psychedelic psychiatry

[dholliday]

One of my favourite subjects (bit of a psychonaut, me) but can be a bit iffy to discuss because:

a) it involves illegal substances
b) some people react very badly when under the influence


So there's a considerable stigma attached to this topic, regardless of the unique benefits many people report.

The Guardian discussed this today, and am interested in yous to share your thoughts, such as: anyone here experience ego-death? Or rather, ego-dampening? Anyone feel their mental health was improved by it?

Could we ever see psychedelics being used in mainstream medicine? We're already seeing Marijuana getting the gradual green light as a painkiller for cancer/arthritis sufferers, so maybe the next decade or so will see a cautious re-introduction of mild psychedelics as psychiatric treatments.



The rough history of psychedelic psychiatry so far:


(further reading available here)

A brief history of psychedelic psychiatry
In the 1950s a group of pioneering psychiatrists showed that hallucinogenic drugs had therapeutic potential, but the research was halted as part of the backlash against the hippy counterculture.



Born in Surrey in 1917, Osmond studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London. He served in the navy as a ship’s psychiatrist during World War II, and afterwards worked in the psychiatric unit at St. George’s Hospital, London, where he became a senior registrar. While at St. George’s, Osmond and his colleague John Smythies learned about Albert Hoffman’s discovery of LSD at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company in Bazel, Switzerland.

Osmond and Smythies started their own investigation into the properties of hallucinogens and observed that mescaline produced effects similar to the symptoms of schizophrenia, and that its chemical structure was very similar to that of the hormone and neurotransmitter adrenaline. This led them to postulate that schizophrenia was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, but these ideas were not favourably received by their colleagues.

In 1951 Osmond took a post as deputy director of psychiatry at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada and moved there with his family. Within a year, he began collaborating on experiments using LSD with Abram Hoffer. Osmond tried LSD himself and concluded that the drug could produce profound changes in consciousness. Osmond and Hoffer also recruited volunteers to take LSD and theorised that the drug was capable of inducing a new level of self-awareness which may have enormous therapeutic potential.

In 1953, they began giving LSD to their patients, starting with some of those diagnosed with alcoholism. Their first study involved two alcoholic patients, each of whom was given a single 200-microgram dose of the drug. One of them stopped drinking immediately after the experiment, whereas the other stopped 6 months later.

Several years later, a colleague named Colin Smith treated another 24 patients with LSD, and subsequently reported that 12 of them had either “improved” or “well improved” as a result of the treatment. “The impression was gained that the drugs are a useful adjunct to psychotherapy,” Smith wrote in a 1958 paper describing the study. “The results appear sufficiently encouraging to merit more extensive, and preferably controlled, trials.”

Osmond and Hoffer were encouraged, and continued to administer the drug to alcoholics. By the end of the 1960s, they had treated approximately 2,000 patients. They claimed that the Saskatchewan trials consistently produced the same results – their studies seemed to show that a single, large dose of LSD could be an effective treatment for alcoholism, and reported that between 40 and 45% of their patients given the drug had not experienced a relapse after a year.

At around the same time, another psychiatrist was carrying out similar experiments in the U.K. Ronald Sandison was born in Shetland and won a scholarship to study medicine at King’s College Hospital. In 1951, he accepted a consultant’s post at Powick Hospital near Worcester, but upon taking the position found the establishment to be overcrowded and decrepit, with patients being subjected to electroshock treatment and lobotomies.

Sandison introduced the use of psychotherapy, and other forms of therapy involving art and music. In 1952, he visited Switzerland where he also met Albert Hoffman, and was introduced to the idea of using LSD in the clinic. He returned to the U.K. with 100 vials of the drug – which Sandoz had by then named ‘Delysid’ – and, after discussing the matter with his colleagues, began treating patients with it (in addition to psychotherapy) towards the end of 1952.

Sandison and his colleagues obtained results similar to those of the Saskatchewan trials. In 1954 they reported that “as a result of LSD therapy, 14 patients recovered (av. Of 10.4 treatments)... 1 was greatly improved (3 treatments), 6 were moderately improved (av. of 2 treatments) and 2 not improved (av. of 5 treatments).”

These results drew great interest from the international mass media, and as a result, Sandison opened the world’s first purpose-built LSD therapy clinic the following year. The unit, located on the grounds of Powick Hospital, accommodated up to 5 patients who could receive LSD therapy simultaneously. Each was given their own room, equipped with a chair, sofa, and record player. Patients also came together to discuss their experiences in daily group sessions. (This backfired later, however: In 2002, the National Health Service agreed to pay a total of £195,000 in an out-of-court settlement to 43 of Sandison’s former patients.)

