Psychopharmaceuticals: 50 years of stagnation?
While treatments for cancer and heart disease have advanced in leaps and bounds, psychiatry continues to use the drugs that first came on the market more than half a century ago
The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of psychiatry. At that time, reliable options were being discovered that curbed the shadows of the mind and regulated emotional pain. Antipsychotics that blocked the reception of dopamine and antidepressants that acted on the reuptake of serotonin were chanced upon. It was a radical development that emerged from a vacuum and led to drugs that muted the voices of schizophrenia or threw a lifeline to sufferers of depression.
