Carbamazepine in the treatment of psychotic and behavioral disorders. A pilot study.

Symptoms of (mostly psychotic) agitation and symptoms of disrupted behavior, loss of impulse control (such as aggressiveness, impulsivity, perversity, suicidal attempts, orality, pseudomania which means mania subjectively experienced as unpleasant mania, mania not responding to lithium treatment) and EPS (very pronounced in group A, less in the other subgroups) in patients with a premorbid active-ambivalent personality pattern, in the absence of clinical and EEG signs of epilepsy, constitute an indication for the use of carbamazepine. This drugs allows a reduction, sometimes marked, of high doses of neuroleptics, as well as of many doubtful indications for lithium, characterised by our selection criteria.