Meanwhile in Canada Osmond’s form of LSD therapy was endorsed by the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and the director of Saskatchewan’s Bureau on Alcoholism. LSD therapy peaked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was widely considered to be “the next big thing” in psychiatry, which could supersede electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery. At one point, it was popular among Hollywood superstars such as Cary Grant.

Two forms of LSD therapy became popular. One, called psychedelic therapy, was based on Osmond and Hoffer’s work, and involved a single large dose of LSD alongside psychotherapy. Osmond and Hoffer believed that hallucinogens are beneficial therapeutically because of their ability to make patients view their condition from a fresh perspective.

The other, called psycholytic therapy, was based on Sandison’s regime of several smaller doses, increasing in size, as a adjunct to psychoanalysis. Sandison’s clinical observations led him to believe that LSD can aid psychotherapy by inducing dream-like hallucinations that reflected the patient’s unconscious mind and enabling them to relive long-lost memories.

Between the years of 1950 and 1965, some 40,000 patients had been prescribed one form of LSD therapy or another as treatment for neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy. It was even prescribed to children with autism. Research into the potential therapeutic effects of LSD and other hallucinogens had produced over 1,000 scientific papers and six international conferences. But many of these early studies weren’t particularly robust, lacking control groups, for example, and likely suffered from what researchers call publication bias, whereby negative data are excluded from the final analyses.

Even so, the preliminary findings seemed to warrant further research into the therapeutic benefits of hallucinogenic drugs. The research soon came to an abrupt halt, however, mostly for political reasons. In 1962, the U.S. Congress passed new drug safety regulations, and the Food and Drug Administration designated LSD as an experimental drug and began to clamp down on research into its effects. The following year, LSD hit the streets in the form of liquid soaked onto sugar cubes; its popularity grew quickly and the hippy counterculture was in full swing by the summer of 1967.


During this period, LSD increasingly came to be viewed as a drug of abuse. It also became closely associated with student riots anti-war demonstrations, and thus was outlawed by the U.S. federal government in 1968. Osmond and Hoffer responded to this new legislation by commenting that “it seems apt that there is now an outburst of resentment against some chemicals which can rapidly throw a man either into heaven or hell.” They also criticised the legislation, comparing it to the Victorian reaction to anaesthetics.

The 1990s saw a renewed interest in the neurobiological effects and therapeutic potential of hallucinogenic drugs. We now understand how many of them work at the molecular level, and several research groups have been performing brain-scanning experiments to try to learn more about how they exert their effects. A number of clinical trials are also being performed to test the potential benefits of psilocybin, ketamine and MDMA to patients with depression and various other mood disorders. Their use is still severely restricted, however, leading some to criticise drug laws, which they argue are preventing vital research.

Huxley believed that hallucinogenic drugs produce their characteristic effects by opening a “reducing valve” in the brain that normally limits our perception, and some of the new research seems to confirm this. In 1963, when he was dying of cancer, he famously asked his wife to inject him with LSD on his deathbed. In this, too, it seems that he was prescient: Several small trials suggest that ketamine alleviates depression and anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients and, more recently, the first American study to use LSD in more than 40 years concluded that it, too, reduces anxiety in patients with life-threatening diseases.

 

[dholliday]

One of the reader commenters links to a Vice article which offshoots into the nature of our society and why it forbids psychedelics. It identifies our society as a "dominator" model, and that if we had a "partnership" model, psychedelics would be in normal (and safe) use:

Why are psychedelics illegal

Terence McKenna viewed cannabis, psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and other psychedelics as “catalysts of intellectual dissent.” He wrote in The Archaic Revival (1991) that his assumption about psychedelics had always been that they were illegal “not because it troubles anyone that you have visions” but because “there is something about them that casts doubts on the validity of reality.” This makes it difficult, McKenna observed, for societies—even democratic and especially “dominator” societies—to accept them, and we happen to live in a global “dominator” society.

McKenna often used the words “partnership” and “dominator” to refer to types of societies and relationships. Riane Eisler, whose work McKenna often praised, coined these terms. In The Archaic Revival, McKenna wrote:

Recently Riane Eisler in her important revisioning of history, The Chalice and the Blade, has advanced the important notion of “partnership” models of society being in competition and oppressed by “dominator” forms of social organization. These latter are hierarchical, paternalistic, materialistic, and male dominated. Her position is that it is the tension between these two forms of social organization and the overexpression of the dominator model that is responsible for our alienation. I am in complete agreement with Eisler’s view.

To better understand why, in McKenna’s view, psychedelics are illegal, it may be helpful to examine why the world today operates on a dominator instead of a partnership model, and what exactly these terms mean. To do this, we’ll examine Eisler’s work, which (like much of McKenna’s work, I think) exposed egregiously overlooked and deliberately suppressed aspects of history and nature. In her book The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler argued that for the majority of at least the past c. 32,000 years, humans lived in partnership societies, within a global partnership culture—a way of life that is almost unimaginable today.


