Cure or Curse: What Are Antipsychotics?

Abstract

Antipsychotic drugs, otherwise known as neuroleptics and sometimes major tranquillisers, were introduced into psychiatry in the 1950s. Many people believe these drugs were the first really effective treatment for the severely mentally ill, and they have been referred to as ‘miracle’ or ‘wonder’ drugs that were said to represent a medical advance as significant as antibiotics (Time Magazine, 1954, 1955; Shorter, 1997). Their introduction is frequently credited with transforming the care of the mad or ‘insane’, enabling the closure of the old Victorian asylums and ushering in the possibility of more humane care based in the community. According to this view, people who would have languished in the back wards of institutions for the whole of their lives could be restored, through drug treatment, to lead normal lives in the outside world. The drugs were said to have brought about the ‘social emancipation of the mental patient’, and to have changed the nature, purpose and location of psychiatric practice (Freyhan, 1955, p. 84). The introduction of antipsychotics and other modern drugs into psychiatry was heralded as a ‘chemical revolution’ that constituted one of the ‘most important and dramatic epics in the history of medicine itself’ (F. Ayd cited in Swazey, 1974, p. 8).