Word: lsd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...disease is striking in beachside beatnik pads and in the dormitories of expensive prep schools; it has grown into an alarming problem at U.C.L.A. and on the U.C. campus at Berkeley. And everywhere the diagnosis is the same: psychotic illness resulting from unauthorized, nonmedical use of the drug LSD...
Patients with post-LSD symptoms are providing the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute with 10% to 15% of its cases; more are flocking to the university's general medical center and the County General Hospital. By best estimates, 10,000 students in the University of California system have tried LSD (though not all have suffered detectable ill effects). No one can even guess how many more self-styled "acid heads"* there are among oddball cult groups...
...Florid & Terrifying." Southern California devotees proclaim the alleged benefits of LSD with evangelistic fervor. They say it brings supernatural powers. It does not, say U.C.L.A. psychiatrists. Some say it is an aphrodisiac. It is not. They say it helps the user to solve his emotional problems. It may-but only if the solution is already in the mind, hidden behind an emotional block...
...What LSD actually has done for far too many users, says U.C.L.A.'s Psychiatric Resident Duke D. Fisher, is to produce "florid psychoses with terrifying visual and auditory hallucinations, marked depression, often with serious suicide attempts, and anxiety bordering on panic. One patient tried to kill himself when he thought his body was melting, and he remained suicidal for more than two weeks, after only one dose of LSD. Other patients have required more than two months of psychiatric hospitalization. Still others have been sent to state hospitals for long-term treatment." Adds U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist J. Thomas Ungerleider...
Besides distortions of objects and other people, some of the interviewed said they would often look down at their hand, while on LSD, and see an ugly, clumsy mass which didn't seem to belong to them. Other students said that LSD actually wiped out their identity until they could fade into a knot on the wall and watch humanity pass, performing its insignificant tasks. "LSD," one student said, "is an excuse to sit back and let your imagination go berserk...