Psychiatry and the Tranquilizers

Abstract

THE major tranquilizers came into widespread psychiatric use in the early nineteen fifties, an epoch unique in its appreciation of the importance of psychiatric illness, its scientific and technologic mastery and its concern for the welfare of the individual citizen. After World War II, which directly and indirectly led to these changes, increasing scientific progress and the development of new technics, as Kline¹ has pointed out, made a biochemicophysiologic approach to the etiology and treatment of mental illnesses especially attractive. The tranquilizers were thus introduced at a particularly opportune time in the development of psychiatry; moreover, their advent was socially . . .