To reduce anxiety and excitability using, also used a salt bromine. But the real coup was the discovery in psychopharmacology antidepressants in the early 50's. Since then, for over half a century, these drugs are the principal means to combat depression.
Despite the fact that the era of antidepressants has started recently, it has already had its "creation myths."
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, researchers have experimented with different substances in an attempt to synthesize the drug that facilitates the symptoms of depression, but the experiments failed. The first antidepressant was "opened" in 1957, quite by accident, when doctors called attention to the effect of iproniazida who applied for the treatment of tuberculosis. In addition to the main effect of the drug were observed and secondary, which was unusual in improving mood in patients with tuberculosis. Soon the drug was used to alleviate symptoms of depression, the more that, as a means of tuberculosis, the drug itself is not justified.
According to another version of the effect of opened Nathan Kline, and its opening was also more than a casual - he tried to help the drug to prove a theory about the location of the "ego". During psychoanalytic sessions, Klein noted that some patients to whom he gave the drug, suddenly ceased to agitate the problem over which they worked. Iproniazid has been placed on the market, but soon proved that it increases the risk of jaundice, and the sale of the drug was discontinued.
At the same time, Germany was opened by Ronald Kunom imipromin. Kuhn gave various drugs to their patients, to their reaction to the global classification of mental illness, which German psychiatrists of that time were literally obsessed. As in previous cases, the drug was "open" when the patient has to rise up. Unlike iproniazida, imipromin still included in the official list of drugs and WHO before prozac was the best selling antidepressants.
When the first antidepressants were discovered, no one could have imagined that just a few decades, treatment with antidepressants almost replace other types of treatment of depression, but in a survey conducted in the late 20 th century in the United States, the biggest opening of the last century will be recognized is not the theory of relativity and not the Internet, a small capsule prozac.
