The family emotional climate has long been recognized as a major predictor of the course of schizophrenia along with stressful life events, reduced compliance with treatment, substance misuse, and poor premorbid adjustment [1,2,3]. The family environment is associated with the emergence of relapses through ‘expressed emotion’ (EE) [4], a construct introduced in the 1950s to describe family members’ affective attitudes and behaviors toward the patient. It refers mainly to criticism (i.e., critical or disapproving…

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