Health& History 1112 2009 159 has to sort through a lot of other stuff to get it.He has some trouble keeping onmessage, often diverting tonon-related areas of psychiatric history. Then, we have to deal with his well-known opinions of the dreaded drug companies who are undoubtedly a part of the history, but could have been dealt with more objectively. I rather enjoyed his interludes into the nineteenth-century asylum records at his disposal, even if theywere not too relevant at times. The book is a scholarly one for all that.Healy's wide knowledge of the facts of the history is impressive and the list of references is one area that I will value. I would still like to see how the non psychiatrist historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter would do it. PAUL SKERRITT UNIVERSITY OFWESTERN AUSTRALIA /JOONDALUP HEALTH CAMPUS Erica Dyck, PsychedelicPsychiatry:LSD from Clinic toCampus (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). ISBN 9780801889943 (HQ. 16halftones, 216 pp. LSD (d-lysergic acid diethylamide) is synonymous with the term 'psychedelic,' a term coined by Dr Humphrey Osmond, the chief person of interest in thisbook. It also elicits two central but opposing associations: the 1960s 'Turn on, tune in, drop out' counter-culture movement, and the recollections of warnings of irreparable brain and chromosome damage, and stories of 'tripping' students leaping out of a windows from high-rise apartments or baby-sitters cooking babies in ovens, mistaking them for roasts. This book is a quest to understand this dichotomy. It seeks to do so by researching the introduction of LSD as a therapeutic tool for the psychotherapy of people with schizophrenia and alcoholism, in a small country town in theprairies of Canada?Weyburn, Saskatechewan (as incongruent as that may seem), by Humphrey Osmond and his colleague Abram Hoffer. As a consequence of their research, some of which initially entailed increasing the treating psychiatrists' empathy and understanding of their patients' experiences through their own experiments with LSD, Osmond and Hoffer tried to bring together biological research into psychiatry with phenomenology. They 160 BOOKREVIEWS envisioned a new psychiatry, solving the mind-body issue by approaching their patients with methods that directly altered phenomenology through chemistry. Unfortunately for them, the trauma of the thalidomide medical disaster, the success of the neuroleptics, the general futility of psychodynamics to deal with mental illness more serious than the 'worried wealthy,' and the largely political demonisation of LSD, pushed psychiatry into the use of purely biological double-blind placebo controlled trial designs with easily objectified measures. Their dreams of a unified mind-body approach did not to come to fruition. Dyck's retelling of this period of psychiatric history falls short of what Imay have wished for in a couple of ways. While quite correctly pointing out thatOsmond and Hoffer had a fairly significant impact on international psychiatry in the fifties and early sixties, this point was not well-documented in the book. Indeed, there are a number of articles investigating other 'psychedelic' drugs as potential therapies?including cannabis and MDMA?in psychotherapy in the sixties, which could have been usefully referred to in the book. Besides being one of the first(ifnot thevery first) author to suggest a biochemical theory of schizophrenia and a very early proponent of a possible genetic link in schizophrenia, Osmond was a prolific writer producing influential articles with people such as Julian Huxley on a diversity of biological issues in psychiatry, which are described, but not so well documented, in the book. Itwould have been good to include some of these references in the book itself, to support this contention empirically. The book may also have been greatly improved if the specific example of the therapeutic use of LSD and its stifling through largely political rather thanmedical reasons were put into a wider context. There were similar experiences in the late 1800s (and again in the early 2000s) in the UK with cannabis, where early evidence of a therapeutic use in the treatment of insanity (1870) was ignored, as were findings thatganja did not worsen insanity, in an attempt to limit the availability of ganja in the Indian colonies as a tool of colonialism. J.H. Mills' recent study...
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Mar 10, 2010
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