Antipsychotics

“The serious but manageable problem is that people having these types of difficulties who want to discontinue treatment may be unable to do so without experiencing lengthy and significant discomfort. The potentially unmanageable problem is that it becomes impossible once patients have taken antipsychotics for some time to know where the treatment ends and the disease begins. . . . Similar problems may beset the SSRIs. This is a prospect that the pharmacotherapy establishment cannot view with equanimity. But what of the alternative, which essentially comes down to recognizing that while dependence is a pharmacological issue, addiction is a social one with political implications. The concepts of drug dependence that first took shape in the late 1960s set the stage for the disease models of addiction, which came to dominate in the 1990s. The historical evidence that therapeutic communities might do more for a larger number of addicts than drug treatments was nowhere to be heard when in the late 1990s two new agents, naloxone and acamprosate, hit the market” (Healy II, 172-73).