ABSTRACT
In 1968, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated a large-scale follow-up study of schizophrenia in nine countries. Initially, the WHO investigators assumed that patients in the poor countries fared better because, compared to the patients in the industrialized countries, they were swallowing their pills more dutifully. Sociological and psychological approaches to mental health issues were especially popular in academic psychiatry, whereas asylum doctors remained more attached to somatic explanations and therapies. One of the most extraordinary drugs in the history of psychopharmacology is lithium. The therapeutic usefulness of lithium in the treatment of manic-depression was discovered by chance only one year after lithium was removed from 7 Up. The psychic energizer was brought to the growing psychopharmacological market. It represented the so-called tricyclic antidepressants, so named because of their tricyclic chemical structure. The mental effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) were accidentally discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann.
