The board-and-care home: does it deserve a bad press?

A survey of 46 randomly selected schizophrenic residents of six board-and-care homes in the Los Angeles area found that the schizophrenic who adjusts to the setting experiences a schizoid-compliant pattern of outcome on antipsychotic drugs that is characterized by blunted affect, passivity, and lack of initiative, interest, and spontaneity. The authors conclude that it is those negative symptoms of schizophrenia, mistakenly attributed to the presumed inadequacies of the board-and-care environment, that have given the board-and-care home a bad press both in the newspapers and in the psychiatric literature.