Abstract
It is not the purpose of this article to give out statistics about chlorpromazine and the cures and improved cases to be credited to its use. More simply,. we wish to outline what our own experience has been after a rather constant use of this drug over a period of two years. During that time about 200 of our patients have received Largactil in various amounts.
— it is our impression that in private psychiatric practice chlorpromazine is most valuable as an emergency drug in all cases of agitation
— Largactil has proved a valuable help in the treatment of acute and even chronic psychosis
— with unstable, turbulent children, often pre-psychotic types, it may be used with advantage
— in neurotic cases the use of this drug are more restricted, and its advantages less marked. At any rate, the criteria of efficacy are here less accurate.
— chlorpromazine is not meant to replace psychotherapy but serves as a potentializer to its action and, in that way, can shorten the duration of treatment
— chlorpromazine's action might be construed as one of “deconditioning“ where the patients had been conditioned to affective traumas. By interrupting the effect of their neurosis on their neuro-vegetative system it leaves them,. so to speak, “disconnected” from their neurosis and, for that reason, more accessible to psychotherapy than could have been hoped.
The hypothesis, as Such, opens up new perspectives in dynamic psychiatry.
It would be an exaggeration, we feel, to talk about the revolution brought about in the practice of psychiatry by the advent of chlorpromazine but certainly it introduces an important evolution and it cannot be denied that the chances have been heightened by it of obtaining cures in psychiatry.