Eisler introduced the terms partnership and dominator via her Cultural Transformation theory, which proposed that “underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society.” In (1) the dominator model, half of humanity is ranked over the other half. Because this bias involves “the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female,” it then becomes the basis for all other relationships (and, I think, probably even experiences). In (2) the partnership model, diversity isn’t equated with inferiority or superiority; instead of “ranking,” there’s what Eisler called “linking.”

In Eisler’s view, the dominator/partnership dichotomy is neither ideology-specific (both capitalism and communism can, and have, operated with dominator values) nor gender-specific—both women and men can, and do, embody dominator attitudes. McKenna praised this aspect of Eisler’s work in particular. He said in The Evolutionary Mind (1998):

I don’t see it as a male disease. I think everybody in this room has a far stronger ego than they need. The great thing that Riane Eisler, in her book The Chalice and the Blade, did for this discussion was to de-genderize the terminology. Instead of talking about patriarchy and all this, what we should be talking about is dominator versus partnership society.

While it’s often assumed that men have historically been the dominant, oppressive sex—which would potentially debunk Eisler’s gender-neutral theory—that is incorrect. Eisler showed that the dominator model that now exists globally, and which is arguably led by the United States, a country with 44 consecutive male presidents and vice presidents, is a recent development. From c. 35,000 BC (the earliest that “so-called Venus figurines,” as Eisler called them, have been dated) to c. 5000 BC, humans exemplified the partnership model. There was neither patriarchy nor matriarchy. As McKenna wrote in Food of the Gods (1992):

Eisler used the archaeological record to argue that over vast areas and for many centuries the partnership societies of the ancient Middle East were without warfare and upheaval. Warfare and patriarchy arrived with the appearance of dominator values.

Evidence of this partnership way of life was discovered, among other places, at a site called Catal Huyuk in Anatolia. Excavations uncovered a period of time from c. 7500 BC (at the time Eisler’s book was published excavations had only uncovered back to c. 6500 BC) to c. 5700 BC. The archeologists found “no glaring social inequalities,” a matrilineal and matrilocal social organization, and that “the divine family of Catal Huyuk” was represented in this order of importance: mother, daughter, son, father. More than 40 of the 139 rooms excavated between 1961 and 1963 seemed to have served as shrines; ”the religion of the Great Goddess appears to have been the single most prominent and important feature of life.” Eisler wrote:

It is also true that in Catal Huyuk and other Neolithic societies the anthropomorphic representations of the Goddess—the young Maid, the nature Mother, and the old Grandmother or Ancestress, all the way back to the original Creatrix, are, as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras later noted, projections of the various stages of the life of woman. Also suggesting a matrilineal and matrilocal social organization is that in Catal Huyuk the sleeping platform where the woman’s personal possessions and her bed or divan were located is always found in the same place, on the east side of the living quarters. That of the man shifts, and is also somewhat smaller.

Eisler added:

But despite such evidence of the preeminence of women in both religion and life, there are no indications of glaring inequality between women and men. Nor are there any signs that women subjugated or oppressed men.

Why, then, c. 7000 years ago, when the dominator model came into existence, was it women—and not men—who were oppressed? The answer, Eisler showed, is in the observation that only women give birth. Prehistoric humans, noticing that new life entered the world exclusively from the female body—which then nourished and cared for that new life—apparently developed a religion/worldview that was centered around the worship of a female deity. Eisler used the word “worship” with the qualification that, “in prehistoric and, to a large extent, well into historic times, religion was life, and life was religion.” Women and men alike worshipped a female abstraction, which Eisler called the Goddess. This continued even after the development of agriculture and the creation of the first civilizations, c. 10,000 years ago:

We find evidence of the deification of the female—who in her biological character gives birth and nourishment just as the earth does—in the three main centers for the origins of agriculture: Asia Minor and southeastern Europe, Thailand in Southeast Asia, and later on also Middle America.

For 3,000 years after humankind condensed into civilizations, people continued to worship the Goddess and live peacefully. Eisler observed that “practically all the material and social technologies fundamental to civilization were developed before the imposition of a dominator society,” meaning that war is evidently not, unlike “what a Pentagon theorist will hold,” necessary “for technological, and by implication, cultural advance.” Eisler called this “one of the best kept historical secrets.”

