Self-Experimentations with Psychedelics Among Mental Health Professionals: LSD in the Former Czechoslovakia

Introduction

Winkler and colleagues situate this study within a long history of self-experimentation in medicine and early psychedelic research, noting that psychologists and psychiatrists often used self-administration of psychoactive substances to gain experiential knowledge of altered states. The introduction outlines how figures from late 19th- and 20th-century psychopharmacology conducted self-experiments with mescaline, LSD and other agents, and how proponents argued that such experiences had didactic and heuristic value for clinicians working with mentally ill patients. The authors also note that despite renewed contemporary human research into psychedelics, peer-reviewed literature lacks systematic retrospective assessments of clinicians who underwent self-experimentation during the legal research era. The study therefore aimed to locate and interview mental health professionals who voluntarily self-experimented with LSD in the former Czechoslovakia between 1952 and 1974. The primary objectives were to determine whether participants reported any long-term negative effects and to assess perceived long-term benefits in self-awareness and didactic understanding of mental illness; a further objective was to capture participants' attitudes toward the professional use of LSD for auto-gnostic and educational purposes.