As of 1960, British academic psychiatry was ‘social’. Social meant epidemiological rather than committed to the idea that mental illness was social rather than biological in origin. The designation ‘biological psychiatry’ became current in the 1990’s. In the 1960s, after an astonishing flood of new drugs, a nascent pharmaceutical industry, previously run by chemists and clinicians, brought in management consultants to ensure the breakthroughs continued but drug discovery in psychiatry has dried up. The pharmaceutical industry has colonised medical research, education and clinical practice. Evidence-based medicine (EBM) and clinical guidelines have served to extend rather than contain the influence of the industry. Antidepressants are now the second most prescribed drugs to teenage girls after contraceptives, in the face of thirty RCTs of antidepressants given to depressed minors – all negative. While they came with drawbacks, through to 1990 the psychotropic drugs introduced from the late 1950s onwards extended the range of clinical capabilities and likely did more good than harm. It is difficult to make the same claims about developments since 1990.