The RADAR trial is complete. Disappointingly it showed that people who gradually reduce their antipsychotic medication are more likely to relapse than people who continue it. At 2-year follow-up there were no differences in social functioning, symptoms, side effects or quality of life. Yet relapse was far from inevitable and the qualitative analysis showed that…
We are told that long-term antipsychotic treatment reduces the risk of someone having a ‘relapse’ of schizophrenia or psychosis. What ‘relapse’ actually refers to in the studies that are supposed to establish this has not been examined though. Our recent study of relapse definitions, published in Schizophrenia Research, shows that there is no consistent or…
People have used psychoactive substances to dull and deaden pain, misery and suffering since time immemorial, but only recently, in the last few decades, have people been persuaded that what they are doing in this situation is rightly thought of as taking a remedy for an underlying disease. The spread of the use of prescription…
Two pieces of research have been published over the last two years that should prompt a major reorientation of the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis, and a fundamental reappraisal of the use of antipsychotic drugs in general. Put together, these studies suggest that the standard approach to treating serious mental health problems may cause more…
Joanna Moncrieff 