There's plenty of evidence that psychedelics help psychosis. It can go either way: worse or better. That's the nature of the drug. Don't be narrow-minded and think that psychedelics are
chemically incompatible with various psychoses.
Was this the first experiment using psychedelics with psychotic or autistic children, or was there prior work that you had heard about?
No, this was in 1959 or 1960, and I hadn’t heard of anything. Then by late 1962, we could no longer legally obtain LSD, and all these projects were shut down. I wrote a long paper on the treatment of one girl, and it was read at the International Association for Social Psychiatry in London by my friend Dr. Joyce Martin. Joyce was a psychoanalyst, and one of the early people who worked with outpatients using LSD in low doses. The editor of the
International Journal of Social Psychiatry was in the audience and wanted to publish the paper, so that was my first publication. The paper was about a girl named Patty. When I told her that we couldn’t continue this work, she asked, “Why?” I said, “Well, we can’t get LSD anymore.” And she asked, “Don’t you know where it is?” I replied, “Sandoz still has it but they won’t give it to us because we’re not allowed to use it anymore.” She asked, “What’s the man’s name who has it?” So I told her the Sandoz representative’s name, and she took my hand and said, “Gary, this is what I think you should do. You go up to San Francisco and find this man, and you tell him that Patty Simpson sent you to see him. And tell him that Patty Simpson says, ‘Please give Gary some LSD because Patty Simpson really needs it.’” We cried for two days. This was a girl who, when we started, was completely psychotic, totally out of contact, destructive, violent, and entirely unmanageable.
So your results with these kids who were not responding to any conventional treatment were excellent. Most of these kids came back to life, right?
Yes. Older schizophrenic children, ages seven to nine, had the most successful response. The least responsive children were very young and had primary autism. Although one girl who was three years old did have a successful response.
We weren’t much focused on diagnoses, as these kids were all totally dysfunctional—incredibly disturbed, violent, and noncommunicative. However, their behavior changed somewhat, even with the young children who were nonverbal and who didn’t have as much response. One three-year-old girl initially would not let anyone touch her or allow any interaction. After the LSD treatments, she would want to come and touch you and be with you, and sit on your knee and stroke you. Totally opposite from before, when if you got near her she would screech. So behavior changed, even in kids who had no verbal ability and no interaction, which is amazing.
Gary Fisher
Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics (editors: Roger Walsh & Charles S. Grob), pages 106-107
Fisher treated kids using doses of at least 300 micrograms (stated earlier in the interview).
More links on Fisher's research:
Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia Utilizing LSD and Psilocybin. Gary Fisher, Ph.D, 1997, , MAPS Newsletter, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 18-25
http://youtu.be/J01YPfOQRv8
