Psychedelic substances exhibit complex interactions with the 'set and setting' of use, that is, the mental state of the user and the environment in which a psychedelic experience takes place. Despite these contextual variables' known importance, psychedelic research has lacked methodological rigor in reporting extra-pharmacological factors. This study aimed to generate consensus-based...
This article offers an overview of the history of substances, plants, and fungi later classified as psychedelic. Drawing from archeological, anthropological, botanical, and clinical claims about the risks and benefits of psychedelics, this historical survey emphasizes diverse attempts to make sense of these mind-altering experiences. It tracks early efforts to harness the properties of...
Harm reduction officially entered the public health lexicon in the 1980s as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis and its spread amongst intravenous drug users, but risk prevention has been an important part of psychedelic consumption in ways that predate this formal conceptualization.We look at psychedelic drug trials in the 1950s and 1960s to consider how people-first perspectives informed those...
Who will staff the psychedelic resurgence? Erika Dyck, Professor and Canada Research Chair in History of Health & Social Justice from the University of Saskatchewan, provides an intriguing answer to this question. On 6th February 2024, a research team at Le Grau-du-Roi Hospital in the south of France, led by addictologist Amandine Luquiens, put their first subject through a clinical trial with...
Will psychedelic research and the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ create another generational divide? Erika Dyck, Canada Research Chair in History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan, discusses changing attitudes to psychedelics and the challenges in forming a strong evidence base from available psychedelic research. As psychedelics re-emerge in the 21st century, their...
LAY SUMMARY The historical relationship between psychedelic drugs and the military has often been characterized in terms of drug misuse or the connection between drugs like d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or psilocybin (magic mushrooms) contributing to anti-war sentiments. Recent clinical evidence, however, suggests these cultural associations may be overshadowing the potential for...
Professor Erika Dyck, Canada Research Chair in the History of Health & Social Justice, discusses the extensive history and growing medical application of psychedelics known as the psychedelic renaissance. British psychiatrist Ben Sessa re-introduced the concept of the psychedelic renaissance in 2011, suggesting that it was perhaps time to rethink the role of psychedelic drugs in medicine. The...
The history of psychedelics and why psychedelic stories matter Erika Dyck argues that how people learn about psychedelics today matters, based on the histories of these drugs and how they have been and should be used in clinical medicine. While these substances have piqued the interest and influenced the attitudes of individuals across academia, culture, and medicine, expanding before and well...
Psychedelic therapies are returning to psychiatry Professor Erika Dyck, Canada Research Chair in History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan argues that psychedelic drugs and therapies, whether conducted in ceremonial settings or clinical ones, are being touted as life-changing moments for their capacity to efficiently transform an individual's perspective on...
Psychedelic-assisted therapy has attracted considerable clinical attention in the past decade for its ability to bring therapeutic benefits to patients in treatment-resistant categories. In contradistinction from other psychopharmaco-therapies, contemporary psychedelic therapists, like their predecessors, paid close attention to the 'set and setting', and argued that the mind-set of the subject...
The revival of psychedelic research coincided and more recently conjoined with psychopharmacological research on how drugs affect moral judgments and behaviors. This article makes the case for a moral psychopharmacology of psychedelics that examines whether psychedelics serve as non-specific amplifiers that enable subjects to (re-)connect with their values, or whether they promote specific...
The concept of a bad or bummer trip has been used to capture the imagination of public health advisors and drug regulators, especially for producing warnings against taking drugs that cause physical and psychological harm. Psychedelics emerged in the 1960s public health literature as frequently causing bad trips, with violent and fearful outbursts from users causing harm to themselves and...
Abstract Alternative therapies are sometimes associated with non-biological approaches, or practices that do not undergo rigorous testing or produce consistently repeatable results. In the 1970s, some alternative therapies also openly embraced spiritual dimensions that directly conflicted with a Western bio-medical paradigm, placing them within a category of new age medicine, suggesting that...
This article places a spotlight on lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and American mental health in the 1970s, an era in which psychedelic science was far from settled and researchers continued to push the limits of regulation, resist change and attempt to revolutionise the mental health market-place. The following pages reveal some of the connections between mental health, LSD and the wider...
This article examines the historical relationship between psychedelics and palliative care. Historians have contributed to a growing field of studies about how psychedelics have been used in the past, but much of that scholarship focused on interrogating questions of legitimacy or proving that psychedelics had therapeutic potential. Palliative care had not yet developed as medical...
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...
Psychedelics fell from medical grace nearly half a century ago, but recent activity suggests that some researchers have "high hopes" for their return.[1][1],[2][2] Over 60 years ago, Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Switzerland first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide
The modern science of spirituality is something of an oxymoron, but anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz tackles this concept in his study of neuropsychedelia, or the psychedelic revival in the behavioral sciences.
In October 1956, a peyote ceremony took place at the Red Pheasant reserve in Saskatchewan. Organized by the Native American Church, the ceremony featured the use of peyote, a psychedelic substance from a cactus traditionally found in Mexico. Its use among Canadian Native peoples in the first half of the twentieth century had signalled concerns about American influences, but by the 1950s the...
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...
In 1957, the word 'psychedelic' entered the English lexicon from a rather unexpected location: an asylum superintendent working on the Canadian prairies in one of the provincial mental hospitals in Saskatchewan. During the 1950s Saskatchewan-based researchers engaged in political and psychiatric reforms that brought international attention to their work in a relatively isolated geographic...
Dr. Humphry Osmond first published the term “psychedelic” in 1957 as a result of an extensive set of clinical investigations with d-lysergic acid diethylmide (LSD) that took place in Saskatchewan in the 1950s. In the post-World War Two period, Saskatchewan became an attractive destination for medical, and in this case psychiatric, researchers who wanted to pursue theoretical and practical...
In April 1943, Dr Albert Hofmann, a Swiss biochemist, dissolved a few micrograms of a newlysynthesized drug, d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), in a glass of water and drank it. Three-quarters of an hour later, he recorded a growing dizziness, some visual disturbances and a marked desire to laugh. After about an hour he asked his assistant to call a doctor and accompany him home from his...
Journal Article ‘Hitting Highs at Rock Bottom’: LSD Treatment for Alcoholism, 1950–1970 Get access Erika Dyck Erika Dyck * *Department of History and Classics/Division of Studies for Medical Education, 2–2 Tory Building , University of Alberta , Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H4 , Canada . E-mail: Erika.dyck@ualberta.ca Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar...