Erika Dyck

Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation with LSD in Historical Perspective

In the popular mind, d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) research in psychiatry has long been associated with the CIA-funded experiments conducted by Ewen Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Quebec. Despite this reputation, a host of medical researchers in the post–World War II era explored LSD for its potential therapeutic value. Some of the most widespread trials in the Western world occurred in Saskatchewan, under the direction of psychiatrists Humphry Osmond (in Weyburn) and Abram Hoffer (in Saskatoon). These medical researchers were first drawn to LSD because of its ability to produce a “model psychosis.” Their experiments with the drug that Osmond was to famously describe as a “psychedelic” led them to hypothesize and promote the biochemical nature of schizophrenia. This brief paper examines the early trials in Saskatchewan, drawing on hospital records, interviews with former research subjects, and the private papers of Hoffer and Osmond. It demonstrates that, far from being fringe medical research, these LSD trials represented a fruitful, and indeed encouraging, branch of psychiatric research occurring alongside more famous and successful trials of the first generation of psychopharmacological agents, such as chlropromazine and imipramine. Ultimately, these LSD experiments failed for 2 reasons, one scientific and the other cultural. First, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the scientific parameters of clinical trials shifted to necessitate randomized controlled trials, which the Saskatchewan researchers had failed to construct. Second, as LSD became increasingly associated with student riots, antiwar demonstrations, and the counterculture, governments intervened to criminalize the drug, restricting and then terminating formal medical research into its potential therapeutic effects.

Trust amply recompensed: Psychological research at Weyburn, Saskatchewan, 1957–1961

During the 1950s and 1960s professionals intensely debated the prospect of changes in the mental health system, largely as a result of the introduction of new therapies, revised theories of mental disorder, and shifting policies governing mental health accommodation. As well as giving rise to new subspecialties within medicine, psychiatrists in some jurisdictions at this time worked closely with psychologists in an attempt to offer a more comprehensive set of options that merged theory with practice. In Saskatchewan, mental health professionals worked closely with government officials and bureaucrats and produced a variety of innovative strategies that addressed changing priorities in this system. This article examines the role played by psychologists in Saskatchewan during this period as they worked cooperatively with psychiatrists and bureaucrats to merge medical, psychological, and political perspectives in a system aimed at accommodating mental illness in the wake of new theories and treatments that questioned the efficacy of care in institutionalized settings in the wake of growing suggestions for care in the community.

Spaced-Out in Saskatchewan: Modernism, Anti-Psychiatry, and Deinstitutionalization, 1950-1968

On the eve of deinstitutionalization, a group of professionals, including an architect, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist, joined together in pursuit of a middle ground between outright closure of long-stay hospitals and the introduction of out-patient services in general hospitals. Augmented by the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, these men produced a trenchant critique of modern psychiatry and the changing mental health system without subscribing to antipsychiatry. Caught among shifting psychiatric paradigms, fiscal constraints, and political pressure to situate mental health within an encroaching system of publicly funded health care reforms, their proposed mental hospital designs failed to stem the tidal wave of post-World War II changes in mental health care.

Psychedelics and psychotherapy in Canada: Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley.

The decade of the 1950s is well known among historians of psychiatry for the unprecedented shift toward psychopharmacological solutions to mental health problems. More psychiatric medications were introduced than ever before or since (Healy, 2002). While psychiatric researchers later credited these drugs, in part, for controlling psychotic, depressive, and anxious symptoms—and subsequently for emptying decaying psychiatric institutions throughout the Western world—psychiatrists also produced a number of other theories that relied on a more delicate and nuanced blending of psychotherapy and psychopharmacology. Canadian-based researchers were at the forefront of experiments combining mescaline, LSD, and psychoactive substances later described as “psychedelics.” From a relatively isolated setting on the Canadian prairies, in one of the most notorious mental hospitals in North America, this blending of traditions generated a unique approach. A close look at the correspondence between the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and his friend, the writer Aldous Huxley, who shared interests in psychoactive substances and their effects on perception, and the stimulation of empathy, gives us an opportunity to explore how they developed their psychedelic approach to therapy in the 1950s. The combination of working in an isolated hospital, far from the main research powers in North America, produced a sense of regional incubation and required Osmond to look for collaborators well beyond his own field of psychiatry.

The Uses of Humans in Experiment

Ethics in human experimentation has a long history and The Uses of Humans in Experiment draws on examples from the early modern period to illustrate how humans have been both subjects and instruments over the past four centuries.

Who Is Keeping Tabs? LSD Lessons from the Past for the Future

Psychedelics fell from medical grace nearly half a century ago, but recent activity suggests that some researchers are optimistic about their return. Are they at risk, however, of facing the same historic challenges with a new generation of psychedelic enthusiasts, or have the circumstances changed sufficiently to allow for a new path forward? The twenty-first-century incarnation of psychedelic research resurrects some anticipated hypotheses and explores some of the same applications that clinicians experimented with 50 years ago. On the surface then, the psychedelic renaissance might be dismissed for retreading familiar ground. A deeper look at the context that gave rise to these questions, though, suggests that while some of the questions are common, the culture of neuroscience and the business of drug regulation have changed sufficiently to warrant a retrial. A close look at the history of psychedelics encourages us to think carefully about the roles of regulators, the enthusiasm of researchers, and our cultural fascination and/or repulsion with mind-altering molecules.

