Quotes About Psychopharmacology

Prozac fundamentally and selectively alters personality without altering perception. This gives rise to disturbing questions: By using Prozac, are we fiddling with the human soul? Does the drug's effectiveness mean that we don't have a soul-that the mind is merely a glob of tissue in which electrical and chemical events occur?

Thus in his 2009 Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia, the historian and clinical psychologist Richard Noll lamented "the tragic years of psychoanalysis" before declaring that "it took major advances in medical technology, specifically the computer revolution and the rise of new techniques in neuroimaging, genetics research, and psychopharmacology to swing the pendulum back to Kraepelin's search for the biological causes of the psychotic disorders.

What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.

By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology"—the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself—has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows.

It was true Advils looked just like little brown M&M's. Motrin, in the right light, were SweetTarts. A band of MAO inhibitor called Nardil looked just like the tiny round Red Hots we'd all eaten as children.

In the past ten years there had been truly amazing advances in those areas of research – psychopharmacology, biochemistry, psychosurgery, clinical psychology – that directly and indirectly contributed to the less reputable but nonetheless hotly pursued science of mind control.