Review: 'Psychedelic Psychiatry' by Erika Dyck

Originally published in 2008 'Psychedelic Psychiatry -- LSD from Clinic to Campus' by the historian Erika Dyck is an excellent, scholarly study into an important slice of LSD history. Mainly concerned with psychiatric LSD research in Canada, the text unpicks with some excellent research, some of the most interesting and important episodes in LSD's short history, and goes a long way to re-establishing the hallucinogen, in its earliest form, as part of the medical discourse.

The central figure in Dyck's history of psychiatric LSD research is Dr. Humphry Osmond (1917-2004). Osmond moved from London, England to Weyburn, Canada in October 1951. Soon after, he began researching the possible therapeutic application of hallucinogenic drugs, mainly mescaline and LSD, at the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital. The socio-political climate in Canada after the second world war was ripe for research. A social democratic government in Saskatchewan was pushing for radical experimentation in public policy, and the extra funding was attracting new researchers to the country; one of these areas was psychiatry.