Doctors once used drugs like LSD not to heal mental illness, but induce it.

A forgotten research program used LSD to better understand schizophrenia.

This quest helped launch the modern idea that mental disorders stem from chemical imbalances in the brain.

Many of us know only one side of the story of psychedelic therapy. In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychiatrists gave LSD and mescaline to patients struggling with depression, anxiety, and addiction. They hoped to create a powerful spiritual experience that would produce lasting change.

Among the celebrities who vouched for this new method of treatment were movie star Cary Grant, writer Anaïs Nin, and Bill W., founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But after LSD spread into the larger culture, the U.S. government imposed strict restrictions on it (Dyck, 2008). By 1966, it became very difficult for researchers to conduct experiments with LSD. Today’s psychedelic therapists see themselves as heirs to this earlier tradition.

But as I explore in my recent book, psychiatrists in the 1950s and '60s also used LSD not to heal mental illness, but to induce it. They believed that if they had a drug that could reliably produce psychosis in healthy volunteers, they could finally uncover the biological basis of schizophrenia.

A Pill to Make Madness

In the 1950s, doctors noted the similarity between LSD trips and psychosis associated with schizophrenia. Both LSD users and patients with schizophrenia seemed to suffer a radical break with reality, replete with hallucinations and delusions.

That observation led some doctors to a far-reaching conclusion: What if LSD trips and schizophrenia share the same underlying mechanism? If so, they reasoned,........

© Psychology Today