Antidepressants Blog

Mental illness often starts early in life and ends late, leaving shattered families in its wake. It is more frightening, more mysterious, and more costly than almost any other disease.

Or it used to be.

That dark picture is brightening very rapidly now, thanks largely to the development of at least 50 new drugs that help check, if not cure, the worst of the major mental illnesses. They are schizophrenia, bipolar mood disorder (manic-depressive psychosis), major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, and panic disorder.

Back in 1960, when the population of America’s mental institutions totaled 630,000, most people with these afflictions were doomed to pass their lives in grim incarceration. Now, properly treated and medicated, up to 80 percent of patients with the worst cases of those six mental illnesses can and do live normal or nearly normal lives.

Dr. David Pickar heads the experimental therapeutics branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Speaking for his fellow researchers, Dr. Pickar says, “There is a generation of us who have spent 20 years or more of our lives hoping, looking and tracking a big jump. The next giant step is in the immediate future.”

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GENERAL HEALTH