Neurontin (gabapentin) spends plenty of time in our patient’s medicine cabinets, but lately it has spent nearly as much time splashed across news sections of daily papers. Parke-Davis, the company that used to market Neurontin before it merged with Pfizer, has been accused of improperly promoting its use for a variety of off-label indications (1).

Zyprexa (olanzapine) became rapidly popular after its introduction in the United States in 1996. Its structural similarity to Clozaril (clozapine) led to hopes that it would be as effective for treatment-resistant cases as Clozaril but without the risk of agranulocytosis.

Abilify (aripiprazole) is out! But you probably already know this, if your mailbox and fax machine have become as saturated with BMS-funded missives from CME, Inc. as mine have been. The hired guns are out in force once again, and so we front-line clinicians are faced with the task of separating the authentic wheat from the hyped-up chaff.

In the beginning of modern psychiatry, there was only one medication— Thorazine (Chlorpromazine). Thorazine was originally classified as an antihistamine, and was used to treat everything thrown in the path of psychiatrists: psychosis, mania, depression, and anxiety.

America has not been kind to St. John’s Wort. In Europe, this flowering bush that blooms around June 24 (St. John’s Day), has been all the rage for about 2000 years. It was first mentioned by the Roman Pliny the Elder in the first century, and over the past two millennia it has been used for a variety of ills, including diarrhea, urinary problems, demonic exorcism, and more recently, for melancholia.

… psychiatric research standards, the numbers were huge: 851 patients in the Effexor XR group, 748 in the SSRI group (Prozac, Paxil, and Luvox), and 446 in the placebo group. The doses of comparator SSRIs were robust enough to mirror what we actually use in clinical practice, and treatment duration...

Celexa (Citalopram) has been used in Europe since the late 1980s, and since its introduction in the U.S. market in 1998 it has made steady inroads into the SSRI market, largely because it has the reputation of being unusually well tolerated.

The latest member of the “controlled-release club” is GlaxoSmithKline, with its Paxil CR. While cynics may believe that CR launches are simply efforts to prolong patent-lives and therefore profits, the reality is that CR formulations are generally better tolerated and easier to dose.