1957

In 1952, following Deniker & Delay breakthrough with the phenothiazine chlorpromazine, Geigy, seeking part of this new market, retrieved “some hitherto useless antihistaminics from their reserves, and recruited Roland Kuhn to test them in antipsychotics. In 1956, they sent him a preparation called G22355, which he employed at his Münsterlingen Hospital; he found no neuroleptic potency but marked effectiveness in “vital depressive mood disorder” (Fangmann et al., 2). In 1957, Kuhn reported positive results of treating 500 patients with imipramine (tricyclic antidepressant) at Int. Congress of Psychiatry in Zurich. Imipramine released in Switzerland and then in spring, 1958 in various European countries under brand name Tofranil (Healy, I, 54). Claims imipramine effects vital (i.e., endogenous) depression. “For Kuhn vital depression was a state that did not necessarily reveal itself in overt sadness but involved a lowering of central vitality in a manner that might well contribute to the development of phobic, obsessive, or hysterical reactions” (Healy, I, 53). Kuhn “was at pains to deny that imipramine had euphoriant effects. . . . Kuhn’s report conveys the implicit idea that imipramine reverses the biochemical or physical substrate of depression” (Moncrieff, 2350). Geigy begins marketing imipramine (Tofranil) in 1958 (Valenstein, 39-40). Amitriptyline (Elavil), the second tricyclic antidepressant was released in 1961. Among the tricyclics that followed was doxepine, released in US in late 60s as Sinequan; it “found broad acceptance, particularly for severe depressive episodes with suicidal ideations” (Fangmann, 3).