What are the psychotropic drugs?

At present, drugs used to treat schizophrenia are mainly divided into two categories. The first category is the traditional antipsychotic drugs, including chlorpromazine, perphenazine, haloperidol, sulpiride, Telden, methimazole, penfluridol and other drugs. The second category is non-traditional antipsychotics, also known as atypical antipsychotics, including risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine, clozapine, aripiprazole and so on. The former is mainly effective for positive symptoms, and its price is cheap, but its side effects are great, including excessive sedation (such as chlorpromazine), extrapyramidal reactions (such as haloperidol and penfluridol), taking too many tablets, and the dosage is difficult to master, which often affects patients' compliance with treatment and the recovery of social function. The latter is effective for both positive and negative symptoms. Except clozapine, there are relatively few side effects and less excessive sedation (such as risperidone). It is convenient to use, but expensive. Experts suggest that atypical antipsychotics should be used as much as possible for patients with first-episode schizophrenia, which is more conducive to the comprehensive recovery of patients. But if you can't afford it financially, you can also choose traditional antipsychotics.

Clozapine in the treatment of schizophrenia has duality, which has unique curative effect and serious side effects, especially fatal agranulocytosis and serious cardiovascular side effects. Therefore, most experts do not advocate clozapine as the first choice for schizophrenia, but use it to treat refractory schizophrenia.

There are also some long-acting injections of antipsychotics, such as fluodecyl ester (fluphenazine decanoate, FD), ambroxol ester (pethidine palmitate), halidol (haloperidol decanoate), high antibiotic injection (chlorothiazide) and rehabilitation injection (trifluorothiazide).

The advantage of long-acting injection lies in its long action time. Acute treatment once a week, recovery once every 2-4 weeks. Long-acting acupuncture is simple in treatment, can avoid the trouble of taking medicine every day, has weak sedative effect, and is suitable for maintenance treatment of patients in rehabilitation period. The disadvantage of long-acting injection is slow drug excretion and accumulation. At the initial stage of treatment, there are few side effects, but after several injections, due to the accumulation of drugs, there may be side effects mainly outside the cone. At this time, even if the drug is stopped, the side effects will last for weeks or even months.