Utiliser les psychédéliques pour « guérir » des adolescents homosexuels ? Essai de thérapie de conversion, France, 1960

Abstract

Between 1960 and 1962, a children's judge placed two French adolescents in a psychiatric hospital in Alsace. Described as “delinquent sexual perverts”, Michel, 15, and Bernard, 18, were in fact two young homosexuals. However, at the time, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder that should be “cured”. With this in mind, psychiatrists set up shock or disgust therapies to push patients to become heterosexual. In this hospital, the chief doctor tested two new substances on them: mescaline and LSD. Injected in very high doses, the idea was to cause a powerful psychological shock in the hope of changing the adolescents’ sexual orientation. This type of placement as well as the treatment inflicted were then common (lobotomies or electroshocks were part of the “therapeutic” possibilities to “cure” homosexuality). Two aspects of these experiments are however particularly original: on the one hand, the use of substances such as mescaline and LSD, on the other hand, the very type of “therapy” implemented. It would thus seem, in the current state of knowledge on the use of LSD and mescaline in psychiatric therapy, that these experiences were isolated facts: the literature remains silent on the subject of the use of mescaline to “cure” homosexuality, and the few known therapies carried out using LSD were offered to adults and above all volunteers. Finally, these therapeutic methods were the opposite: psychotherapies in which particular attention was paid to patients and their well-being in the United States or in England and “psychic shocks” in Alsace. This hospital is the only French example of an attempt to “treat” homosexuality using psychedelics. The use of these substances by the French team therefore began in 1960; it involved administering mescaline or LSD in high doses (an exceptional characteristic in Europe where psychiatrists were in favor of therapy with low doses known as “psycholytic”) and in injections, ranging from 200 to 1200mg for mescaline and for LSD from 100 to 800micrograms. By way of comparison, a recreational dose is 300 to 500mg for mescaline and 100micrograms for LSD, administered orally. In order to create “psychic shock”, the effects of the substances were immediately stopped by the injection of chlorpromazine, a powerful neuroleptic. The authors noted that for all patients, “two modes of behavior are common: stupor and agitation”. They sometimes tore their sheets or pajamas or grabbed the examiner, asking for support. The sessions were linked: in 118 days, Bernard would undergo 16 of these sessions, one every 7 days on average. Michel, during one of the sessions, felt like he had been killed by his psychiatrists. Neither would subsequently become heterosexual. Elsewhere in the world, other forms of LSD conversion therapy have emerged. However, these were benevolent psychotherapies; the product was not injected but taken orally (therefore with more progressive effects), and the approach was not the same. Thus, acceptance of their homosexuality by patients was considered as desirable an option for therapists as was conversion to heterosexuality. For French practitioners, on the contrary, “healing” was the only objective. This article will highlight a double French specificity in the use of psychedelics: first, the refusal to introduce the new method of administering these substances, called “set and setting”, theorized from the late 1950s in Anglo-Saxon countries, and yet known and discussed by French experimenters. Then, it will show the use of these substances in shock therapy, particularly in the treatment of homosexuality.