The first anti-psychotic drug
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2019
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the first half of the 20th century, most mentally ill patients were locked away in psychiatric hospitals and asylums. Those suffering from severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, were often sedated or restrained. Shock therapies were standard treatments. Then in France in the 1950s, a new drug was discovered which dramatically reduced psychotic symptoms in many patients. It was called Chlorpromazine. Soon it was being used around the world. Alex Last has been speaking to the psychiatrist Dr Thomas Ban, emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, who witnessed the introduction of Chlorpromazine first-hand in the 1950s.
Photo:Nurses prepare a patient for electric shock treatment in a psychiatric hospital. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:29.2 | Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service |
| 0:38.0 | with me Alex Last and today we go back to the 1950s and the development of the first antipsychotic drugs which caused a revolution. It changed everything in psychiatry in the hospitals, at least you see in my experience. |
| 1:06.5 | In the first half of the 20th century, the mentally ill in Western societies were often simply |
| 1:12.2 | locked away in psychiatric hospitals and |
| 1:15.0 | asylums. In the 1950s and the United States alone more than half a |
| 1:19.7 | million were in public mental institutions where in many cases conditions could be very harsh. |
| 1:25.8 | Among the most seriously ill, long-term inmates were those suffering from schizophrenia, |
| 1:31.1 | a mental illness that affects 1% of the population and causes psychotic symptoms. |
| 1:38.0 | To be schizophrenic is to feel your mind falling apart. |
| 1:42.0 | Schizophrenics don't have a dual personality. They have bizarre |
| 1:45.4 | thoughts and strange feelings. They may have a persecution complex, believe |
| 1:50.4 | they're someone they're not, hear voices, see visions, use strange language, or refuse to speak. |
| 1:57.5 | It is in short classical madness. |
| 1:59.5 | When these voices appear to be located in In the back of my skull, they suggested that there was a conspiracy against me. |
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