[Perspectives of psychiatric pharmacotherapy]

A review of the development of psychiatric pharmacotherapy often leads to the conclusion that the major discoveries were made in the years between 1952 and 1960; Since the psychiatric pharmacotherapy is said to stagnate. This opinion is wrong. Psychopharmacological research has attained continuous progress also in the last twenty years. In the future, further progress is to be expected, if clinical research expands to hitherto neglected (e.g. Alzheimer dementia, personality disorders, drug dependence) and at the same time abandons the unilateral tie to an up to now purely nosologically oriented concept of indications. This means that in the future psychopharmaca will be prescribed possibly no longer primarily according to etiological considerations, but also with particular consideration of the symptoms and the course of the disease.