[Difficulties in changing drugs--from clozapine to aripiprazole in ambulatory care].

Although there are well-established psychiatric procedures available concerning switching of antipsychotic drugs, in practice we often face a situation where we have to consider not only the patient's demands, but also requests from relatives. In this article we describe a case where we encountered this situation. Our patient was a 48-year-old married man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with extreme obesity. We had to consider the modification of the antipsychotic treatment because of the patient's persistent residual symptoms (significant lack of initiative, serious under-motivation, emotional plainessness, considerable passivity) his overweight and its consequences (metabolic syndrome). In our paper we describe the psychoeducational process and the clozapine/aripiprazol switch.