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The Relationship Between Symptomatic Changes and Perceived Improvement Among Patients Treated in Brazilian Community Mental Health Services

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Abstract

Perceived improvement has been proposed as an important patient-reported outcome measure in mental health services evaluation. One advantage of this measure is that it can indicate whether other outcome measures, as pre-post differences in symptoms, correspond to a noticeable impact in patients’ lives, as assessed by themselves. This study investigated the association between observer and self-reported symptomatic changes and perceived improvement by patients treated in two Brazilian outpatient mental health services. Significant and positive correlations were found between perceived improvement scores and both pre-post differences, obtained in observer-reported and patient-reported symptom scores. Nevertheless, scores of perceived improvement showed to be more correlated to patient-reported than to the observer-rated symptomatic change score. In addition, a greater correlation was found between perceived improvement scores and post-treatment symptom scores, compared to pre-treatment. These results suggest that an improvement in symptom severity, measured by pre-post differences scores, corresponds to the patient perception that he is actually better than before. However, the correlations found were moderate, suggesting that other factors may also be related to perceived improvement and must be investigated in further studies.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais [Foundation of Research Support in the State of Minas Gerais]—FAPEMIG. The first author’s training at Douglas Institute and McGill University, which included the preparation of this manuscript, was funded by FAPEMIG, grant number ECT—00041-11.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei (UFSJ), Campus Dom Bosco, Praça Dom Helvécio, 74, PPGPSI sala 1.53, São João del-Rei, MG, 36301-160, Brazil

    Mário César Rezende Andrade, Marina Bandeira, Antonio Paulo Angélico & Marcos Santos de Oliveira

  2. Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Douglas Mental Health University Institute Research Centre, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Mário César Rezende Andrade & Michel Perreault

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  1. Mário César Rezende Andrade
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  2. Marina Bandeira
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  3. Michel Perreault
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  4. Antonio Paulo Angélico
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  5. Marcos Santos de Oliveira
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Correspondence to Mário César Rezende Andrade.

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Andrade, M.C.R., Bandeira, M., Perreault, M. et al. The Relationship Between Symptomatic Changes and Perceived Improvement Among Patients Treated in Brazilian Community Mental Health Services. Psychiatr Q 83, 361–370 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-012-9206-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-012-9206-6

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