ABSTRACT
The present article illustrates the history of psychotropic drugs introduced in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1945 onwards. We begin by examining the introduction of an anti-depressant and a tranquilizer at the university psychiatric clinic, Charité, in East Berlin. On the basis of patient files, we consider the monitoring routines, altered by the use of psychotropic drugs, and the difficulties that arose when these routines were translated into existing research programs. In the 1960s, attempts to evaluate the psychiatric practice were based on psychopathology whereas at the end of the 1960s there was a shift to "target symptoms".
Subject(s)
Ambulatory Care Facilities/history , Antidepressive Agents/history , Biomedical Research/history , Mental Disorders/history , Practice Patterns, Physicians'/history , Psychiatry/history , Tranquilizing Agents/history , Antidepressive Agents/standards , Behavioral Symptoms/drug therapy , Behavioral Symptoms/history , Berlin , Biomedical Research/methods , Evaluation Studies as Topic , Germany, East , History, 20th Century , Humans , Medical Records , Mental Disorders/complications , Mental Disorders/drug therapy , Psychiatry/methods , Psychopathology/history , Tranquilizing Agents/standards , Universities/historyABSTRACT
Psychiatrists have often referred to the discovery of new psychopharmaceutical drugs in the 1950s as a 'therapeutic revolution', which allowed physicians to observe und measure therapeutic effectiveness easily. Contrary to this view, this article will argue that psychiatrists needed the patient's subjective voice to evaluate the effects of the drugs. In a micro-analysis of hospital records of the first patient to be treated with chlorpromazine in the Heidelberg clinic in 1953, I show the different perspectives of doctors and patients on the diagnosis and treatment.The analysis points up how difficult it was to get an impression of the drug's effectiveness.The article emphasizes the importance of the new perspective that includes the patient's voice in the history of psychotropic drugs after 1945.
Subject(s)
Antipsychotic Agents/history , Chlorpromazine/history , Historiography , Hospital Records , Hospitals, Psychiatric/history , Hospitals, University/history , National Socialism/history , Germany , History, 20th Century , HumansABSTRACT
The peculiarities of drug regulation in the GDR are best described by a historical reconstruction of a concrete field of practice. The article analyses the regulation of psychotropic drugs by focussing on the centralised planning and control of pharmaceutical research and development in the 1960s. Its starting point is the observation that an introduction of certain psychotropic drugs like tranquilizers was initially controversial in the GDR. As a consequence, the key question is how an agreement over their medical and economic benefit was reached eventually. The article shows how in the course of the 1960s a discursive arrangement between the medical profession, pharmaceutical industry and the state apparatus emerged, which was supported by an increased political involvement of leading scientists and the directing staff of enterprises.
Subject(s)
Drug and Narcotic Control/history , Psychotropic Drugs/history , Socialism/history , Germany, East , History, 20th Century , HumansABSTRACT
Therapeutic substances, their development, testing, application and effects, have in recent years become a central topic of the history of medicine, history of science, and science and technology studies. This paper provides an overview of the literature on this topic through the four-fold perspective of individual substances, industry, patients, and regulation. It introduces the recently established, DFG-funded research network "Pharmaceuticals in the 20th Century" and sketches current methodological approaches to the history of therapeutic substances. At present it appears to be particularly promising to adopt an approach which uses substances or groups of substances as a heuristic device for exploring their complex networks and interdependencies.
Subject(s)
Drug Approval/history , Drug Industry/history , Drug Therapy/history , Pharmaceutical Preparations/history , Animals , Europe , History, 19th Century , History, 20th Century , Humans , United StatesABSTRACT
This paper describes the introduction of antipsychotic drugs in the FRG in relation to a new definition of the term ',efficacy' It focuses on problems of the standardization of clinical trials in West German psychiatry during the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the development of a diagnostic card for the evaluation of efficacy will be discussed as part of a new experimental system and regarding its role in constructing new knowledge on neuroleptic effects.
