Medicine: Pills for Mental Illness?

Mental-health experts across the U.S were choosing up sides in a controversy over a new drug. From California’s Modesto State Hospital came enthusiastic reports of success in using reserpine (TIME, June 21) to calm down the most disturbed patients in the back wards, and to lift the most depressed out of their lethargy, thus making both types more responsive to psychiatric treatment. Three California doctors used such words as “dramatic” and “incredible” to describe the improvement wrought by reserpine* in 80% of the 74 patients on whom they tried it. They forecast in the A.M.A. Journal: “If . . . long-term studies substantially confirm these preliminary findings, reserpine will be the most important therapeutic development in the history of psychiatry.”

Other psychiatrists in state hospitals were quick to question the extreme optimism of the Californians’ findings. Elsewhere, the drug has been tested and found helpful but no cureall, or even a cure at all, for mental illness. One advantage on which most researchers who have tried it agree: reserpine should reduce the need for electroshock treatments.

* Derived from the root of the snakeroot shrub, Rauwolfia serpentina, crude extracts of which have been used for 3,000 years by India’s medicine men. The late Mohandas Gandhi took such an extract as a tranquilizer.