The influence of diagnosis and selected variables on psychiatric inpatients\u27 opinions regarding the relative benefit of different types of treatment

The demonstration of a link between diagnostic category and treatment preference would allow therapists to use diagnosis as a guide in choosing interventions which maximize patient satisfaction. Findings that subject variables are related to diagnosis would permit tests of these variables to determine patients\u27 therapeutic preferences where diagnosis is in question. Previous research has shown that schizophrenic patients prefer milieu treatments, and are more introverted and external than manic patients; depressive patients prefer somatic treatments, and are more introverted and external than manic patients; and manic patients prefer psychotherapies, and are more extroverted and internal than schizophrenic or depressive patients. Further, patients with lower social status have generally been shown to prefer somatic and milieu treatments, while patients with higher social status prefer psychotherapeutic treatments. The present study was designed to clarify the relationships between these variables in an adult, inpatient, psychiatric sample. The subjects were 120 psychiatric inpatients diagnosed as having schizophrenic, depressive, or manic disorders. The mean age of the 72 males and 48 females in the study was 30.88 years. Subjects completed the following instruments: Patient Opinion Survey, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Internal-External Locus of Control Scale, and Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. Race was found to be significantly correlated with the patient opinion measures ($p \u3c$.01). Two-way analyses of variance, by diagnosis and race, found no significant differences regarding patients\u27 treatment preferences. Chi-square and post-hoc tests indicated that there was significantly greater extroversion in the manic sample than in the depressed sample ($p \u3c$.05). A two-way analysis of variance and post-hoc tests showed that the manic group was significantly less external than either the schizophrenic or depressed groups ($p \u3c$.05), which did not differ from each other. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients for social status and the treatment opinion scores found no significant relationships between the variables. A two-way analysis of variance of social desirability found no significant differences between diagnostic groups. Although no support was provided for a relationship between diagnosis and treatment preference, the other findings of this study generated information which may be of heuristic value to the practicing clinician