Chapter 6 Therapeutic Uses

Many people remember vaguely that LSD and other psychedelic drugs were once used experimentally in psychiatry, but few realize how much and how long they were used. This was not a quickly rejected and forgotten fad. Between 1950 and the mid-1960s there were more than a thousand clinical papers discussing 40,000 patients, several dozen books, and six international conferences on psychedelic drug therapy. It aroused the interest of many psychiatrists who were in no sense cultural rebels or especially radical in their attitudes. It was recommended for a wide variety of problems including alcoholism, obsessional neurosis, and childhood autism. Almost all publication and most therapeutic practice in this field have come to an end, as much because of legal and financial obstacles as because of a loss of interest. In the last five years only a few scattered articles and books have appeared, most of them based on earlier clinial work. Possibly those two decades of research and clinical practice that took up a considerable part of the careers of many respected psychiatrists should be written off as a mistake that now has only historical interest; but it would be wiser to see first whether something can be salvaged from them, and also what the story suggests about the boundaries of psychiatry and the meaning of drug use in psychiatry.