Erasing the Personal Baseline: Graphing Responders to Psychiatric Drug Maintenance Therapy

Since the 1950s, the practice of psychiatric drug maintenance therapy has been supported by graphics. Lacking physical markers to identify "responders" to long-term drugs, psychiatrists have used graphics to make the outcomes of their interventions visible. This article identifies changes in the graphical representation of drug responders in psychiatric journals between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s. It argues that before 1970, psychiatrists assessed patients' responses in relation to their personal baselines or symptom trajectories. After 1970, clinical trials made it possible to see responders through a statistical lens, as a homogeneous population, decontextualized from its past and having a future consisting of two possible states: relapse or remission. Abstracted from their life's context, responders became the desired outcome of prescribing protocols that could be applied anywhere. Psychiatry's graphical language supported an authoritative view of mental health as something to be optimized and maintained with prescription drugs.