Antipsychotics

Antipsychotics: Dopamine, Typicals & Atypicals

Block one transmitter — dopamine — and you can quiet the voices and delusions of psychosis. But dopamine runs in four separate highways of the brain, and a drug can't block just one. Silence dopamine everywhere and you calm the psychosis in one pathway while causing Parkinson-like stiffness in another, and a hormone surge in a third. That single fact — four pathways, one drug — explains everything antipsychotics do, for good and ill.