The Drugs Meant to Induce Madness, a Review |
A new book traces the rise and fall of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia.
It confirms the importance of psychedelics and amphetamines to key discoveries in biological psychiatry.
Though optimism over a magic bullet was misplaced, the research identified receptors for dopamine and opioids.
In the spring of 1965, notes Justin Garson in The Madness Pill: One Doctor’s Quest to Understand Schizophrenia, published today by St Martin’s Press, several leading researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health set up an experiment with a small colony of squirrel monkeys, then with a slightly larger group of humans. Giving high doses of hallucinogens like LSD to each, they hoped to induce schizophrenia in their subjects, the better to study its underlying mechanism.
Two and three years later, before Institutional Review Boards in the 1970s would have stopped the experiments, they ran a similar one with STP, a street drug popular in the Bay Area. Later, they did the same with a cluster of amphetamines given to volunteers, including postdocs and lab workers. This time, hoping to cause amphetamine psychosis, they looked to confirm a causal relationship between dopamine flooding and a “schizophrenic reaction,” the phrase appearing in DSM-II, the field’s diagnostic manual, recently updated in 1968.
The researchers included scientists such as Bellevue psychiatrist Burton Angrist and Johns Hopkins professor Solomon (“Sol”) Snyder. Buoyed by optimism over other breakthroughs in neuroscience, they undertook the experiments in hopes of finding a cure for schizophrenia. Less hubristically, they wanted to improve its treatment, as first-generation antipsychotics like Thorazine, Mellaril, and Haldol came with a litany of side effects, from catatonia and drooling to tardive dyskinesia, a motor impairment causing involuntary spasms and twitches.
The researchers assumed that the drug-induced psychosis would be short-term only and sufficiently similar to its organic counterpart........