Our work team have already found that our Institutional Psychiatric Open Light Treatment (IPOLT) model allows the patient affected by severe mental illness (SMI) to more easily express her/his personal coping skills rather than behaving passively thanks to the “real free spaces” separating a structured intervention from another. Our work consisted in evaluating how patients with FSP respond to IPOLT.

This paper describes observations of psychotic patients operating from the position of FSP in order to evaluate how they respond to IPOLT compared with other patients according to three standards (day hospital attendance, psychotic episodes and hospital admissions).

Identify the core factors for management of patients with FSP in the context of IPOLT.

We isolated a sample including patients affected by severe mental illness (SMI); within this sample, we selected a small group of patients with FSP. During the last three years, we have been evaluating patients with FSP in terms of day hospital attendance, number of psychotic episodes and number of hospital admissions compared with data obtained from other patients with SMI without diagnosis of FSP.

The two data sets revealed no statistically significant differences in terms of the three standards.

Our preliminary study showed a good effect for IPOLT treatment on patients with SMI. We expected that patients affected by SMI with FSP would have a different response to IPOLT, but it was not. We do not know whether such results depend on a too small sample of patients or inappropriate descriptors.