**6. Efficacy of natural plants in the treatment of psychosis**

Many medicinal plants studied for psychosis were found to have efficacy against the positive, negative and cognitive deficit of schizophrenia in laboratory animals, without the disturbing adverse effects seen with conventional antipsychotic drugs. Even those that are thought to act on the dopamine receptors had minimal or no cataleptic tendencies. The tendency for these plants to ameliorate the negative symptoms in schizophrenia, and in some cases also improve psychotic symptoms, may be owing to the ability of most plants to generally exert anti-inflammatory effects [71] and given that inflammation is a risk factor in most neuropsychiatric disorders including schizophrenia [72]. Oxidative stress is also a major factor in psychosis, plants contain diverse constituents which exhibit antioxidant, and neuroprotective effects useful in ameliorating psychotic symptoms [67].

Large number of schizophrenic patients fail to respond adequately to the initial antipsychotic drug treatment necessitating the addition of natural antipsychotic plants to their treatment regimen. As recently reviewed by Hoenders et al. [73] the inclusion of traditional medicine or Ayurvedic herbs to antipsychotics, generally improve the psychopathology of the disease, however, more studies are needed to conclusively support this finding.
