ABSTRACT
What accounts for the finding arrived at in the previous chapter, that the proportion of schizophrenic patients found to be in hospital at follow-up declined dramatically before the advent of the antipsychotic drugs? A widely held belief about modern mental health care is that these drugs, introduced in the mid-1950s, brought a new dawn to psychiatry, making possible effective treatment and community care for psychotic patients. Chlorpromazine, the first of the antipsychotic drugs, initiated a “therapeutic revolution” in the hospital and community treatment of schizophrenia, argues psychiatrist John Davis in the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry. He continues:
Those changes have resulted in a massive reduction in the number of hospitalized schizophrenic patients, a finding all the more remarkable since, up to the introduction of the new drugs, there had been a steady increase in the number of hospitalized mental patients. The shift in the fate of mental patients is the most convincing proof of the efficacy of those agents.1
