Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Puder, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching residents and medical students.

Okay, we are live and I am back with Dr. Michael Cummings.

And today we are going to depart to sort of a review of psychopharmacology.

We're going to be diving into schizophrenia today and the history of anti-psychotics

and history of schizophrenia and Dr. Cummings, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. I'm glad to be back and indeed ready to talk about how anti-psychotics

came into existence and what has evolved since their introduction.

The beginning point actually goes all the way back to around 1933.

In France, there was a push to develop anti-histamines as treatments.

And that led to a line of research that ultimately by 1947 led to the introduction of promethazine,

which produced sedation and calmness in animal models, was not very highly effective in people,

but did lead to the thought that it might provide a preoperative way to calm people down.

That in turn, however, led to Paul Serpentier in 1950 looking at derivatives,

other phenothazine derivatives of promethazine, and one of those turned out to be chloropromazine.

It was initially tried in a surgical military hospital in France by Dr. Henry Laverette.

It was successful in making people calm prior to surgery and making them somewhat indifferent to the impending surgery.

They tried it in a psychiatrist volunteer, Dr. Corti, who indeed reported it had favorable effects

until he stood up and promptly fainted.

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