Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA 81Figure 4.1 Resident patients in US federal, state, county and private hospitalsSource: US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to1970, Part I, Washington, DC, 1975, p. 84.THE IMPACT OF THE ANTIPSYCHOTICSSeveral psychiatrists, especially those practicing in northern Europe before andafter the Second World War, remarked that the arrival of the antipsychotic drugsin 1954 had little impact on the discharge rates of many mental hospitals. ÖrnulvÖdegard studied the figures for patients first admitted to all Norwegian psychiatrichospitals before and after the introduction of the antipsychotics. 2 He found asmall increase in discharge rates for patients admitted during 1955–59 comparedwith those admitted during 1948–52, prior to the use of drugs. But he found amuch bigger increase in the discharge rate when he compared the 1948–52 groupwith patients admitted in the late 1930s. The figures for patients suffering fromfunctional psychosis were:In Britain, Alan Norton observed the same pattern at Bexley Hospital in Kent. 3Although some improvement in discharge rates occurred between 1953 and 1957with the introduction of drug treatment, a much more dramatic trend ofimprovement was already under way by the end of the Second World War, asthese figures for female patients with schizophrenia show: