Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies by Erika Dyck (review)

The use of psychoactive substances is not something that appeared recently in history. For millennia, a multitude of mind-altering substances have been consumed for various reasons, such as religious, recreational, and medicinal purposes. The boundaries between those different purposes have never been easy to draw, becoming in some cases particularly blurred. This is the case with LSD, a psychoactive substance where the distinction between medicinal and recreational use wasn’t always easy to make. In Psychedelic Psychiatry, Erika Dyck provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the use of LSD for therapeutic purposes in the 1950s. Situating her study in the field of the history of medicine, the author explores the way LSD, initially used for its therapeutic benefits, became mostly known for its recreational and illegal use as part of the counterculture of the 1960s. In this regard, this book provides a good illustration of the process by which some psychoactive substances are migrating back and forth over the boundary between medicinal and recreational use.

This original study starts with the history of Humphry Osmond, a leading psychiatrist from Saskatchewan who in the early 1950s began to investigate the therapeutic potential of hallucinogenic drugs. This man was in fact a forerunner, since he’s the one who introduced the word psychedelic into the English lexicon in 1957, referring to an enlargement and expansion of the mind that could be reached by consuming hallucinogenic substances. When Osmond started working with LSD, various drugs were already being used by psychiatrists to keep some of the symptoms of mental illness under control, thereby providing an opportunity for patients to receive care in the community. But in the case of LSD, its therapeutic benefits lie in its ability to bring patients to new levels of self-awareness, thus providing an experience that could help them to overcome their mental disorder. In this context, LSD was also used as a substance that could help understand the dysfunctional feelings and behaviours of mentally ill patients. Psychiatrists who were working with LSD did in fact believe that the symptoms chemically created by consumption of the substance were quite similar to those described by patients suffering from schizophrenia. Besides the use of LSD with mentally ill patients, the substance was also used to cure people who had an alcohol problem, based on the belief that alcoholism was caused by a neurological dysfunction that could be fixed by the prescription of psychedelic drugs. One of the therapeutic benefits of LSD was that it could help alcoholics to restore self-control over their drinking problem. Compared to other forms of pharmacotherapy, the therapeutic use of LSD was quite original since it relied both on a biomedical model of mental disorder and on the importance accorded to the subjectivity of patients.

Dyck’s original book is based on a huge investigation in which the author examined a large number of records about the experiments conducted by Osmond and his colleagues in the 1950s. In addition to the large amount of documents, the author also benefits from the testimony of former patients and professionals who were involved in those experiments. She conducted oral interviews with people who were at the core of those therapeutic trials; these offer an original point of view that contributes to the high quality of the book.

Besides the rich and stimulating description of the way LSD was used as a therapeutic device, one of the most important contributions of this book is the emphasis put on the political and cultural context in which those therapeutic practices were held. One has to remember that in the 1950s Saskatchewan became one of the first places in North America where a publicly funded health care system was implemented. The political environment that was then flourishing in Saskatchewan became very attractive for those who wanted to explore new therapeutic avenues. This particular context is well exposed in the book, providing better tools to understand the reasons why those experiments were conducted in the Canadian...