[Self-administration of drugs in an open psychiatric unit].

In 65% of the rehabilitation wards on Bavarian psychiatric hospitals, medication is not distributed by nurses but is collected by the patients in the nurses' room. For 159 patients, data on their reliability in this procedure were obtained. Patients generally come for their medication with considerable reliability. Patients suffering from schizophrenia were unreliable during the first week of treatment. During the last week of treatment, however, their reliability improved. The improvement of reliability was high for patients of higher education, productive psychotic symptoms at the beginning of the treatment, good response to neuroleptic medication, or first manifestation of the disease. The system of patients coming for their medication is a method of training self-responsible medication intake. The reliability of the patients' participation can be interpreted as a measure of their compliance.