Antipsychotics 1950 – Drug Treatment for Psychological Disorders

According to British psychiatrist Trevor Turner, the antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine should be regarded as one of the greatest medical discoveries. Turner wrote: 

“Without the discovery of chlorpromazine, we might still be in the lamentable era when a carer's role resembled that of a zookeeper. Chlorpromazine may be seen as a kind of ‘psychological penicillin’ that enables patients and their carers to communicate.”

Antipsychotic drugs treat people with psychosis, who show abnormal thought processes such as delusions or hallucinations in schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Chlorpromazine, the first antipsychotic, was discovered almost by chance. After French chemist Paul Charpentier synthesised it in 1950, French surgeon Henri Laborit tested whether it might relieve anxiety in surgical patients. Laborit's work caught the attention of French psychiatrists Pierre Deniker and Jean Delay. Testing it in uncontrollable patients who harmed themselves, they observed striking improvement in many patients experiencing delusions and hallucinations.

Many patients with delusions and hallucinations showed remarkable improvement with chlorpromazine. In 1954, chlorpromazine, under the brand name Thorazine, was approved for use in the US. By 1964 it had been used by approximately 50 million people worldwide. Numbers of people staying in psychiatric hospitals began to fall dramatically, and older schizophrenia treatments such as insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy were used less frequently. Unfortunately, like many drugs, chlorpromazine caused adverse effects such as muscle tremors and movement disorders. 

Clozapine is a forerunner of newer-generation antipsychotics. It reduces the risk of movement disorders but has other adverse effects of its own. Nevertheless, as emphasised at the beginning, antipsychotics changed the lives of people experiencing psychosis or diagnosed with schizophrenia in a positive way unlike anything before in history.

All antipsychotics tend to block central nervous system receptors for dopamine (a neurotransmitter involved in motivation and voluntary movements).

Health experts Joe and Teresa Graedon wrote: 

“Hundreds of years ago, people with mental illness were burned to death; in the early twentieth century, some people with schizophrenia were lobotomised with an ice pick. It was in such a barbaric setting that the first antipsychotic drugs were developed.”

Description of the article image: Cat illustrations by British artist Louis Wain (1860-1939). Some psychologists suggest that Wain's schizophrenia influenced some of his wild cat illustrations.

Historical figures mentioned in the article: Jean Delay (1907–1987), Henri Laborit (1914–1995), Pierre Deniker (1917–1998)

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