Review

Authors: Joel T Braslow, Stephen R Marder

We live in an age of psychopharmacology. One in six persons currently takes a psychotropic drug. These drugs have profoundly shaped our scientific and cultural understanding of psychiatric disease. By way of a historical review, we try to make sense of psychiatry's dependency on psychiatric drugs in the care of patients. Modern psychopharmacology began in 1950 with the synthesis of chlorpromazine. Over the course of the next 50 years, the psychiatric understanding and treatment of mental illness radically changed. Psychotropic drugs played a major part in these changes as state hospitals closed and psychotherapy gave way to drug prescriptions. Our review suggests that the success of psychopharmacology was not the consequence of increasingly more effective drugs for discrete psychiatric diseases. Instead, a complex mix of political economic realities, pharmaceutical marketing, basic science advances, and changes in the mental health-care system have led to our current infatuation with psychopharmacology.

Topics: History, 19th Century; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; Humans; Mental Health Services; Psychiatry; Psychopharmacology; Psychotropic Drugs

PubMed: 30786241
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-050718-095514

Authors: David Nutt, David Erritzoe, Robin Carhart-Harris...

After a legally mandated, decades-long global arrest of research on psychedelic drugs, investigation of psychedelics in the context of psychiatric disorders is yielding exciting results. Outcomes of neuroscience and clinical research into 5-Hydroxytryptamine 2A (5-HT2A) receptor agonists, such as psilocybin, show promise for addressing a range of serious disorders, including depression and addiction.

Topics: Hallucinogens; Humans; Mental Disorders; Neuropharmacology; Psilocybin; Psychiatry; Serotonin 5-HT2 Receptor Agonists

PubMed: 32243793
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.03.020

Authors: J J Breeksema, R A Schoevers, E Vermetten...

Topics: Brain; Hallucinogens; Humans; Psychiatry

PubMed: 32816288
DOI: No ID Found

Authors: J R Zinkstok

Topics: Adolescent; Brain; Humans; Poverty; Psychiatry

PubMed: 34043218
DOI: No ID Found

Authors: Anke Hinney, Jochen Seitz

Topics: Adolescent; Adolescent Psychiatry; Child; Child Psychiatry; Family; Humans

PubMed: 35514169
DOI: 10.1024/1422-4917/a000875

Authors: G Meynen, M Destoop, J J M van Delden...

Topics: Ethics, Medical; Humans; Psychiatry

PubMed: 34757605
DOI: No ID Found

Authors: Robert Df Nathan

A new psychiatric institution emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the psychopathic hospital. This institution represented a significant development in the history of psychiatry, as it marked the profession's reorientation from asylum-based to hospital-based care, and in this way presaged the deinstitutionalization movement that would begin half a century later. Psychopathic hospitals were also an important marker of psychiatry's efforts to redefine its professional boundaries and respond to its vociferous critics. This entailed both a rapprochement with general medicine in an effort to assert its scientific bona fides and a redefinition of its scope of practice to absorb non-certifiable 'borderland' cases in order both to emphasize non-coercive treatment and to enlarge the profession's boundaries.

Topics: Humans; Psychiatry; Hospitals, Psychiatric

PubMed: 37691414
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X231194910

Authors: Beate Herpertz-Dahlmann, Astrid Dempfle, Joseph Neulen...

Topics: Adolescent; Adolescent Psychiatry; Child; Child Psychiatry; Contraceptive Agents, Female; Depression; Female; Gynecology; Humans; Suicide

PubMed: 32614280
DOI: 10.1024/1422-4917/a000736

Authors: David Goldbloom, David Gratzer

Topics: Humans; Ontario; Physicians; Psychiatry; Telemedicine

PubMed: 28985700
DOI: 10.1177/0706743717714469

Authors: Ralf W Dittmann, Aribert Rothenberger

Topics: Adolescent; Adolescent Psychiatry; Child; Child Psychiatry; Humans; Psychopharmacology

PubMed: 31702457
DOI: 10.1024/1422-4917/a000690