Publications by authors named "Mintz J"

Measures of familial emotional climate and communication deviance, obtained when subjects were adolescents, were used to predict social adjustment 15 years later. The results showed that disturbed family functioning predicted poor quality of later intimate relationships, but did not predict other dimensions of adult social functioning.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Plasma fluphenazine concentrations (FLU) were measured in 45 patients with schizophrenic disorders who participated in a double-blind comparison of 5 and 25 mg fluphenazine decanoate (FD). The rise in plasma level of FLU 24 h after a "test dose" was significantly correlated with steady state FLU concentration at 12 weeks (for 5 mg patients, r = 0.45, P = 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Courts have found psychiatric patients to have the qualified right to refuse treatment. Particularly problematic is whether newly admitted psychiatric patients can comprehend information and give informed consent. The authors examined the ability of voluntary and involuntary psychotic patients to understand information about antipsychotic medication, related this assessment to psychopathology, and evaluated factors involved in hypothetical acceptance or refusal of treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Improvement in depressive symptoms was significantly related to a decrease in subjective memory complaints in 29 elderly depressed outpatients. Patients with substantial improvement in their depression showed similar reductions in memory complaints regardless of whether they received tricyclic antidepressants or group psychotherapy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Blood pressure measurements were collected from 36 depressed geriatric outpatients (ages 55 to 81 years) enrolled in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of the efficacy of doxepin and imipramine. Mean systolic postural changes were 25.9 mm Hg for imipramine, significantly higher than the 10.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Most people would agree that a relationship exists between drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, but there is very little empirical evidence demonstrating a direct causal association. Study of the relationship has been hampered by the lack of a simple laboratory methodology. This article describes an efficient experimental paradigm.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In a randomized controlled study, the affective style (AS) of parents of schizophrenics in clinic-based individual treatment groups and home-based family treatment groups was compared prior to treatment and again three months after treatment had begun. Affective style is an index reflecting the quality of the family emotional climate, measured from face-to-face discussion. Pretherapy and posttherapy measures of negative AS were significantly predictive of relapse within the nine-month treatment period for patients in individual treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The relative costs and benefits of low- and conventional-dose neuroleptic maintenance therapy were evaluated in a double-blind comparison of 5 and 25 mg of fluphenazine decanoate administered every two weeks. Subjects were 50 patients fulfilling DSM-III criteria for schizophrenic disorder who had been successfully maintained with 25 mg or less of fluphenazine decanoate. A one-year survival analysis disclosed that there were no statistically significant differences between the two doses insofar as preventing relapse.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Two concurrent studies of geriatric outpatients who received diagnoses of depression were conducted. In the first, patients were treated with one of two tricyclic antidepressants or with a placebo. In the second, patients were assigned to groups receiving either psychodynamic group therapy or cognitive-behavioral group therapy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Two studies compared propoxyphene napsylate (Darvon-N) with methadone hydrochloride as maintenance treatment for narcotic addicts. Most measures indicated that methadone was more effective than propoxyphene as a maintenance drug. Patients receiving propoxyphene reported more withdrawal-related symptoms early in treatment, tended to drop out sooner than patients receiving methadone, and were more likely to abuse heroin.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Malan has argued forcefully that meaningful measurement of outcome in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy requires a complex clinical-judgment process by an expert clinician that is based on a psychodynamic hypothesis. Information pertaining only to symptom status before and after treatment was abstracted from each of 18 case summaries published by Malan. Each of these abstracted "cases" was related by a nonprofessional judge for global improvement and by me for symptomatic improvement.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF