Mental-health experts across the U.S were choosing up sides in a
controversy over a new drug. From California's Modesto State Hospital
came enthusiastic reports of success in using reserpine
to calm down the most disturbed patients in the back wards, and to lift
the most depressed out of their lethargy, thus making both types more
responsive to psychiatric treatment. Three California doctors used such
words as “dramatic” and “incredible” to describe the improvement
wrought by reserpine* in 80% of the 74 patients on whom they tried it.
They forecast in the A.M.A. Journal: “If . . . long-term studies
substantially confirm these preliminary findings, reserpine will be the
most important therapeutic development in the history of psychiatry.” Other psychiatrists in state hospitals were quick to question the
extreme optimism of the Californians' findings. Elsewhere, the drug has
been tested and found helpful but no cureall, or even a cure at all,
for mental illness. One advantage on which most researchers who have
tried it agree: reserpine should reduce the need for electroshock
treatments. * Derived from the root of the snakeroot shrub, Rauwolfia
serpentina, crude extracts of which have been used for 3,000 years by
India's medicine men. The late Mohandas Gandhi took such an extract as
a tranquilizer.
