Psychopharmacological treatment of schizophrenia

Abstract

Pharmacotherapy with neuroleptic drugs is considered by most clinicians to be the treatment of choice for schizophrenic patients. Perhaps its most significant achievement has been its impact on the ever present relapse risk of schizophrenic patients in remission. As recently as 20 years ago there was nothing anyone could do to reduce this risk effectively. Today, neuroleptic drugs give the psychiatrist the means of controlling and decreasing this risk to a considerable extent if, in his clinical judgment, the whole complex of constitutional, social, and psychological factors presented by every schizophrenic person seems to make such pharmacological control desirable.