Eugenics in Canada: Choice, Coercion and Context

In this chapter, Erika Dyck explores Canada’s history of eugenics by situating these debates within concurrent discussions about feminism, birth control, reproductive rights and indigenous feminism. It argues that attitudes towards eugenics and birth control were far from uniform across the country, particularly as the legacy of population control and colonialism continued to plague discussions of Aboriginal rights in the 1970s. Although the language of sterilization changed during this period from one associated with coercive eugenic practices to an operation sought by choice, the spectre of population control fuelled ideological reactions to a new era of reproductive health options.

Editors' Note / Note de la rédaction

We are pleased to report that CBMH/BCHM has now completely shifted its online presence to the University of Toronto Press and can be accessed at: http://www.utpjournals.press/loi/cbmh. This website includes all of our current and back issues, bilingual abstracts, an ahead of print section for upcoming articles, as well as information for reviewers and authors. CBMH/BCHM is also now available through Project MUSE. With this transition, we are no longer using our former website, hosted by the University of Winnipeg. We are grateful for the outstanding support and generosity that we have enjoyed from the University of Winnipeg (especially Michael Hohner), and from our outgoing Associate Editor, Chris Dooley. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank resigning members of our advisory board for their long and committed service to CBMH/ BCHM: Toby Gelfand, Angus McLaren, Ronald Numbers, and Susan Solomon. We welcome new members Maureen Lux and Kevin Siena, and we are excited to work with them to continue our tradition of publishing leading scholarship in the history of health and medicine.

After the Asylum in Canada: Surviving Deinstitutionalisation and Revising History

Psychiatric deinstitutionalisation began in Canada in earnest during the 1960s and continues today. The downsizing and closure of custodial mental hospitals did not occur uniformly across the country, and regional variations in government, healthcare staff and community care policies profoundly shaped the process. The Saskatchewan Mental Hospital at Weyburn, the last asylum built in the Victorian style in the British Commonwealth, was the first to shut its doors, which it did dramatically in 1963. Others closed in stages, emptying wings and transitioning into outpatient care facilities or, as was the case in Alberta, repurposing the buildings for brain injured patients requiring shorter-term stays. Some facilities remained open with a reduced patient population and abandoned sections of the hospital that no longer conformed to the standards for privacy or health and safety regulations. Eastern Canadian provinces like Nova Scotia had not subscribed to large-scale custodial institutions in the first place, and while deinstitutionalisation from cottage-style facilities also occurred, the pace and impact of that change was profoundly different for staff, communities and ex-patients. Several Ontario-based institutions centralised their services, closing some and enlarging others. British Columbia’s iconic Riverview mental hospital continued to exist partially until 2012, looming large in cultural memory, as did many of these other monuments to what soon became a bygone era of psychiatric care. This regional variation in service delivery has in part characterised deinstitutionalisation in Canada, and also helps to underscore how patients from place to place may have encountered very different circumstances as they moved out of institutional care.

Editors' Note / Note des rédacteurs

Welcome to our inaugural issue! As you can see, we have initiated a number of changes to the CBMH/BCHM since assuming our new posts as co-editors last Summer. The journal has a new look, inside and out. We have found a new publisher in the University of Toronto Press. And, if you are reading this online (as we expect you are), you’ll notice that we have an entirely new website as well. We’ve also made a number of changes that you might not see so readily. Our Editorial and Advisory Boards have changed a little. We have a new Book Reviews Editor (English). We also have new copy-editors, and more of them. We’ll soon be managing submissions and communicating with our authors through a content management system. And future issues of the CBMH/BCHM will be accessible primarily through institutional or members’ portals via the UTP Journals website, where you will also soon find the entire open-access archive of past CBMH/BCHM issues. Despite these changes, we are very pleased to have been able to maintain continuous publication of the CBMH/BCHM. This would never have been possible without the combined efforts of our past editors and the wonderful staff at UTP Journals. But the most important thing to which we’d like to draw your attention is what hasn’t changed about our journal. The CBMH/BCHM still publishes the very best scholarship in our field. In both official languages. Our authors hail from around the world. They might be found at the pinnacle of a long and successful academic career. They might be just starting out as graduate students, or as junior scholars. Or they might be independent scholars with a deep curiousity about medicine’s past, and with the courage to subject their work and ideas to the scrutiny of the academy. In each case, what binds them together (online readers will forgive the pun) is the desire to bring the diversity of Canada’s – and the world’s – histories of health and medicine to life. These values, so hard-won by the work of previous editors, contributors, board members, and the CSHM/SCHM leadership, remain at the very core of our journal. We feel very priviledged to have this opportunity to take direction of the CBMH/BCHM ’s longstanding tradition of publishing high-quality, meaningful historical scholarship.