[Pharmacopsychoses during drug addiction]

Abstract

Widespread use of certain drugs (amphetamines, L.S.D., hypnotics) in France, allowed us to observe more than 200 cases of acute or chronic psychoses among addicts. Sometimes these are transitory outburst but the occurrence of a delusional psychosis with long range evolution raises a difficult diagnosis problem in relation to functional psychoses. The emphasis should be put on respective roles of the drug and of a predisposed mental state. Circumstances of beginning, apparently direct relationship between drug taking and pathological symptoms, therapy efficiency, absence of earlier pathological traits (as in many of our patients) and relapse when intoxication starts again, are in favour of a pharmacological origin of the troubles.