Background The bioenergetic therapy model combines holistic somatic therapy with psychotherapy, addressing both physical and emotional aspects of healing. In cases of long-standing treatment-resistant schizophrenia (TRS), which may persist for over two decades, finding effective therapeutic strategies remain a significant challenge. Despite numerous treatment options, no existing reports integrate somatosensory therapy with neuropsychopharmacological interventions for these complex cases. Purpose To demonstrate the integration of bioenergetic therapy with neuropsychopharmacological interventions in managing long-standing treatment-resistant schizophrenic cases. Methods Two cases of long-standing schizophrenia were illustrated for how we integrated somatosensory bioenergetics principles with neuropsychopharmacology. They had emotional and/or physical abuse in addition to psychotic symptoms without any pre-morbid schizoid/paranoid traits or psychiatric history of substance abuse, and presented to us with complaints of high sensitivity to rejection, persecutory delusions, third-person auditory hallucinations, irritability, episodic aggression, psychomotor retardation, disturbed sleep, and declining professional performance. Results A systematic cognitive deficit evaluation, slow building of clozapine (100 mg/day), integration of somatosensory therapy, family system therapy model and cognitive enhancement therapy were integrated. This integration of somatosensory therapy with neuropsychopharmacological interventions led to a significant improvement over a four-week period. Notable recovery was observed in the experience of being touched for rebuilding maternal trust and developing a therapeutic rapport. Conclusion Integration of multiple system bioenergetic model in chronic TRS adds another novel way to its management which is an advanced extrapolation of the Bio-Psycho-Social model of schizophrenia. Bioenergetic analysis facilitated a unique somatic psychotherapy that combined cognitive feelings, somatic, and psychomotor functions. To our knowledge, this represents the first successful application of bioenergetic analytical integration in schizophrenia with marked behavioural resistance.
Khairkar et al. (Thu,) studied this question.