Pill against psychosis
Chlorpromazine was the first drug available in the 1950s to relieve delusions and hallucinations.
Around the world, millions of people take medication every day to keep their psychosis at bay. Before treatment, they might see people who weren't there, or they might hear phantom voices telling them increasingly threatening scenarios. Perhaps they didn't feel their thoughts were their own, or felt they were being controlled remotely. The tablets counteract all of this because their active ingredients affect molecular processes in the patient's brain.
Such a therapy would have been unthinkable 70 years ago. At that time, people classified as "mentally ill" often spent years in a closed institution, and many of those affected were denied a normal life in society. The fact that this situation has changed completely within a few years is mainly due to one discovery: that of the first neuroleptic, chlorpromazine. His story is closely linked to that of a French doctor named Henri Laborit.
Born in 1914 in Hanoi, Vietnam (then part of French Indochina), young Henri followed in the footsteps of his father, who died young, in 1933…
