LSD, Speed, and The Making of Biological Psychiatry

Titre : LSD, Speed, and The Making of Biological Psychiatry 

Résumé : Historians of medicine have written on the causes of American psychiatry’s biomedical revolution in the 1970s, yet they have neglected one of its most consequential drivers: the mid‑century use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and amphetamines to induce “artificial psychosis” in volunteers. In the hands of Johns Hopkins researcher Solomon Snyder, this line of inquiry provided powerful evidence for the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, which helped to legitimate psychiatry’s emerging biomedical identity at a time when that identity was still under debate. Recovering this episode also helps to clarify psychiatry’s shift from a “drug‑centered” model to a “disease‑centered” one, in which drugs were understood as correcting underlying biological abnormalities rather than producing altered states.