BIOLOGICAL THERAPIES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY: WHAT IS INNOVATIVE TODAY BECOMES OBSOLETE TOMORROW (Atena Editora) (original) (raw)

History of Psychopharmacology: From Functional Restitution to Functional Enhancement

Handbook of Neuroethics, 2014

The paper presents a very short history of psychopharmacology and attempts to make clear distinctions between (i) the practices of drug administration to insane subjects and the first observations of interactions between diseases and insanity during antiquity, (ii) the concept of psychopharmacology which appears at the end of the 18th C. with the reform of ancient pharmacology focusing on general knowledge and the closer relations established between chemical substances and mental diseases within the first psychopharmacological rationalisms, and (iii) the rise of psychopharmacology as a discipline after the successes of a few advocates of pharmacological psychiatry in the early 1950s, with the successful uses of chlorpromazine, haloperidol or reserpine. At each time period, ethical questions arose as to the dangers of these drugs, addiction risks already being studied in the 19th C., the mental diseases which these drugs can induce being studied by means of animal experimentation, and the non medical uses of some drugs for enhancement behaviours and better life quality especially in children and students. The epistemology of psychopharmacology as a project arising in the early 19th C. has developed continuously more complex methodologies for clinical trials. It is a field of intense progress and current inquiry which in return raises new ethical problems to be solved in future decades in order to guarantee progress in biological psychiatry to all social categories.

The History of Psychopharmacology

John Wiley & Sons, Ltd eBooks, 2004

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.

Pioneers in Psychopharmacology

The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology / official scientific journal of the Collegium Internationale Neuropsychopharmacologicum (CINP), 1998

In pursuing the history of any field, even one in which many of the main exponents are still alive, it can be very difficult to establish facts and priorities. Detailed scrutiny of the events leading to the recognition of the antidepressant effects of iproniazid, in which Nathan Kline was involved, may fail to establish the exact sequence of events or the sources of inspiration for a discovery (Healy, 1997). Quite apart from the 'facts' behind the antidepressant story, Kline's role in the story beautifully illustrates one of the sayings of Francis Galton, to the effect that in history the driving force may not lie with the first discoverer of a new scientific fact, but rather with the individual who was the first to persuade the world of the importance of a particular discovery. This maxim applies with some force to the three individuals who have been honoured by the CINP in 1998 for their pioneering roles in psychopharmacology - Pierre Deniker, Joel Elkes and Heinz Lehm...

The beginnings of modern psychiatric treatment in Europe

European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 2008

Convulsive therapy (COT) is a major European contribution to the psychiatric armamentarium and biological psychiatry. COT was introduced in psychiatry by László Meduna, a Hungarian neuropsychiatrist. All subsequent publications about the first patient treated with COT, Zoltán L (ZL), were based on Meduna’s papers and autobiography. After 4 years of catatonic stupor, ZL received camphor-induced COT which resulted in full remission and discharge from the institution. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct ZL’s case history from the original case notes—partly written by Meduna himself—which were recovered from the archives of the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology. The case notes show that ZL repeatedly received COT between 1934 and 1937, first with camphor and then with cardiazol induction. After the first course of COT the catatonic stupor was resolved and the psychotic symptoms subsided. However, the remission lasted for only a few months and was followed by a relapse. Despite repeated courses of COT, ZL never became symptom free again, was never discharged and died in the Institute in 1945. This historical case is discussed from both the diagnostic and therapeutic points of view, and an attempt is made to explain the possible reasons for the discrepancies found between Meduna’s account and ZL’s case notes.

Adolf Meyer’s Psychobiology and the Challenge for Biomedicine

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2008

George Engel's biopsychosocial model was associated with the critique of biomedical dogmatism and acknowledged the historical precedence of the work of Adolf Meyer. However, the importance of Meyer's psychobiology is not always recognized. One of the reasons may be because of his tendency to compromise with biomedical attitudes. This paper restates the Meyerian perspective, explicitly acknowledging the split between biomedical and biopsychological approaches in the origin of modern psychiatry. Our present-day understanding of this conflict is confounded by reactions to 'anti-psychiatry.' Neo-Meyerian principles can only be reestablished by a challenge to biomedicine that accepts, as did Meyer, the inherent uncertainty of medicine and psychiatry.

EMERGING PARADIGMS IN MEDICINE: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF PSYCHIATRY

The causes of mental illness remain obscure in spite of rapid progress in the neurosciences. This is due in part to the fact that contemporary biomedical psychiatry rests on philosophically and scientifically ambiguous ground. In Western medicine paradigms , theories from physics, chemistry, and biology form the basis of an explanatory model of illness, including mental illness. Symptoms are conceptualized as subjective descriptions of effects caused by factors characterized in empirical terms. Conventional biomedicine asserts that all causes of illness, and by extension, mechanisms of action underlying legitimate treatment approaches, rest on biological processes that can be described in the reductionist language of Western science. However , in contemporary Western psychiatry, there is no single adequate explanatory model of the causes of mental illness. What remains are competing psychodynamic, genetic, endocri-nologic, and neurobiological models of symptom formation reflecting disparate ideological positions and diverse clinical training backgrounds of mental health professionals. There is no unifying theory in psychiatry because no single explanatory model has been confirmed as more valid than any other. I hypothesize in this article that the synthesis of ideas and clinical approaches from Western biomedicine and non-Western systems of medicine based on understandings of human consciousness , the neurosciences, complexity theory, and quantum field theory, will lead to rapid evolution of conventional Western biomedical psychiatry toward truly integrative mental health-care. The result will be the emergence of an integrative mental healthcare model that will more adequately address the disparate causes, conditions, and meanings of symptoms combining mul-timodal approaches from Western biomedicine and non-Western systems of medicine.