Boston Psychopathic Hospital

Boston Psychopathic Hospital, later renamed the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, was a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. It was the site of the first American LSD experience in 1949, when Robert Hyde took the drug under the observation of Max Rinkel and Dr. H. Jackson DeShon. The hospital's research director, Milton Greenblatt, vividly recalls the presentation by a visiting Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders, who described how an infinitesimally small dose had rendered Albert Hofmann temporarily "crazy." "We were very interested in anything that could make someone schizophrenic," says Greenblatt. If the drug really did induce psychosis for a short time, the Boston doctors reasoned, an antidote might cure schizophrenia.¹

CIA-Funded Research Program

From 1952 on, the CIA funded the hospital's LSD program to the tune of about $40,000 a year through MKULTRA. Only Robert Hyde and his boss, the hospital superintendent, knew officially that the CIA was the funding source, though according to DeShon, all senior staff understood where the money really came from. Hospital officials told volunteer subjects something about the nature of the experiments but nothing about their origins or purpose. Hyde set up a multidisciplinary program that brought together psychiatrists, psychologists, and physiologists, virtually unheard of at the time.¹

Key Findings

The researchers learned that while some subjects seemed to become schizophrenic, many others did not. Surprisingly, true schizophrenics showed little reaction to LSD unless given massive doses. The Hyde group found out that the quality of a person's reaction was determined mainly by the person's basic personality structure (set) and the environment (setting) in which he or she took the drug, a concept that would become known as "set and setting." More than anything else, LSD tended to intensify the subject's existing characteristics, often to extremes. Men from MKULTRA frequently visited, passing themselves off as foundation officials, to observe and suggest areas of future research.¹