Well, regarding the guy in my profile who I'm sure many of you know, Syd Barrett was written off as an "acid casualty." I'm a big fan of him, one of my favorite musicians, so I've read all the books on him and stories from people who knew him who might've not included some things in those books. I'd only suggest reading any of this if you have interest in him as well. Otherwise you can hit the tl;dr at the bottom.
This will be a bit of a long read and I've probably even mentioned some of this before but it's one of the most common myths about LSD. When people think of an acid casualty, they instantly think of him first. There were others but they recovered pretty well. I don't think Syd had the support system he needed, and his bandmates just leaving him behind probably broke his heart.
It's true that he likely had one big overdose because as the other guys described it, one day he was himself, then he turned up after a weekend not speaking, very disinterested in everything, a cold, brooding look in his eyes. But he was already growing tired of the commercialization of the band given they went from making crazy noises in the UFO club to doing 150 gigs or so in just that one year, many of which he was in a terrible state, but often could still perform at a good level. I don't think he entirely hated it, there's a picture of him from just weeks before this incident where he's playing on stage and looks totally sharp and together.
There were only a handful of gigs he actually sabotaged by not playing and they were in the last months, and in one of them he was electrocuted, looking ready to go, and then just stood limp. People die from that shit, Keith Richards almost did. Also he was playing in front of white strobe lights quite often, and tripping some of the time. So there's speculation he may have developed temporal lobe epilepsy. The way he could go from being totally normal to suddenly catatonic suggests that's a great possibility, even Gilmour thought that. This was during the North American tour, where he'd often not play and have to be replaced by David O'List from The Nice. They looked similar, enough to maybe fool some, but not all people. Either way they did still play a few great gigs with Syd that were well reviewed in the papers.
He seemed to recover well before their North American tour, I've read some books on him. Pictures around October show him smiling again, sporting a nice Hendrix perm, probably excited that he'll get to meet Hendrix and see him play since it was a package tour. But when the light guy, Peter Wynne Wilson and Syd went about the Haight scene, they were introduced not only to DMT but also STP/DOM, which was dosed as high as 10-20mg at that time. This stuff RAVAGED the whole area and single handedly fried what the "Summer of Love" could've been. Even 5mg of this is considered pretty high. 10mg and you'll be tripping for a week.
Peter recalls they consumed the 10mg tablets, and the same day they were sent out, there were over 300 cases of acute psychosis if I remember correctly. The other band members say this is the tour that he really lost his marbles, and it seems to add up. If he was taking LSD all the time, it wouldn't be doing that much, so I think he either wasn't or could've been given DOM during the period he went missing, because the month of July 1967 is when DOM was going all around. A lot of people knew it was bad but some, like John Lennon decided to take it anyway around this same time.
Regardless, he got into quaaludes, Mandrax to be specific which is packed with a nice dose of diphenhydramine. He was known to take handfuls of these daily for at least 5 years from 1967-1972, maybe even a bit longer. Mandrax was a commonly used drug to calm people down from bad trips since it was such a sedative hypnotic. But take enough of it and you'll be tripping on Benadryl too. On one occasion he was found overdosed foaming at the mouth basically having a seizure when he lived with Duggie Fields.
They both tripped together in 1969, 2 years after he became a "casualty" and mentioned that he was having a great time, smiling, laughing, they both were. So I do think Mandrax played a much bigger role in his breakdown after leaving the band and into his solo career. According to Gilmour he'd often be so fucked up on the stuff while trying to record that he'd be falling over, dropping his pick, strumming away randomly and losing focus. In quite a few of his solo album songs you can just tell he's on it. Then there are brilliant songs that he sounds very clear and on point.
I certainly don't believe he had schizophrenia, or that LSD alone can cause schizophrenia, which is another common myth I think that stems directly from what the others in the band believed. And once they became one of the biggest bands in the world, they could repeatedly tell this story of him taking too much acid and going crazy. They did imply it was likely dormant but, there was no history of it in his entire family. There was a history of autism, though, and he did show signs of it in ways and his sister had it. The band just had no other way to describe his strange behaviors, which by later on were basically intentional. He didn't like the direction they were going, making music from an architectural approach rather than the freeform type that he liked so much.
His behavior on that Mandrax was wild, there were cases of him abusing his girlfriends (he'd often have 2 or 3) and in one case crushing one of them behind a door into a wall and screaming. Most of the flatmates didn't do a whole lot about heated arguments or him sort of throwing her around but the door incident is when they stepped in. Mandrax was known to cause violent outbursts at times, I believe Jimi Hendrix had a bad time with it and got very violent. I heard alcohol could turn him really nasty too, when in general he was a very charming and nice guy. So was Syd before all of this shit happened to him.
I had a similar experience at 17, a psychotic break that lasted for months. Total extreme brain fog and depersonalization/derealization, I couldn't recognize where I was, ever, and I felt like a ghost, like my body was just moving but I wasn't moving it. It gradually improved, this was the summer going into my senior year of high school. I smoked a lot of weed to cope, thinking using a drug that makes me feel detached would make me feeling detached make sense. It... kind of worked? And it's possible that Syd, if in a similar state, might have done the same thing.
He was certainly a prodigious hash smoker and maybe something like that was going on as well. Others suggested he kept taking acid to "self-medicate" which in my eyes translates to the same thing I was doing, but I think the others in the band thought he was doing it a lot more than he actually was. Some people he knew thought he didn't do it all that often, others say he lived with people who were spiking his food and drink (those people denied it but there's pretty good evidence that this was happening based on the freaky people I've heard he lived with).
Anyway, sorry to write a book lol. I guess it's just such a common LSD myth, how it fried him, when there was so much more going on. I don't know if I believe entirely in an acid casualty. Maybe cases of serious dormant mental illness being brought out with it, or psychosis that could last from months to a year or so. As mentioned some of the others did recover eventually. You don't often hear of mushroom casualties either, do you? It's always about LSD. I think the fact that it was synthesized stamps a big stigma, a great danger on it. My issue is that I was not ready. I'd been a straight edge just months before and took way too much. I did acid one more time when I was 22 and it was still sketchy. It just doesn't jive with me, I prefer shrooms and most specifically DMT.
TL;DR: So the long and the short, my LSD myth that I'm debunking is that acid is what messed up Syd Barrett so bad, when in reality, it was the quaaludes. Maybe he resorted to them after shock from bad trips, pressure from the music scene and all that, only he would know, but based on the fact it was given to people having bad trips, I can see it being very likely. Mandrax for years daily is a great way to totally fry your brains. I mean he lost all ability to function at one point. Generally he's the poster child of what "too much LSD" can do, especially with the band members constantly referring to his use of it which I doubt they knew the extent of given they didn't live together. Given he had a nice trip 2 years later clearly the stuff couldn't have freaked him out all that much.
