apart from clozapine, second-generation antipsychotics are generally as effective as first-generation antipsychotics for positive symptoms, but the promise of greater efficacy for negative symptoms has not been fulfilled (leucht et al., 2012). for instance, the concomitant use of antipsychotics and chinese herbs was found to induce significantly improved clinical outcomes compared with antipsychotics only (rathbone et al., 2007). next, abstracts about the following topics were included: a) effects of natural medicines on psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia spectrum nonaffective disorders and b) effects of natural medicines on the adverse effects of antipsychotics. concordant with these findings, omega-3 pufa may have positive effects in the treatment of schizophrenia (emsley et al., 2002; peet, 2008). antioxidants may capture these reactive free radicals and convert them back to less reactive forms of the molecules (singh et al., 2010). the pineal hormone melatonin is a potent antioxidant and attenuates dopaminergic activity in the striatum and dopamine release from the hypothalamus (shamir et al., 2001). d-cycloserine showed an improvement of negative symptoms in three (from nine) studies when added to antipsychotics (goff et al., 2008; heresco-levy et al., 2002; yurgelun-todd et al., 2005); some improvement of positive symptoms in one (gottlieb et al., 2011) and worsening in another study (from seven) (van berckel et al., 1999); and little or no effect on cognitive and depressive symptoms or general psychopathology and no improvement of adverse effects of antipsychotics was shown.