Louis Wain (1860 – 1939) was an English artist best known for his drawings of anthropomorphised cats. In his later life, Wain developed schizophrenia, which psychiatrists speculated at the time was brought on by toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be contracted from cats. He was first committed to a mental hospital in 1924. He…
View Post
Thomas Szasz was an American psychiatrist who became a controversial academic figure for his criticism of the foundations of psychiatry. He has been associated with the anti-psychiatry movement (although Szasz himself insisted he was not anti-psychiatry but anti-coercive psychiatry). In books such as The Myth of Mental Illness (1960), as the title suggests, Szasz argues that…
View Post
Allen J. Frances is an American psychiatrist who has become famous for his critique of the DSM-5, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Mental Disorders. He was also the former chair of the task force that published the DSM-IV, the fourth edition of the DSM. The DSM is published by the American…
View Post
This article is based on a lecture entitled ‘fMRI and MEG Studies With Psilocybin’, from ‘A Discussion on Scientific Research with Psychedelic Drugs’, a conference chaired by Professor David Nutt at Imperial College London (12/06/2013). Researcher Robin Carhart-Harris begins this lecture by pointing out that psilocin, a psychedelic alkaloid found in magic mushrooms along with psilocybin, is…
View Post
Ketamine is a dissociative drug, meaning that it produces feelings of dissociation – dissociation from one’s environment and even dissociation from one’s own body. The drug is used in human and veterinary medicine, both as an anaesthetic (to knock the patient out) and as an analgesic (to numb any feelings of pain). Ketamine is also…
View Post