Antidepressants

“The earliest drugs that are retrospectively regarded as antidepressants, the anti-tuberculous drugs, were clearly similar in nature to stimulants. Although stimulants had been successfully promoted as ‘antidepressants,’ by the 1950s and 1960s, a distinction started to be drawn between stimulants, which were regarded as nonspecific, and drugs that were thought to target depression specifically. The anti-tuberculous drugs metamorphosed into antidepressants through the concepts of the psychic energizer. It was imipramine, however, that finally established the modern notion of an ‘antidepressant.’ Imipramine had to be regarded as acting on the basis of a disease, because it was difficult to see how any effects that imipramine was known to induce could be useful in depression” (Moncrieff, 2353).;