Chlorpromazine is today considered a very
dirty and borderline
unethical drug, except where no other treatments are effective. In addition to quieting the psychological symptoms of
schizophrenia, such as disordered thought and speech, it causes severe
poverty of
thought and
affect, as well as physical impairment. This is because it causes a universal depletion of dopamine throughout the brain, in both the
mesolimbic areas relating to emotion and reward and the
nigrostriatal areas that allow initiation of action. Because chlorpromazine is more effective on the positive symptoms of schizophrenia (inappropriate activity, hyperkinesia, etc) than the negative ones (lack of emotion, catatonia), it has been suggested that it and other drugs of the family called "
typical antipsychotics" actually work in no small part by knocking the subject on her ass.
Newer
atypical antipsychotic drugs are better at releiving the
symptoms without making the subject into a
vegetable.