We live in an age of psychopharmacology. One in six persons currently takes a psychotropic drug. These drugs have profoundly shaped our scientific and cultural understanding of psychiatric disease. By way of a historical review, we try to make sense of psychiatry's dependency on psychiatric drugs in the care of patients. Modern psychopharmacology began in 1950 with the synthesis of chlorpromazine. Over the course of the next 50 years, the psychiatric understanding and treatment of mental illness radically changed. Psychotropic drugs played a major part in these changes as state hospitals closed and psychotherapy gave way to drug prescriptions. Our review suggests that the success of psychopharmacology was not the consequence of increasingly more effective drugs for discrete psychiatric diseases. Instead, a complex mix of political economic realities, pharmaceutical marketing, basic science advances, and changes in the mental health-care system have led to our current infatuation with psychopharmacology.

中文翻译：

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心理药理学的历史。

我们生活在一个心理药理学时代。目前，六分之一的人服用精神药物。这些药物深刻地影响了我们对精神疾病的科学和文化理解。通过历史回顾，我们试图弄清精神病学在患者护理中对精神病药物的依赖性。现代心理药理学始于1950年的氯丙嗪的合成。在接下来的50年中，精神病患者对精神疾病的理解和治疗发生了根本性的变化。精神药物在这些变化中起了主要作用，因为州立医院关闭并且心理治疗让位给了药物处方。我们的评论表明，心理药理学的成功并不是对离散性精神病药物越来越有效的结果。反而，