ABSTRACT
There has never been a book on polypharmacy in psychiatry. Perhaps the increasing relevance of polypharmacy in psychiatric practice tells us something about how far the field has come since the early days of psychopharmacology a half century ago. Are we going too far? Does the resurrection of polypharmacy in psychiatry mean that psychopharmacology has run amok? Have we gone from a period of too little use of psychotropic drugs to too much?*
In this book, I have tried to collect clinical and research information that can give some empirical perspective to why and when polypharmacy is used in contemporary psychiatry. I have also tried to provide some conceptual discussion of how we can think about the issue of polypharmacy in the larger context of the status of psychopharmacology in general psychiatry. By now, I would hope that readers would have enough of a sense of the empirical literature as well as the conceptual background to be able to make their own judgments about polypharmacy in psychiatry. Before proceeding to my views, I want to briefly assess the few psychiatric authors who specifically have written about this subject.