It wasn’t until c. 5000 BC that the dominator model appeared in the form of “nomadic bands” from peripheral areas that attacked the preexisting civilizations, which were all partnership societies. Defense mechanisms like trenches and ramparts—previously nonexistent—gradually appeared. “These repeated incursions and ensuing culture shocks and population shifts were concentrated in three major thrusts,” wrote Eisler, calling these “Wave No. 1” (4300-4200 BC), “Wave No. 2” (3400-3200 BC), and “Wave No. 3” (3000-2900 BC). "At the core of the invaders' system was the placing of higher value on the power that takes, rather than gives, life," observed Eisler. As the dominators conquered, they also began to suppress the old way of living, which meant suppressing worship of the Goddess, which meant the marginalization of women in general. The Goddess, and women, Eisler claimed, "were reduced to male consorts or concubines. Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more 'effeminate' men became the norm." Eisler wrote:

After the initial period of destruction and chaos, gradually there emerged the societies that are celebrated in our high school and college textbooks as marking the beginnings of Western civilization.

The last partnership civilization was the Minoan civilization, which, Eisler observed, is usually not mentioned in courses on Western civilization. The precursor to the Minoans arrived on the island of Crete in c. 6000 BC, bringing the worship of the Goddess with them. For c. 4,000 years, the Minoan civilization thrived, showing “no signs of war” and “a rather equitable sharing of wealth.” They decorated their homes and public buildings with “an artistic tradition unique in the annals of civilization,” and had four scripts. In Minoan Crete, Eisler quoted a scholar in her book, “Wherever you turn, pillars and symbols remind one of the presence of the Great Goddess.” Based on her research, it seemed to Eisler that the mythical civilization of Atlantis, which Plato described in the 4th century BC, was “actually the garbled folk memory, not of a lost Atlantic continent, but of the Minoan civilization of Crete.”



By 1100 BC, Eisler wrote, “it was all over.” The dominator model, in the form of a patriarchy, had completely gained control. Women, previously equal to men for at least c. 30,000 years, suddenly began to experience a lesser status. They were marginalized in Ancient Greece, whose democracy “excluded most of the population (giving no participation to women and slaves).” In Eisler’s view, “much of what was finest” in Ancient Greece—“the great love of art, the intense interest in the processes of nature, the rich and varied feminine as well as masculine mythical symbology”—could be “traced back to the earlier era” of Minoan Crete. Remnants of Goddess worship also survived into Ancient Greece, in the form of the many Greek Goddesses, but these were all subordinate to Zeus. Things deteriorated further until they reached a kind of culmination in the Bible, with the Old Testament explicitly proclaiming, Eisler observed, that “it is God’s will that woman be ruled by man.” Eisler wrote:

If we read the Bible as normative social literature, the absence of the Goddess is the single most important statement about the kind of social order that the men who over many centuries wrote and rewrote this religious document strove to establish and uphold.

The next 2,000 years, until the present, can be seen as a gradual recovery—with increasingly dangerous setbacks, now that war involves massively destructive weapons—from the sudden infiltration of the dominator model, which has, since its appearance, been in a constant process of both consciously and unconsciously destroying and suppressing evidence of the original Goddess religion and its various revivifications throughout history.

*

Today, unless you’re a member of an indigenous tribe like the !Kung in southern Africa or Bambuti in Congo, you probably live firmly within the global dominator culture. Eisler wrote: “To us, after thousands of years of relentless indoctrination, this is simply reality, the way things are.” McKenna observed that, in dominator societies especially, people aren’t encouraged to question their behavior or why things are how they are—which is what psychedelics, among their other effects, reliably cause people to do. As McKenna said in 1987:

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

On that thought, I encourage people to get stoned and read The Chalice and the Blade. Or get stoned and listen to “Man & Woman at the End of History,” a multi-day discussion led by Eisler and McKenna that was serialized on the radio in 1988. In the discussion, McKenna introduces the role of psychedelics into Eisler’s theory. Eisler, at one point, compares McKenna’s oratory style to fireworks: “You illuminate so many things so quickly then pass from one to another.” I’ll end this week with an example of this, from the same discussion:

We are now being told that we are in the midst of a tremendous political crisis that goes under the banner of “the drug problem.” But the drug problem is an addiction problem. And the addiction, in my mind, is the addiction of intelligence agencies to vast amounts of untraceable money. This is the addiction which drives the global drug problem. But of course it is true that there are chemical dependencies. And this is a very interesting thing about human beings. Something—and I’ll talk about this a bit more tomorrow—but something about our ability to be omnivorous, to eat all kinds of things, has lain us open to, perhaps manipulation is too strong a word, but certainly to evolutionarily selective pressures that are not ordinarily present. Most animals eat a few foods. Many animals eat only one food. Our ability to be omnivorous has exposed us—over the last four, five million years—to a vast number of mutagenic and synergistic compounds that may have been responsible for such things as the prolongation of adolescence in our species, the way in which lactation occurs.​

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[McBain]