Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (review)

Here's a conundrum for historians—should the author of a history of psychedelic psychiatry have had LSD? The question doesn't resonate in the same way for histories of the anxiolytics, antidepressants, or antipsychotics where plumbing archives, assembling documents, and undertaking interviews will let a researcher create a credible narrative framework and let others critique the outcome based on an appeal to common sources of evidence. Erika Dyck dodges the has-she-or-hasn't-she bullet by doing something that to some might seem almost as surreal as having LSD—she focuses close to exclusively on Saskatchewan in the 1950s, when quite extraordinarily Weyburn and Regina were almost as important lights in the psychopharmacological firmament as Paris and Basel.

Where we might have been given a broad and sweeping account of the range of work that happened with LSD in the 1950s in America, Britain, and Europe, we have instead an especially provincial Canadian story. Where we might have expected the maestros of the new psychopharmacological world to appear in the narrative, we get Humphrey Osmond, Abram Hoffer, and Bruce Blewett. Where we might have been told about the range of therapeutic techniques LSD gave rise to, we see instead the slow evolution of an experimental approach to its use and finally see a story largely written out other accounts—its use for alcoholism. While Timothy Leary does turn up, he features as much less important to the story being told than Al Hubbard, for instance, or Tommy Douglas—the premier of Saskatchewan.

In this story the enemies lay outside of Saskatchewan—primarily in Toronto where researchers from the Addiction Research Foundation (ARF), in a bizarre insistence on the primacy of controlled trials, ran a therapeutic study of LSD for alcoholism that blindfolded the subjects and isolated them from any interaction with those looking after them. It would be perfectly orthodox now to say that controls of this sort were mistaken—that randomization is what counts rather than draconian controls. But when Hoffer and Osmond tried to raise questions about this kind of "science," they all but exiled themselves from mainstream psychiatry. It makes you want to know what exposure key figures in the ARF had to LSD.

There is a lot more it would be nice to know—whether Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies are still alive. The focus of the book however is on a very narrow window from 1952 to 1968 when LSD came unstuck, but in giving an intense snapshot of a geographical area that no longer features on the psychiatric map, Dyck manages to convey something of the essential mysteriousness of the LSD narrative—a historical version of the Blair Witch story.

She seems to offer only one connecting thread to our modern world—and perhaps it just snuck in by accident. In an almost throwaway comment, she notes that it was a time when we were moving from a world where experience was primary to a "new cult of expertise where authority derived from method and not experience" (p 121). While methods and experts have proliferated there are still no experts or methods that satisfactorily explain what happens when individuals or groups take drugs like LSD, and as a result LSD still has the capacity to blow apart our current accommodation to the psychotropic drugs, and a lot else beside.