One of the major developments in psychiatry in the last decade is the development and widespread use of the new antipsychotics. The field has moved from the typical dopamine D2-blocking neuroleptics into the new era of antipsychotics with the addition of the serotonin 5-HT2A properties to the classical D2 antagonism. These “atypical” antipsychotic drugs (APDs) provide us with new tools with which to treat our patients. However, do we really know how to make the most of these new medications? Are we equipped with the knowledge to do the best matching between the different APDs and the patients that we will see in an hour's time?

One potential way to get the maximum therapeutic effect of a specific medication is to improve the matching between the compound and the patient that we are seeing, ie, to try and get the best medication for the patient. For example, the medication one would choose for a patient with cognitive decline and a tendency to be overweight, would likely be different from an antipsychotic one would select for a patient with the same diagnosis, but who is slim and has paranoid delusions. It is also intuitively clear to us that we should treat first-episode patients differently from those with a 20-year history of social decline. Similarly, a patient with pronounced affective component would receive a different treatment regimen from a patient who is affectively “flat.”

Although we have been hearing and reading a lot about all the different APDs, it would be quite accurate to postulate that a concise updated summary of the different APDs, examining them around four different critical axes, might be welcomed by our readers.

The topics covered in this supplement are: the differential receptor's profile of APDs and their clinical implications, the issue of cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and APDs, monitoring guidelines to assess metabolic abnormalities that may occur with APDs, and an update on treatment after first-episode psychosis.