Yet preceding these two articles we have the even more fascinating, groundbreaking participant-observer LSD account by journalist Sidney Katz, "My 12 Hours as a Madman." Based on his experience in an LSD schizophrenia experiment directed by Humphry Osmond, Katz's essay was published in Maclean's magazine in 1953 and was widely read with great interest. Like Albert Hofmann's initial discovery of the drug's effects, Katz's account stresses the horrors and transient pleasures of LSD and the identification of LSD with mental illness: "On the morning of Thursday, June 18, 1953, I swallowed a drug which, for twelve unforgettable hours, turned me into a madman. For twelve hours I inhabited a nightmare world in which I experienced the torments of hell and the ecstasies of heaven" (Katz). And like other accounts, Katz depicts his LSD use as a journey, an "excursion into madness" or a trip into a "nightmare world."Katz's experience with LSD is, of course, heavily scripted. He takes LSD after being vetted for the experiment and has been told what to expect. While under LSD, Katz is constantly attended by members of Osmond's team who test him and question him at various stages of the experiment:Q: Do you know who you are?
A: Sidney Katz.
Q: Do you know where you are?
A: The mental hospital in Weyburn.
Q: What are you undergoing?
A: It's an experiment with LSD.
Q: That's right. You came here to write a story.
Do you feel keen about doing this story?
A: (No answer.)
Q: Do you want to write this story?
A: (No answer.) (Katz)
Katz is, furthermore, explicitly reminded of the experiment's goals by the research team during his LSD intoxication:Now Stefaniuk [the psychologist] handed me one of the cards of the Rorschach test … "We want to know why schizophrenics won't co-operate with us in Rorschach tests." I looked at the colored blots and could see that they had turned into thick enamel… . I could feel the enamel coating creeping up from my hands to my arms and down my body… . I quickly handed the card back to Stefaniuk and the sensation left me. I hadn't offered any explanation. "Schizophrenics won't co-operate in a Rorschach test and you won't either," Stefaniuk was saying. (Katz)
The expectations of LSD's effects combined with the researchers' understanding of the symptoms of schizophrenia structure Katz's experience. Katz is dependent on this context not simply conceptually, but in a way that seems visceral: "I was completely dependent on those around me to give me reassurance that I was not damned to the eternal hell of insanity. Had … I been left alone even for a minute to the mercies of my hallucinations, I am convinced that I would have perished from grief."
Notably, Katz comes out of his temporary immersion into disability with a strong sense of empathy for the hospital's patients. After he has fully recovered from his LSD intoxication, Katz again walks through the hospital ward with a new, more immediate awareness of others' psychic pain:From the far end of the hall I could hear the terrible chant of a disturbed schizophrenic repeating over and over: "Burn, goddam body; burn goddam body, burn goddam legs, burn goddam belly, burn goddam body, burn goddam body …" What corner of hell did he inhabit? What terrors beset him? Fresh from my experiences of yesterday I could imagine what they might be, and imagining, wince from pain.
Katz concludes, "We should insist that our best doctors, technicians and laboratories be immediately sent to rescue the schizophrenic from his endless hell. No goal can be more urgent or humane. I know." Katz's intense feelings of empathy toward people with mental illness became a therapeutic hallmark of psychiatric self-experimentation with the drug during this period.
