Antipsychotic drugs

Antipsychotic drugs

Antipsychotic drugs can control psychotic symptoms,such as delusions and hallucinations, and thought disor-ders that can occur with schizophrenia, mania, and other psychoses.

By any other name

Drugs used to treat psychoses have several different names, in-cluding:

§    antipsychotic, because they can eliminate signs and symptoms of psychoses

§    major tranquilizer, because they can calm an agitated patient

§    neuroleptic, because they have an adverse neurobiologic effect that causes abnormal body movements.

Two major groups

Regardless of what they’re called, all antipsychotic drugs belong to one of two major groups:

·                 atypical antipsychotics, which include aripiprazole, cloza-pine, olanzapine, paliperidone, quetiapine, risperidone, and ziprasidone

·                 typical antipsychotics, which include phenothiazines and nonphenothiazines.