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Abstract Background Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder, and although drug therapy and psychological intervention have made some progress, the recovery of patients’ social function remains one of the difficulties in treatment. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have shown that tourism activities may become a novel and effective intervention method due to their multidimensional social interactions, emotional experiences, and environmental stimuli. Research and explore the intervention effect of tourism activities on the social function recovery of patients with schizophrenia, in order to provide scientific basis for intervention strategies in this field. Methods The study adopted a randomized controlled design and selected 100 patients with schizophrenia in the recovery period with a disease course of more than 2 years. They were randomly divided into an experimental group (n=50) and a control group (n=50). Both groups received conventional drug therapy and psychological intervention for 12 weeks, and the experimental group received an additional group travel activity once every two weeks for two days, a total of six times. Tourism activities include natural landscape viewing, cultural site visits and team work activities. Social functional impairment screening scale, positive and negative symptom scale and subjective well-being scale were used to evaluate the patients before and after the activity. SPSS 25.0 was used for statistical analysis. Results The effect of social function recovery in patients with schizophrenia is shown in Table 1. As can be seen from Table 1, after the intervention, the social functional impairment screening score of the experimental group decreased significantly, from 8.7±2.4 before the intervention to 5.3±1.6, while that of the control group changed little, from 8.6±2.2 to 6.8±1.9, with statistical significance between groups (P0.01). The positive and negative symptom scores showed that the negative symptoms of the experimental group improved more significantly, from 46.2±7.5 to 31.5±5.8, and from 45.8±7.8 to 38.7±6.5 in the control group, the difference was significant (P0.01). In addition, the patients’ subjective well-being score showed a significant improvement in the experimental group, from 14.5±3.2 to 21.7±3.6 before the intervention, while the control group only increased from 14.3±3.1 to 17.8±3.4. Discussion The results show that tourism activities have significant intervention effects in improving the social function, relieving negative symptoms and enhancing subjective well-being of patients with schizophrenia. In addition, tourism activities can effectively improve patients’ participation enthusiasm and make them more willing to communicate with others, forming a virtuous circle. The research brings a new therapeutic idea for the treatment of schizophrenia patients. Funding No. BXLBX0932.
Gao et al. (Tue,) studied this question.