Many people diagnosed with and treated for severe mental illness are likely to experience relapse at some point during their lives. In addition to beginning and continuing therapeutic and medical treatment, other types of support and follow-up measures may be important for the patients’ health and welfare. Examples of relevant support and follow-up interventions include: patient education and life skills training, structural measures such as supported housing and follow-up monitoring, recreation and leisure activities, and vocational rehabilitation.

The Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services has summarized available research on the effect of support and follow-up measures for patients with severe mental illness. We included 17 systematic reviews that compared different support and follow-up interventions in addition to treatment as usual compared to treatment as usual. The reviews included people with schizophrenia and schizophrenia-like illnesses, bipolar disorder, severe or major affective disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, people with both severe mental illness and substance misuse and mixed groups of patients with severe mental illnesses.

The evidence was of moderate to very low quality and the necessary evidence was often lacking. However, based on the available evidence, support and follow-up interventions such as education, exercise and vocational rehabilitation may have beneficial effects on health and health related outcomes such as readmissions and relapse. We also found improvements in adherence to recommended drug use, patient satisfaction and employment.

We could not draw any conclusions about the effects of interventions such as housing and home visits, monitoring of physical health and use of reminders to patients with severe mental illness, supportive relationship building for patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as well as cultural and recreational activities such as sports and games for patients with PTSD. The reason for this was that we did not identify any relevant reviews or that the reviews we found were empty.