Adherence to Chronic Therapies in Psychiatry: From Treatment to Cure. The Relevance of Therapeutic Relationship

It has been said that, a primary determinant of treatment success is adherence to therapy [1]. A lack in adherence to psychiatric therapies has been shown to result in an increase of relapses, re-hospitalizations, evolutions towards chronicity, various kinds of psychic and somatic complications, and an increase in health care costs. According to the World Health Organization, the degree of low adherence toward medication, in all illnesses in general, is so great and the consequences are of such concern, that worldwide people would benefit more from the efforts to improve adherence than from the development of new medical treatments [2]. In Psychiatry, this problem seems to be more relevant than in the rest of Medicine. Counseling about medication adherence for the three major diseases states: in Schizophrenia, Mood Disorders, and Personality Disorders, thatis important to educate patients and their families about the consequences of not appropriately treating these conditions, which can result in psychotic attacks, increases in aggressiveness, suicides, potentially permanent losses of social skills and devastating alterations to their quality of life [3].