DURING the last decade, the increasing utilization of computers for information processing in psychiatry has been both dramatic and pervasive. Systems have been devised for a variety of tasks ranging from the automation of patient records, medication inventories, and assessment scales to the simulation of clinical decision processes.1-18 In roughly the same time span, the evaluation of psychoactive drugs and the search for new and superior therapeutic agents has become an active area of psychiatric research. This paper describes a data processing system which was developed for the specific purpose of displaying and analyzing data generated from psychotropic drug trials.
The methods now current in clinical psychopharmacology are the cumulative experience of many research teams. Though these methodologies have much in common, comparisons across studies, especially of different teams, have been hazardous or impossible. The result has been a