Antipsychotic Polypharmacy: Squandering Precious Resources?

Atypical antipsychotics represent a major advance in psychopharmacology, based on compelling evidence that monotherapy with atypical antipsychotics has superior benefits over monotherapy with conventional antipsychotics. Despite becoming the most expensive drugs in psychiatry and for many health care systems, atypical antipsychotics have now largely replaced conventional antipsychotics due to the perceived greater efficacy of the atypicals. An especially expensive clinical utilization of these already expensive drugs is to combine them with another antipsychotic (polypharmacy) in an attempt to further enhance their efficacy.