The outcome of group therapy for psychotic patients was used as the dependent variable in assessing the comparative efficacy of trained and untrained therapists. The latter were undergraduate students with no training or experience in psychotherapy. For this reason, their role in psychotherapy was viewed as analogous to that of a placebo in studies assessing drug effects. Changes in psychological test performance of 295 patients before and after 5 months of group therapy served as the criterion of therapeutic behavior change. By comparison to an untreated control group the lay therapists achieved slightly better results than psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers doing group therapy with similar patients. Caution was urged in extending the implications of these results beyond group therapy with schizophrenic patients.

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