In this Chapter:
11.1. Antipsychotic drugs (neuroleptic drugs)
11.2. Antidepressants
11.3. Drugs used in manic states (antimanic drugs, mood stabilizing drugs)
11.3.1. Lithium salts
11.4. Anxiolytics (tranquilizers)
11.5. Sedatives
11.6. Psychostimulant drugs
11.7. Nootropic drugs (cognitive enhancers)
Drugs of this group are used for the treatment of mental illnessis. They are used in the treatment of psychoses, as well as in neurotic and pseudoneurotic disorders, associated with stress, nervousness, fear, anxiety and other symptoms.
Mechanisms of action of psychotropic drugs have been studied to a limited extent, though the scale of this research is huge. The most interesting data describe the effect of these drugs on the interneuronal transmission, biogenic amines metabolism, cholinergic systems of the brain, interaction with peptides, amino acids, stimulating or inhibiting neurons, etc. However, the mechanisms of antipsychotic and antineurotic drugs remain unclear. This is, firstly due to the fact that the causes of most psychiatric disorders and psychopathologic conditions are unknown. There are significant obstacles in the search and preclinical assessment of potential psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately, there are no adequate experimental models of psychiatric disorders. This is why one has to use a complex of various techniques, enabling to evaluate the drug effect on the higher nervous activity of animals, and on this basis to predict the possibilities of their clinical application. Various types of conditional reflexes are widely used to study the psychotropic drugs. These studies evaluate the effect of these drugs on behavioural reactions, emotions, motivations, motor activity, experimental psychoses and neuroses. Due to the accumulated experience in the psychopharmacology it is possible to give a general prediction of the extent of the