David Cunningham Owens is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh and honorary consultant psychiatrist, the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. Society has a complex relationship with drugs - especially those which alter ‘the mind’. In this talk, we shall chart the evolution of psychotropic drugs - agents used in the management of mental state disorders. That some compounds alter human experience has been known since pre-history, but the seeds of modern psychopharmacology go back to the mid-Victorian period and had nothing at all to do with medicine. It took three quarters of century before real breakthroughs were made, in which World War 2 played its part. The 1950s seemed like a golden age, when almost all the major types of psychotropics still in use were identified or found their applications. This explosion of new therapeutic tools had profound social consequences and for the first time in human history, it was possible to believe, not through faith but through science, that major psychiatric disorders were ‘illnesses’. But few psychotropics ‘cure’, and none modifies underlying disease processes. Furthermore, development of new compounds remains hampered by limited understanding of the complexity of the human brain. So, what does the future hold for some of the world’s most widely prescribed therapeutic agents? Are there any new developments on the horizon? This lecture is part of the Medical Detectives, a series of public lectures that show how keen detective work is still essential for 21st century doctors: http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/events/medical-detectives/ Recorded on 20 September 2012 in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre at the University of Edinburgh.