This is the question asked by Tilman Steinert & Martin Jandl in a letter to the journal Psychopharmacology.
They point out that in the past 20 years, the word "antipsychotic" has exploded in popularity. Less than 100 academic papers were published with that word in the title in 1990, but now it's over 600 per year.
The older term for the same drugs was "neuroleptics". This terminology, however, has slowly but surely fallen into disuse over the same time period.
To illustrate this they have a nice graph of PubMed hits. Neuroskeptic readers will be familiar with these as I have often posted my own and I recently wrote a bash script to harvest this data automatically. Now you too can be a historian of medicine from the comfort of your own home...
Why does it matter what we call them? A name is just a name, right? No, that's ...
