One Hundred Years of Schizophrenia. Hegerty, J. American Journal of Psychiatry 151 (1994):1409-1416.
In 1994, Harvard Medical School researchers reported that outcomes for schizophrenia patients in the U.S. had declined since the 1970s, to the point they were no better than they had been in 1900. Although the researchers did not blame antipsychotics for the poor outcomes, it is notable that this decline occurred during a period when American psychiatrists began telling the public that people diagnosed with schizophrenia had to stay on the drugs for life. In other words, the decline coincided with the adoption of a paradigm of care that emphasized lifelong drug therapy.
