Efficacy of antipsychotic medications is nowadays confirmed, but their effectiveness is biased by the generally low compliance to therapy associated to psychotic patients. Psychiatric intramuscular depot pharmacotherapy represents a good option to increase compliance and to improve the outcome.

We indirectly assessed compliance to oral antipsychotic therapy by psychopathological and clinical scores, and compared it to results obtained on patients who were assuming intramuscular antipsychotic therapies, whose compliance is assumed to be total.

Our purpose was to discriminate differences in outcome between clients who were provided a psychopharmacological oral treatment, and those who take a depot psychopharmacotherapy.

We collected psychopathological and clinical data on 100 schizophrenic patients attending our outpatient psychiatric services; we divided our sample in two subgroups according to the type of therapy (oral vs depot). We matched patients depending on sex, age, schizophrenia subtype and age at onset, and compared psychopathological variables (BPRS, PANSS, NRS, SWS and number of hospitalizations) on 32 couples.

We did not find any statistically significant difference between the two subgroups, as regards the outcome.

Efficacy to long-term oral antipsychotic therapy is similar to that shown by depot medications, suggesting that compliance between the two types of long-term therapies is high and comparable. We conclude that, balancing the pros and cons while choosing the typology of treatment, doctors should pay more attention to patient's needs and preferences and to a good therapeutic alliance rather than to potential side effects and general outcome.