Introduction

It is always comforting to reflect on a ‘Golden Age’ – a time of optimism and hope when the barriers of ignorance and impotence tumbled before an onslaught of knowledge.

For psychiatry, the decade of the 1950s might now be seen as one such Golden Age, for the 1950s saw the explosive birth of psychopharmacology. Suddenly, those devoted to the medical management of individuals suffering the ravages of psychiatric disorder had at their disposal an ever-expanding array of therapeutic tools whose efficacy could be established by the application of scientific principle, which did not require a lifetime to show their benefits, and which were relatively cheap. No longer was the therapeutic armamentarium restricted to those who were sufficiently intelligent and articulate to utilise what was on offer, or sufficiently well-heeled to afford it. For no longer would psychiatrists need to be pseudo-physicians, misdirecting their medical skills to crude and largely ineffective physical interventions or suffocating them under a welter of unverifiable dogma. Most importantly of all, no longer were those whose misfortune it was to be afflicted by major disorders excluded from the therapeutic possibilities.

It was, of course, necessary to interpret the concept of knowledge in this ‘Golden Age’ in a somewhat wider than usual manner, for while it may have been clear that the increasing litany of new compounds worked, understanding of how they worked was rudimentary.