Psychotropic drugs: another survey of prescribing patterns.

We surveyed the psychotropic drug treatment of our hospital's 220 patients, and compared our findings with those of the only previous hospital survey in this country which showed much allegedly inappropriate prescribing. Using simple classifications of the patients' diagnoses and of the drugs prescribed, 30 per cent of our prescriptions appeared inappropriate in the absence of knowledge of the patients' symptoms. With such knowledge we show that only 2 of our 460 prescriptions were inappropriate.