For suitable patients, treatment that once required a tablet every day can now be delivered in two clinic visits a year. For carers and families, that difference is not merely one of convenience. It changes the texture of daily life.
Why long-acting injectables matter
Schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders are, for most people, long-term conditions in which continuity of treatment is the strongest protection against relapse. Yet daily oral medication is difficult to sustain over years. Doses are missed for ordinary reasons, travel, work pressure, illness, a change of routine, and unnoticed non-adherence is among the most common precursors to relapse, admission, and the loss of hard-won stability.
Long-acting injectables (LAIs) remove that daily decision point. Medication levels remain steady, gaps in cover become visible to the clinical team, and patients are no longer reminded of their diagnosis every morning. The evidence base for LAIs in reducing relapse and readmission is substantial, and international guidance increasingly positions them not as a last resort for the most unwell, but as a legitimate first choice for anyone who would prefer not to take a daily tablet.
The six-monthly formulation extends that logic further than has previously been possible in the region. Two injections a year, alongside regular psychiatric review, allow treatment to recede into the background of a person’s life while their recovery moves to the foreground.
Long expertise in community management of psychosis
Introducing a treatment is straightforward. Delivering it well is not.
Psychotic disorders are among the most demanding conditions in psychiatry to manage outside hospital. Doing so safely requires diagnostic clarity, physical health and metabolic monitoring, structured relapse-prevention planning, close work with families, and the clinical confidence to hold complexity in the community rather than defaulting to admission.
Our psychiatrists have built their careers on this work. The team at Valens has extensive experience in the assessment and long-term management of first-episode psychosis, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and psychosis in the context of mood disorders, including treatment-resistant presentations, delivered on an outpatient basis with dignity and discretion, within a service designed to keep people in their lives, their jobs, and their families.
Regional leadership in integrated care.
Our Medical Director, Dr. Joseph El-Khoury, has been one of the region’s consistent advocates for community-based, recovery-oriented care in psychosis, contributing to clinical education, guideline discussion, and professional training on psychotic disorders across the Middle East.
That advocacy is grounded in direct experience. Back in 2017 at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Dr. El-Khoury founded the Psychosis Recovery Outreach Program (PROP), a pioneering service developed in a setting of significant resource constraint and social stigma. PROP was built on a simple conviction: that people experiencing psychosis do far better when care is brought to them and their families in the community, with continuity, assertive follow-up, and an explicit focus on functional recovery rather than symptom suppression alone. It demonstrated that a modern standard of care for psychosis is achievable in the Arab world, and much of what was learned there now informs how we structure psychosis services at Valens.
The psychological work alongside the prescription
Medication is only ever one part of the picture. The decision to begin a long-acting injectable, and to continue it, is shaped as much by belief, fear, and family attitudes as by pharmacology.
“For many patients and families, the obstacle is not the medication but what they believe it says about them, that an injection must mean the illness is severe, or permanent, or that they can no longer be trusted with their own treatment. Our work is to open that conversation rather than leave it unspoken, and to reframe treatment as something that protects a person’s plans and independence. Adherence then stops being a matter of persuasion and becomes a choice the patient owns.”
Dr. Rassil Ghazzaoui, Senior Clinical Psychologist, The Valens Clinic
Alongside psychoeducation and family work, our psychologists offer structured support for people living with psychosis: cognitive and behavioural approaches to residual symptoms, work on insight and self-stigma, relapse-signature identification, and help rebuilding study, work, and relationships.
Patients with psychosis deserve hope
Too often, a diagnosis of schizophrenia is still spoken of as an ending. It is not. With early intervention, continuous treatment, and genuine psychosocial support, many people go on to work, to study, to marry, to raise children, and to live full and self-directed lives. Quality of life is not a secondary consideration in psychosis; it is the point of treatment.
Long-acting injectables, and twice-yearly treatment in particular, are part of that direction of travel, treatment designed around the person’s life rather than the other way round.
The Valens Clinic is committed to this cause: to raising the standard of care for psychotic disorders in the region, to challenging the stigma that still surrounds these conditions and their treatment, and to ensuring that patients in the UAE have access to the same options they would be offered anywhere in the world.
Find out more
If you, or someone you care for, is living with schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder and would like to discuss whether a long-acting injectable is appropriate, our team is here to help. We also welcome referrals from colleagues across the UAE and are happy to advise on suitability, initiation, and monitoring.
To arrange a consultation, please contact The Valens Clinic at our Business Bay or Jumeirah 3 location.
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The Valens Clinic is a multidisciplinary mental health clinic in Dubai, licensed by the DHA and CDA, integrating psychiatry, psychology, and allied health services. Long-acting injectable antipsychotic treatment is initiated only after full psychiatric assessment and is not suitable for every patient. This article is for general information and does not constitute medical advice.