Making the First Anti-Depressant: Amphetamine in American Medicine, 1929-1950

@article{Rasmussen2006MakingTF,
  title={Making the First Anti-Depressant: Amphetamine in American Medicine, 1929-1950},
  author={Nicolas Rasmussen},
  journal={Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences},
  year={2006},
  volume={61},
  pages={288 - 323}
}
  • N. Rasmussen
  • Published 19 June 2006
  • Medicine
  • Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
E are accustomed to thinking of the widespread use of anti-depressant drugs as a recent phenomenon, and one of decidedly mixed blessings. While no doubt effective, their phenomenal popularity since the 1990s has raised questions about the medicalization of problems of living and the fading boundaries between healing and medical enhancement (or the specter of “cosmetic pharmacology,” in Peter Kramer’s pithy formulation). Today’s anti-depressants have also, for some critics, come to symbolize the… 
View on PubMed
doi.org
73 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
17
Methods Citations
1

73 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Amphetamine-Type Stimulants: The Early History of Their Medical and Non-Medical Uses.
  • N. Rasmussen
  • Psychology, Medicine
    International review of neurobiology
  • 2015
TLDR
By the late 1940s, methamphetamine had achieved medical and market success as an antidepressant and was quickly gaining such success as a diet medication that their abuse potential was becoming recognized by medicine, eventually leading to their strict control internationally around 1970.
Opium and the People: The Prescription Psychopharmaceutical Epidemic in Historical Context
TLDR
The chapter describes how the controls placed on the availability of drugs like opium and cocaine set the scene for the rise of prescription psychopharmaceuticals in the mid-twentieth century and helped usher in the recreational drug scene in the 1950s.
Marketing Masked Depression: Physicians, Pharmaceutical Firms, and the Redefinition of Mood Disorders in the 1960s and 1970s
TLDR
The article argues that the collective construction of the market for first-generation antidepressants triggered two realignments: first, it bracketed etiological issues with multiple classifications in favor of a unified symptom-oriented approach to diagnosis and treatment; second, it radically weakened the differentiation between antidepressants, neuroleptics, and tranquilizers.
The creation of the concept of an antidepressant: an historical analysis.
  • J. Moncrieff
  • Sociology, Medicine
    Social science & medicine
  • 2008
TLDR
Questions are raised about the view that psychiatry was transformed into a modern medical enterprise in the 1950s and 1960s by the introduction of disease specific drugs.
Title The Psychoactive Effects of Psychiatric Medication : The Elephant in the Room Permalink
The psychoactive effects of psychiatric medications have been obscured by the presumption that these medications have disease-specific actions. Exploiting the parallels with the psychoactive effects…
The Psychoactive Effects of Psychiatric Medication: The Elephant in the Room
TLDR
Extensive research is needed to clarify the range of acute and longer-term mental, behavioral, and physical effects induced by psychiatric drugs, both during and after consumption and withdrawal, to enable users and prescribers to exploit their psychoactive effects judiciously in a safe and more informed manner.
Collateral Damage: A Mixed Methods Study to Investigate the Use and  Withdrawal of Antidepressants Within a Naturalistic Population
The use of modern antidepressants has flourished over the past few decades with the modern attribution of affective disorders such as depression to biomedical causation. However, recent…
How ephedrine escaped regulation in the United States: a historical review of misuse and associated policy.
TLDR
Tighter control of all ephedrine products, drugs and dietary supplements alike, might have prevented adverse outcomes and allowed this substance to remain available in a safer manner.
Cardiovascular toxicity of novel psychoactive drugs: Lessons from the past
  • P. Dawson, J. Moffatt
  • Medicine, Psychology
    Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry
  • 2012
The long use of ephedrine, amphetamines, cocaine, LSD and more recently 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA; "Ecstasy") allows us to predict with some confidence what cardiovascular risks…
America's first amphetamine epidemic 1929-1971: a quantitative and qualitative retrospective with implications for the present.
TLDR
Retrospective epidemiology indicates that the absolute prevalence of both nonmedical stimulant use and stimulant dependence or abuse have reached nearly the same levels today as at the epidemic's peak around 1969.
...
1
2
3
4
5
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 118 REFERENCES
Observations on Benzedrine
TLDR
Benzedrine has now been given to over 250 in patients, out-patients, and normal subjects at this hospital, and in a proportion of these only the subjective and objective results of administration have been noted, but in more than a hundred cases systematic experiments were carried out.
ADDICTION TO AMPHETAMINE SULFATE
TLDR
The purpose in this report is to warn against the possibility of addiction by the continued use of this new stimulating drug amphetamine in the treatment of obesity.
Prozac on the couch : prescribing gender in the era of wonder drugs
Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the…
THE USE OF BENZEDRINE FOR THE TREATMENT OF NARCOLEPSY
TLDR
Pharmacologic studies indicated thatBenzedrine has a more stimulating effect on the higher centers of the central nervous system than ephedrine, as manifested by its ability to awaken experimental animals from intraperitoneal barbital anesthesia and by its insomnia-producing effect in human beings.
COLLAPSE WITH DEATH FOLLOWING THE USE OF AMPHETAMINE SULFATE
TLDR
During the past few years the use of amphetamine sulfate as a stimulating drug has become increasingly widespread, and the public is becoming familiar with it, and its use among students is probably more common than one would think.
THE STIMULATING ACTION OF BENZEDRINE SULFATE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE RESPONSES OF NORMAL PERSONS AND OF DEPRESSED PATIENTS
TLDR
Benzedrine was given prominence as an astringent to the human nasal mucosa, chiefly through the work of Bertolet, Byrne, 8 Scarano 9 and Wood.
CLINICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE EFFECT OF BENZEDRINE SULFATE: A STUDY OF PATIENTS WITH STATES OF CHRONIC EXHAUSTION, DEPRESSION AND PSYCHONEUROSIS
TLDR
Benzedrine has been utilized particularly in the treatment of congestion of the nasal mucosa, in maintaining blood pressure during spinal anesthesia and in orthostatic hypotension, and for the relief of spasm affecting the gastro-intestinal tract.
Mental ills and bodily cures : psychiatric treatment in the first half of the twenthieth century
"Mental Ills and Bodily Cures" depicts a time when psychiatric medicine went to lengths we now find extreme and perhaps even brutal ways to heal the mind by treating the body. From a treasure trove…
FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON BENZEDRINE
".anxiety states," three schizophrenics, and one organic (manic-depressive with disseminated sclerosis). At the beginning of this study the pressor effect of the drug was studied as well as its…
The action and clinical use of ephedrine, an alkaloid isolated from the Chinese drug ma huang; historical document.
TLDR
Ma huang (Ephedra vulgarisvar) has been known in Chinese medicine for some 5,100 years and was one of the drugs tasted by Emperor Shen Nung, and has been incorporated into many famous prescriptions, including one for typhoid.
...
1
2
3
4
5
...