Many people, including some professional practitioners, think of neurofeedback only as something to be used for ADHD. This may be because the most research has been done on ADHD, or it could simply be that other studies are less well-known and smaller in scope. The literature on schizophrenia is among that not as well known.
In 2010, a study was done that showed progress on schizophrenia symptoms among 70 individuals included in the study. It’s a small number of participants, but the progress was statistically significant. Then, in 2017, a single-person case study was done on a middle-aged woman with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Her symptoms improved, too. You can read the full study, conducted by researchers at the Universities of Macao, Shanghai, and Lisbon and published in the journal Behavioral Neurology here.
Because the abstract is fairly straightforward, I have included it for those who don’t want to read the full study: “Schizophrenia is a chronic and devastating brain disorder with ongoing cognitive, behavioral, and emotional deteriorated functions. Neurofeedback training, which enables the individuals to regulate their brain activity using a real-time feedback loop, is increasingly investigated as a potential alternative intervention for schizophrenia. This study aimed to explore the effect of short but intensive neurofeedback training for schizophrenic patients with difficulty for long-time training. A middle-aged woman with chronic schizophrenia completed the intensive training of alpha/beta2 (20–30 Hz) in four consecutive days with a total training duration of 13.5 hours. The results showed that her alpha/beta2 increased over sessions, and her behavior performance including short-term memory, mood, and speech pattern was improved at the end of neurofeedback training. Importantly, a 22-month follow-up found a dramatic improvement in both positive and negative symptoms. These positive outcomes suggest that such intensive neurofeedback training may provide new insight into the treatment of schizophrenia and thus deserves further study to fully examine its scope.”
Neurofeedback is not a cure-all, but it is, indeed, a powerful tool.