Damien 明心’s Reviews > The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs > Status Update

Chapter 11 The Antipsychotic Epidemic: Prescribing in the Twenty-First Century

Pretty much on the use of neuroleptics in cases not related to psychosis, mainly bipolar. Alarming usage in children, messed up money incentives, and lawsuits.

Old and New Drug Induced Problems. Antipsychotics shrink the brain, can cause tardive dyskinesia, tardive dementia, cause weight gain and in some cases diabetes, heart disease and death. "This is not to say that for someone trapped in the throes of severe mental derangement the drugs might not be the lesser of two evils, but an evil they are nonetheless."

".... there is, in any case, much more to the biochemistry of antipsychotics than dopamine, and the fact that clozapine, which has relatively weak D2 receptor-blocking properties is one of the most likely candidates to provoke withdrawal psychosis, suggests that dopamine may not be only, or even the most important, brain chemical involved."

Building a House of Cards: The Dopamine Theory of Schizophrenia and Drug Action. This chapter seems to support that the constantly evolving dopamine theory of schizophrenia is a psuedoscience. "For [Karl] Popper, a pseudoscience, like psychoanalysis..., was a theory that [couldn't] be refuted because it could explain everything-but to explain everything is, in fact, to explain nothing."

Magic Bulllets: The Development of Ideas on Drug Action. Talks briefly a bit on the dopamine theory of schizophrenia and drug action, which the next chapter is on, which I'm excited about.

History of chlorpromazine, the first antispychotic. Also goes briefly on a few other treatments near the time such as inducing comas and lobotomy.