An Oral History of Neuropsychopharmacology the First Fifty Years Peer Interviews: Volume 1: Starting Up

THE SERIES The 10 volumes in this series record a fifty year history of neuropsychopharmacology related by 213 pioneer clinical, academic, industrial and basic scientists in videotaped interviews, conducted by 66 colleagues between 1994 and 2008. These volumes include a preface by the series editor [...]
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THE SERIES The 10 volumes in this series record a fifty year history of neuropsychopharmacology related by 213 pioneer clinical, academic, industrial and basic scientists in videotaped interviews, conducted by 66 colleagues between 1994 and 2008. These volumes include a preface by the series editor placing its contents in an historical context and linking each volume to the next. Each volume is dedicated to a former President of the ACNP and edited by a distinguished historian or Fellow of the College who provides an introduction to its themes and a biography of each scientist's career. The series provides insights into a half century of discovery and innovation with its rewards and disappointments, progress and setbacks, including future expectations and hopes for the field as a whole and the ACNP as an organization. IN THIS VOLUME Volume I, "Starting Up" is dedicated to Heinz Lehmann, President, 1965 and edited by Edward Shorter, a distinguished historian and professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry. ¬The 22 pioneers, all men and predominantly Americans, include trialists, pharmacologists and clinical scientists. From 1952 to the mid 1960s the earliest clinical trials of the first psychotropic drugs took place in the V.A., private practice and State hospitals. ¬Thousands of people with untreated mental illness benefited for the first time. Psychoanalysis dominated academia, the pharmaceutical industry had barely awakened to the potential for treatment of mental illness and clinical pharmacology was an infant discipline. But the NIH and NIMH expanded dramatically, funded by an enthusiastic Congress and the FDA was empowered to insist on drug efficacy as well as safety. Basic scientists began to make the first linkages between serendipitous clinical efficacy and putative neurochemical mechanisms of action.