Limits and Usefulness of Clinical Psychopharmacology

Abstract

The discovery of psychoactive drugs has followed different historical phases. Initially attempts were made to utilize natural compounds capable to modify behaviour or to synthetized analogue chemical structures. Later on the discovery “by chance” of therapeutic effects of drug developed in other indications has represented a quite frequent event in psychopharmacology, underlying the difficulty in finding adequate animal models to predict a therapeutic effect in psychiatric illness. Subsequently to the discovery of “mile stone” psychoactive drugs the developmental strategy has followed an “indirect” comparative methodology by modifying molecules known to have a psychotropic action and comparing in animal selected models the activity of the new molecules to the activity of the known ones. A moderne and more challenging approach is the one which tries to infere from the understanding of possible mechanism of action a molecular structure which could fit the ethiopatogenetic hypothesis.