The Rise of Psychopharmacology and the Story of CINP

Abstract

One recalls how long the road leading to the ‘70s had been. The 1950s had known the in- troduction of the spectrophotofluorimeter – the key technical invention for studying changes in brain chemistry affected by centrally acting drugs – and the first truly effective psychotropic compounds. In the 1960s the discipline of psychopharmacology materializes with the introduction of methods for showing therapeutic efficacy, and of pharmacological screens for detecting drugs with a therapeutic profile similar to the prototype psychotropics, such as chlorpromazine and imipramine. During the 1970s many of the drugs detected by the screens were introduced into clinical use. By the end of the decade pharmacotherapy with these new drugs had become the pri- mary treatment modality of mental illness. The psychopharmacologic paradigm replaced the old paradigms in psychiatry and would henceforth dominate psychiatric practice, education, and research. Not even anxiety disorders would be explained any longer in psychological and social terms. Pharmacotherapy with the new drugs brought to attention that different patients within a diagnostic group responded to the same drugs in different ways. There were expectations that a triumphant psychopharmacology would resolve this heterogeneity by reconstructing psychiatry along biochemical lines from new fundamentals, replacing old diagnostic presup- positions with new “diagnostic” concepts built from new building blocks, such as pharmaco- logic responsiveness, neuroendocrine tests, biochemical measures, neurophysiologic indica- tors, and brain images. The future looked bright at the end of the 1970s, full of promise that psychopharmacology would redefine the scope and content of psychiatry during the 1980s. Similar to volume one, this is not a formal history, but a repertory of the memoirs of those who were there, during the second epoch of psychopharmacology. It is a sourcebook, based on first person recollections of the players of the time that others may want to use to find out how it once was. Yet this is more than a source book. Many of the stories have rele- vance to current research. In the first volume we charted the work of the pioneers of the 60s and before. Now we watch as psychopharmacology becomes an important discipline in its own right and gives birth to neuroscience.