“My 12 Hours as a Madman”: LSD and Disability Immersion Experiences of Schizophrenia more

In 1953, Maclean’s journalist Sidney Katz published a shocking account of “the torments of hell and ecstasies of heaven” he experienced as part of a schizophrenia experiment at Saskatchewan Hospital. Along with articles like “Help for the Living Dead” (Saturday Evening Post, 1955) and “Step into the World of the Insane” (Look, 1954), Katz’s “My 12 Hours as a Madman” helped to introduce the general public to cutting-edge research in psychiatry involving a new drug: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. While LSD became infamous as a psychedelic years later, in the early 1950s LSD was primarily thought of as a psychotomimetic, a drug which could produce a “model psychosis” or “artificial schizophrenia.” This paper focuses on the use of LSD in psychiatry in this often overshadowed period. More specifically, I examine experiments that use LSD as a prosthetic tool to produce “disability immersion” experiences of schizophrenia in people without psychiatric symptoms or diagnoses. This use of LSD often reversed the traditional way drugs circulate in psychiatry: instead of patients receiving mind-altering medication to ameliorate disabling psychiatric symptoms, mental health professionals took LSD to temporarily disable their normal cognition. Despite the problematic nature of disability immersion experiences in general and the negative valence sometimes attached to mental illness and schizophrenia in these accounts, these trips into madness produced, I will argue, positive therapeutic insights, perhaps best illustrated by architect Kiyo Izumi’s LSD-inspired design for Yorkton Psychiatric Centre.