With suicides becoming the second leading cause of death among youngsters in India — overall suicide rate of 18.6 per one lakh boys and 12.7 per one girls as reported by 2012 Lancet report 2012 — the medical fraternity has been burdened with the need to evolve new therapies to treat various mental disorders.
However, according to city doctors, all is not lost as current research in the field, is hoping to do just that. America’s biopharmaceutical research companies are testing nearly 200 medicines that target the central nervous system, to fight various mental disorders and addictive ailments like dependence on alcohol or drugs, afflicting millions of patients worldwide, doctors said.
These potential medicines, either in clinical trials or under review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), include 52 for
depression, 37 for schizophrenia and 26 for anxiety disorders.
Dr Bharat R. Shah, consultant psychiatrist at Lilavati Hospital said, “Like physical ailments, psychological disorders can be disabling and a major contributor to the overall disease burden…the new medicines being developed hold the promise of outperforming existing therapies and improving the outcome — be it depression, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder, or other conditions. In the long run, such large-scale development of new medicines to treat depression and schizophrenia will significantly impact the lives of patients.”
Examples of new cutting-edge approaches to fight mental illnesses include a medicine to potentially treat various symptoms arising from schizophrenia with diminished side effects.