Affective Disorders

Abstract

The discovery of new, effective psychopharmacological agents has never been a simple matter. Indeed, most of the major psychiatric drugs were introduced about three decades ago. Although the search for more effective and more rapidly acting antidepressants and mood-stabilizing agents has continued unabated, progress in drug develop­ment has been very slow, with the exception of serotonin-selective re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Although this class of drugs has signifi­cantly fewer serious side effects and is thus a useful addition to our therapeutic aresenal, they are somewhat cleaner “me too” drugs, and may even be less effective than the older tricyclics in severe depres­sion. In psychopharmacology, we have traditionally used behavioral and physiological animal models that reflect the actions of drugs already known to be antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and so on (Potter et al., 1992). This has proved to be an excellent method of finding compounds with a similar therapeutic profile to the original, serendipitously discovered, psychotherapeutic compounds. This approach, however, has not yet developed a widely accepted drug whose therapeutic biochemical principle is not inherent in drugs discovered three decades ago.