Perspectives in chemotherapy of schizophrenic psychoses

1. The treatment of schizophrenic symptoms has not the same efficacy in acute and chronic phases of the disease and on the various target symptoms of schizophrenia. 2. The ideal antipsychotic drug might have different properties, sometimes contradictory, to be effective both on paranoid and hebephrenic symptoms which seem to be a mirror image of the same disorder. 3. Basic perspectives in the chemotherapy of schizophrenic psychoses must be founded on better methodological considerations in clinical trials, on a better use of antipsychotic drugs with the help of pharmacokinetic data and computerized EEG and also on new neurochemical findings. 4. Recent data on the mode of action of neuroleptics open up new therapeutic classes of drugs. Such are GABA-like drugs and, more recently, beta-blockers.