What is a mood stabilizer?
Lately, we are being told that olanzapine is not only an antipsychotic, it is a mood stabilizer. This is not a big surprise for those of us who have used this drug on psychotic bipolar patients and observed that it has positive effects beyond its neuroleptic properties. Whether its mood-stabilizing effects are greater than or equal to its current competition, both antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, remains very much an unanswered question. Clozapine has been shown recently to have excellent mood-stabilizing properties above and beyond its antipsychotic effect. All of this has precipitated many discussions about the potential of new-generation (atypical) antipsychotics as mood stabilizers. Santayana once said, “Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The current discussions are reminiscent of the first discussions about antimanic agents. The advent of lithium as the first approved antimanic agent in the 1970s also brought a multitude of studies of many of the th
