Editor's note

It is interesting that the most researched and possibly most important area of therapeutics in mental illness, the drug treatment of schizophrenia, is covered in less than 4000 words in this chapter. Why is this? Is it that our two authors are so good at précis that they can summarize in 10 words information that would use 100 words in the writing of others, or is it because the information is so diffuse that no conclusions can be drawn? Or is there another reason: that the subject has such a strong evidence base that it is possible to describe it both briefly and fully? Perhaps the last option has it. Lord Moran of Manton, perhaps best known as the personal doctor of Winston Churchill, in his Harveian oration of 1945 put it this way:-

“The physician who knows what is wrong with a patient and has an effective remedy can cut the cackle. He has no need of it”. Now we are not suggesting that the other longer chapters are full of cackle, but when there is more doubt, there is more conjecture and this takes up more space. As Adams et al. (2006) states, ‘the literature on the drug treatment of schizophrenia is actually quite clear and unequivocal; the problem is that in rich countries with powerful drug companies, the constant jockeying for market position tends to confuse by setting up winners and losers on flimsy evidence.