Word: mental
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...them are suffering or have suffered from a mental disease known as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which torments its victims with clouds of horrific anxieties and forces them, like primitive priests propitiating unknown gods, to indulge in senseless and repetitive rituals. Not long ago, this disease--along with most other so-called mental illnesses--was considered to be a chronic, untreatable condition, a psychological crippler whose roots lay hidden deep within the brain's mysterious recesses...
...brain is finally giving up its secrets, and the biggest secret of all is that this 3-lb. maze of nerves and tissue is also a veritable laboratory of chemicals whose workings and interactions largely determine the state of our mental health, down to the latest mood swing. Many mental illnesses once thought to be purely psychological conditions--among them schizophrenia, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and ocd--turn out to be caused by specific chemical imbalances. Those who suffer from them are racked not by toilet-training traumas or the "unceasing terror and tension of the fetal night...
...good news is that many if not most of these brain afflictions can now be remedied by increasingly precise psychoactive drugs. In the past few years, scientists have joined disciplines and come up with a whole new pharmacopoeia of compounds to deal with mental disorders. "Today the psychiatrists who treat patients are working hand in hand with the 'wet-brain guys'--the pharmacologists, chemists and molecular biologists," says Dr. Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. While the effects of earlier psychiatric drugs were discovered largely by trial and error, the latest compounds...
...development of drugs for schizophrenia, one of the most perplexing and devastating of all mental illnesses, was an early success story. After several decades as a hopeless research backwater, the schizophrenia field was reborn in 1989, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a remarkable drug, clozapine (brand name: Clozaril). Made by the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, Clozaril was aimed at patients who did not benefit from other drugs. While traditional antipsychotic drugs such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and haloperidol (Haldol) work by blocking dopamine receptors, Clozaril appears to bind to serotonin receptors as well. "It is what we call...
...decade ago, many a panic-disorder patient ended up as a tragic, misunderstood recluse. But today panic disorder is one of the most treatable mental illnesses. Studies have shown that 70% of patients benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy, which includes breathing training, "cognitive restructuring" and "exposure therapy." Most patients can be helped by short-acting antianxiety drugs such as Xanax and long-acting antidepressants such as desipramine and imipramine...