Erasing the Personal Baseline: Graphing Responders to Psychiatric Drug Maintenance Therapy.

This article identifies changes in the graphical representation of drug responders in psychiatric journals between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s. It argues that before 1970, psychiatrists assessed patients' responses in relation to their personal baselines or symptom trajectories. After 1970, clinical trials made it possible to see responders through a statistical lens, as a homogeneous population, decontextualized from its past and having a future consisting of two possible states: relapse or remission. Abstracted from their life's context, responders became the desired outcome of prescribing protocols that could be applied anywhere. Psychiatry's graphical language supported an authoritative view of mental health as something to be optimized and maintained with prescription drugs. PMID: 31518180 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Medical History - Category: History of Medicine Authors: Tags: Can Bull Med Hist Source Type: research