Chlorpromazine and the Untreated Chronic Schizophrenic: A Long-Term Trial

Abstract

Although chlorpromazine was the first of the phenothiazine drugs to be used in psychiatry, and has since been the subject of an extensive literature, there is a surprising dearth of information about the nature of its effect in chronic schizophrenia. Some early reports indicated that it produced a beneficial change, but before this could be examined and documented the attention of most psychiatrists was diverted to newer and supposedly more potent analogues. The present trial was undertaken with three factors in mind, which had not been fully taken into account of in previous studies. These were: