before prozac the troubled history of mood disorders in psychiatry oct 2008

[...]... virtuous One thinks of “hysteria” and the toxic salts of the element bromine, the “bromides.” The future of today’s psychiatry does not lie in resurrecting the past but in respecting the scientific method, in abandoning diagnoses fashioned by consensus, and in doing away with ineffective therapies dictated by the corporate bottom line It does not necessarily lie in reviving the first drug set of the 1950s... results.23 In the 1860s a private psychiatric hospital near Halle in Germany used a half grain of the extract or ten drops of the tincture per day, obtaining in “very severe hallucinations of terrifying content and in chronic insomnia always a calming effect.”24 At a meeting in Switzerland in 1916, Max Cloetta, professor of pharmacology in Zurich, noted with interest the uses of potassium bromide in melancholia,... cocaine inhibited the reuptake of norepinephrine, making it an interesting candidate as an antidepressant, because other antidepressants had a similar action Moreover, unlike other drugs under study, cocaine caused the release of norepinephrine from the neurons into the synapse, thus increasing even more the amount of the neurotransmitter available to the brain (a supposedly good effect) In view of. .. part of the book turns to the hitherto unknown story of the FDA’s power flexing against the pharmaceutical industry by taking down a good deal of the first drug set and other medications, such as the first of the benzodiazepine drugs that were launched in the early 1960s It was an in uence grab that had little to do with science and much to do with the imperatives of inside -the- Beltway empire building in. .. is the situation today Yet in the past the drug-approval process was quite different: In the 1960s, the FDA did a lot of muscle flexing, taking on the star drugs of big companies as an exercise in empire building There is no doubt that today, the FDA towers punishingly over the pharmaceutical industry: For a drug company, challenging the FDA bureaucrats is a good way of going out of business Yet in. .. Norbert Matussek of the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich had studied at pharmacologist Bernard Brodie’s lab at the National Heart Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland Once back in Munich, “applying the knowledge I had gained at the NIH, I began to unravel the mysteries of the release and uptake of NE [the neurotransmitter norepinephrine].” Matussek... in 1844.17 The cure consisted of doses of 2–3 grains of opium, titrating up to 8–10 and even to 16 grains, in intervals of 10 hours (An apothecary “grain” is 64 mg.) The Engelken clinic in Rockwinkel bei Bremen used up to 40 pounds of opium a year.18 The Engelken opium cure became famous throughout Europe Its popularity was much accelerated by the above-mentioned invention of the syringe in the 1850s,... in Western society as psychoactive It is curious that the earliest drugs in psychiatry are among the most interesting Barbiturates In the late nineteenth century, a slew of new treatments started to become available thanks mainly to the magic of the German chemical industry In 1857, the salts of bromine—for “hysteria” and epilepsy—hit the market In 1869 the psychiatric uses of chloral hydrate, a minor... psychopharmacology in this country.” He noted that Sigmund Freud had initiated it In a way, the poor man is now seeking vengeance by having flooded this country with psychoanalysis.”30 Was there anything to this cocaine hype? Cocaine is another of the narcotic drugs to which restless minds have later returned in search of active pharmacological principles in the treatment of mood disorders As a young man in the. .. then described the results There was no control group, save the doctor’s own recollection of how similar patients have done on other drugs in the past Physicians chronicled the results of such trials in the medical press, and the medicine of the day accepted the results as valid guidelines There is no reason why the conclusions of such small open trials would be completely misleading, even though the . h0" alt="" Before Prozac This page intentionally left blank Before Prozac The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry Edward Shorter 1 2009 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes. the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Shorter, Edward. Before Prozac: the troubled history of mood disorders in psychiatry / Edward. Seroxat in United Kingdom) sertraline Zoloft (Pfi zer patented in 1981; introduced in 1992) zimelidine (zimeldine) Zelmid (Astra-Hässle synthesized in 1969; launched in 1981 in Europe; withdrawn in