One More Dead End: Psychiatry Comes Full Circle on Psychedelics

     Author and historian Justin Garson’s latest book,  The Madness Pill: One Doctor’s Quest to Understand Schizophrenia , was published by St. Martin’s Press last month. Garson’s new work is billed as a “rollicking history” of the brilliant, but quirky psychiatrist Solomon Snyder whose schizophrenia research into psychedelic experiences back in the 1970s helped usher in the last forty years of neurobiology-based mainstream psychiatry.

     In 1963 Snyder himself took LSD and thought that the experience was akin to a schizophrenic state. He began researching the biological impact of acid by injecting monkeys with it, but by the mid-1960s acid had been banned in New York and California and it was made illegal altogether in 1968. It could no longer be obtained legally, even for research.

     In 1970 Snyder discovered that amphetamines, taken in abundance, also triggered a kind of schizophrenic state by flooding the brain with dopamine. In 1976 he wrote the “The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia” and the seed for a chemical imbalance theory of mental illness was fully sown.

     What Garson calls ‘the biological revolution” of psychiatry had begun.

     The dopamine theory helped the public see psychiatrists as “real” doctors and not as the fuzzy-headed “quacks” that they had become in the 1950s with their Freudian psychobabble talk therapy. Snyder’s dopamine proposition was also a boon to an emerging Big Pharma industry with their eye on an immensely lucrative market for new pharmaceutical wares.

     Like “real” doctors, Big Pharma also now had “real” drugs that “cured” actual physical deficiencies.

     Garson’s book is a quick paced narrative and addresses “just the facts, ma’am” of Snyder’s remarkable career. The author inserts no judgments, overtly or covertly, within his exposition of the modern day biological revolution in psychiatry. He does, however, add an epilogue in which he lauds alternative, non-drug centered mental health treatment centers such as Soteria houses and the Hearing Voices Network of help, thus hinting at his own negative opinion of today’s psychopharmacology approach to mental health.

     The FDA is now considering a fast-track approval process to help spur psychiatry’s testing of psychedelics to treat mental illness. This new “revolutionary” approach could pave the way for Big Pharma to escape the market-shrinking threats of so much recent negative publicity about their antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs.

     That might be fine for Big Pharma profits from newly patented drugs, but it might not be of any help to the general public.

     If Snyder’s avenue of “chemical imbalance” research only led to a dead end for helping the mentally “ill” through psychedelics the first time around, coming full circle on them might only provide Big Pharma a new marketing path to the same therapeutic dead end.