Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior

LABORATORY AND BRANCH RESEARCH REVIEWS 87

Joel Elkes, M.D.
Courtesy of the National Library
of Medicine

phenothiazines and a placebo with the additional goal of determining:

1. the effect of the physical environment on the responsiveness to
   drugs; 2) the effect of various types of nursing care on drug response;


2. the cultivation of therapeutic and research skills in ward personnel;


3. the usefulness and reliability of clinical research instruments and
   scales; and 5) the codification of specific patient change behavior and
   hospital milieu attributes, such as staff attitudes, toward the research
   program and the ward setting.^5 Additional research conducted by this
   section studied patient social interaction (i.e., association or isolation)
   within a chronic mental hospital ward, dependency as a factor in chronic
   hospitalization, the transitions of chronic schizophrenic patients into the
   community and the group therapeutic techniques that facilitate such
   transitions, and the effects of imipramine on depression.^6
   The Section on Chemical Pharmacology, headed by Hans Weil-
   Malherbe, focused on: 1) human and animal studies in intermediate
   metabolism, specifically correlating behavioral effects with biochemical
   structure, properties, and effects of various psychotomimetic tryptamine
   derivatives; 2) at the cellular level, an examination of drug effects on car­
   bohydrate and nucleotide metabolism in the central nervous system;


4. the effects of phrenotropic drugs on the concentrations, intracellular
   distribution, and synthesis of catecholamines within the brain, including
   developing and refining reliable, sensitive, and specific methods for the
   routine assay of catecholamines in plasma; and 4) the effect of drugs on