Psychopharmacology

   The study of the differential use of drugs to understand and modify neuochemistry and the psychiatric disorders to which anomalies in neurochemistry give rise.

   The first researcher in the modern history of medicine to use a psychoactive drug in order to study differences in the form of illness was Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804–1884, called "Moreau de Tours" because he had studied medicine in Tours). In a well-known monograph in 1845 on Hashish and Mental Illness (Du hachisch et de l’aliénation mentale), Moreau said that the effect of hashish, given in steadily increasing doses, in melancholic depression was quite different from that in retarded depression (un aliéné stupide) or in dementia. "In the demented patients the results . . . were virtually null, despite the high dose. It was the same for stupidity. Two melancholic patients, after five or six hours, experienced a quite lively arousal with all the characteristics of merriment and banter that are normal." "As soon as the arousal had passed, both patients relapsed to their former state" (pp. 402–403). This was the first modern demonstration of differential effectiveness in different illnesses and represents a distant anticipation of the birth of psychopharmacology 100 years later. (The next efforts to use drugs to study mental pathology would be the LSD research of the late 1940s and after. See Hallucinogen.)

   The term "psychopharmacology" was coined in 1920 by David Macht (1882–1961), a pharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, to describe "the effect of drugs on psychological functions" (p. 167). In a wider sense, as Thomas Ban (1929–), at the time founding director of the division of psychopharmacology at McGill University, pointed out in his textbook Psychopharmacology in 1970, it is "a new scientific discipline which encompasses all the aspects and interactions between psychoactive drugs and biological systems" (p. vii). Contemporary use of the term dates from an article by Jean Delay and Jean Thuillier (1921–), who was Delay’s assistant, on "Psychiatrie experimentelle et psychopharmacologie" in the Hospital Gazette (Semaine des Hôpitaux) in 1956. It came into general use after a conference in Milan in 1957.

   Psychopharmacology as a field of study has conventionally been dated from the introduction of chlorpromazine in 1952. Yet, there were several striking earlier successes in the use of drugs to improve psychiatric conditions, notably William J. Bleckwenn’s introduction of intravenous injections of amobarbital in 1930 to relieve catatonia. (See Barbiturates; Catatonia. For further details on the history of psychopharmacology, see the entries for Antidepressant; Antipsychotics; Benzodiazepines; Dopamine; Extrapyramidal Side Effects; Iproniazid; Lithium Therapy; Parkinsonism; Reserpine; Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors; Tardive Dyskinesia.)