LSD, Schizophrenia & The Madness Pill: Psychiatry’s Wildest Experiment | Dr. Justin Garson | Ep. 49
In VivoShow Notes
Philosopher and historian of science Dr. Justin Garson joins me to unpack The Madness Pill: One Doctor’s Quest to Understand Schizophrenia, the mid-century hunt for a pill that could temporarily induce schizophrenia so scientists could reverse-engineer a cure.
Garson opens with his father’s journey: diagnosed in 1973, treated for a time with talk therapy and no meds, then caught in the post-1980s biomedical turn of hospitals, antipsychotics, and side effects. The episode then centers Solomon Snyder, opiate receptor, dopamine receptor, grind-and-bind assays, and the arc from an LSD ego-death to amphetamine psychosis to the dopamine hypothesis that helped flip psychiatry toward chemical-imbalance models. Also: Hearing Voices Network, pathology vs purpose, and Garson’s Substack Reclaim Your Inner Life.
Dr. Justin Garson Website: www.justingarson.com X: x.com/justin_garson Substack: www.reclaimyourinnerlife.com Amazon (The Madness Pill): www.amazon.com/Madness-Pill-Doctors-Understand-Schizophrenia
In Vivo on X - https://x.com/InVivoPodOnX
In Vivo on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@InVivoPodcast
In Vivo on Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-vivo/id1775578563
In Vivo on Amazon Podcasts - https://music.amazon.ca/podcasts/1ac4dbec-df46-4d1f-b0a1-742e9656ef44/in-vivo
The opinions in this episode are those of the speakers. They do not represent the official views of any college, university, company, or other institution I may work for.
More from In Vivo
Dr. Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, joins me to unpack autonomous labs, what they are, why biology’s bench tooling barely moved in 20 years, and why the right analogy isn’t a subway or a car, but a Waymo. Is the biology singularity around the corner?
Cathy Tie (founder, Origin Genomics) and Prof. Jiang Xueqin (Predictive History) join me for a wide-open conversation on germline gene editing, the science, the ethics, and the geopolitics.
Jason Verbelli, founder of Galilean Variance and CEO/Lead Engineer at SEG Magnetics, argues that Einstein left a written test for his own theory: if the speed of light depends even a little on the motion of the source, relativity and Einstein’s theory of gravitation are false. In this interview we start from first principles and work up through John Searl, magnetic waveforms, free energy vs over-unity, the double-slit experiments, the Casimir effect, and what that would mean for energy, technology, and space travel.
In this episode of In Vivo, I sit down with Dr. Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, Assistant Professor of Forensic Epistemology at the University of Toronto and author of Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis (MIT Press).
In this episode, NASA space biologist Ryan T. Scott explains why biology, not rocket science, is the real limiting factor in humanity’s goal of becoming a multi-planetary species. We discuss how NASA’s Open Science Data Repository (OSDR) is transforming space biology by making decades of multi-modal data openly available, standardized, and reusable.