Humphry Osmond
| Humphry Osmond | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1 July 1917 Surrey, England |
| Died | 6 February 2004 (aged 86) Appleton, Wisconsin |
| Residence | England, Canada, U.S. |
| Fields | Psychiatry and psychology |
| Known for | Psychedelic therapy, Socio-architecture theory |
| Spouse | Jane Roffey Osmond (1924-2009) |
Humphry Fortescue Osmond (1 July 1917 – 6 February 2004) was an English psychiatrist known for inventing the word and for his research into interesting and useful applications for psychedelic drugs. Osmond also explored aspects of the psychology of social environments, in particular how they influenced welfare or recovery in mental institutions.
Osmond was born in Surrey, England and educated at Haileybury. As a young man, he worked for an architect and attended Guy's Hospital Medical School at King's College London. While active as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Navy during World War II, Osmond trained to become a psychiatrist.
After the war, Osmond and his colleague John Smythies perceived a similarity between the effects of LSD and the early stages of schizophrenia. In 1951, Osmond and Smythies moved to Saskatchewan, Canada to join the staff of the Weyburn Mental Hospital in the southeastern city of Weyburn, Saskatchewan.
At Weyburn, Osmond recruited a group of research psychologists to turn the hospital into a design-research laboratory. There, he conducted a wide variety of patient studies and observations using hallucinogenic drugs, collaborating with Abram Hoffer and others. In 1952, Osmond related the similarity of mescaline to adrenaline molecules, in a theory which implied that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by one's own body. He collected the biographies of recovered schizophrenics, and he held that psychiatrists can only understand the schizophrenic by understanding the rational way the mind makes sense of distorted perceptions. He pursued this idea with passion, exploring all avenues to gain insight into the shattered perceptions of schizophrenia, holding that the illness arises primarily from distortions of perception. Yet during the same period, Osmond became aware of the potential of psychedelics to foster mind-expanding and mystical experiences.
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