Medicine: Brain's Opiate

It can help schizophrenics

In little more than 20 years, the population of U.S. mental hospitals has been cut from 560,000 to 170,000, and a million or more patients have been restored to bearable, often productive life. This mental-health revolution was brought about by a group of drugs, mostly phe-nothiazines (best-known: Thorazine). But like all potent medications, these have severe long-term side effects in some patients (for example: muscular spasms of the tongue, mouth or limbs).

Two of the men who introduced drug treatment for mental illness into North America, Dr. Nathan S. Kline, director of New York's Rockland Research Institute, and Dr....