According to a study titled Psychedelics and Mental Health: A Population Study (published in PLOS One), the use of LSD, magic mushrooms and peyote does not increase one’s risk of developing mental health problems. The researchers behind the paper are Teri Krebs and clinical psychologist Pal-Orjan Johansen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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