Research on the effects of psychodrugs on human interaction. A theoretical/experimental approach

Medications as Social Phenomena

This article discusses medications as socially embedded phenomena, using the class of psychoactive medications as a primary example. The analytical perspective is systemic, constructivist, and critical. We suggest that the ‘rational use of drugs’ paradigm fails to appreciate various legitimate rationalities motivating medication usages and is therefore inadequate to understand the place of medications in society. Medications have complex life cycles, with diverse actors, social systems, and institutions determining who uses what medications, how, when and why. Such understanding permits analyzing medications simultaneously as entities and representations. We outline recent changes in usage patterns of psychoactive medications (notably prescriptions to children), in pharmaceutical marketing practices (notably direct-to-consumer advertising), and in the construction of knowledge about drugs (notably the role of the Internet in legitimating consumers’ viewpoints). These changes indicate that medication life cycles evolve and mutate with social and technological change. These life cycles are viewed, then, as systems – part of other social, cultural, and economic systems, themselves in constant change. This perspective provides fertile ground to raise several research questions in order to understand better the nature of medications, their effects, and their place in society.

Schizophrenia: a study comparing a family therapy group following a paradoxical model plus psychodrugs and a group treated by the conventional clinical approach

A 'short family therapy' in schizophrenia, according to a specific systemic model (the 'Elementary Pragmatic Model' or EPM) with a strong paradoxical structure is presented. A total of 38 schizophrenic patients, randomly allocated, were treated according to the EPM model combined with psychotropic drugs (19 cases, each of whom underwent 10 weekly sessions of family therapy) or a traditional clinical-pharmacological approach (19 cases). With regard to all measures (number of drop-outs, symptoms according to the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, social activity according to the Strauss-Carpenter Outcome Scale and an interactive test) the EPM group showed better results. It is suggested that the systemic approach could be used not only as an effective therapy model in schizophrenia but also as an intervention in addition to or integrated into an ongoing psychoeducational family therapy.