Psychedelic Press Blog — review

LSD The Wonder Child: The Golden Age of Psychedelic Research in the 1950s by Thomas Hatsis | Park Street Press | 2021 We stand far enough away from the 1950s for it to have now become historically well-revised. Taken as a whole, it is a time of mixed understandings in the anglophone world that entails readings of suburban bliss and isolated monotony, creature comforts and social anxiety, with national consensus nursing cultural malcontent. It is also regarded as a ‘golden age’ in psychopharmacology. New drug discoveries, such as meprobamate, chlorpromazine, and benzodiazepines, flourished, promising a revolution in mental health treatment,...

Author Ben Sessa is a psychiatrist, and his novel starts with a psychiatrist character, Dr Robert Austell, having a violent fantasy where he cuts a patient’s throat with a scalpel and nonchalantly watches her bleed to death. The reader can be forgiven for momentarily wandering just how autobiographical the work is, and indeed whether such things are the norm within the psychiatric profession! But of course this slasher opening is a piece of black comedy in order to set up the jaded, disillusioned Austell as someone who – like the majority of the working population – is bored with his job and...