Oh yeah! And Tommy Douglas was the grandfather of popular television
actor Kiefer Sutherland. :-)
Chris Green
York U.
Toronto
==============
Christopher D. Green wrote:
>
>
> There is an article in a recent issue of the /Journal of the History
> of the Behavioral Sciences/ by Erika Dyck and Jon Mills on the use of
> psychedelics at Weyburn, and my York colleague, Alexandra Rutherford
> has done research on the development of token economies there (though
> I am not sure where she has published it exactly). Weyburn was, for a
> long while in the middle of the 20th century, one of the most
> progressive psychiatric institutions in North America (though not all
> of their experiments worked out in the long run, to be sure). And, it
> is no accident that it this phenomenon was coincident with the
> election of the social democratic government of Tommy Douglas, who
> ruled Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961 and who instituted
> publicly-funded universal health care ("socialized medicine," as US
> conservatives would have it -- check out yesterday's Krugman column in
> the NYT: http://tinyurl.com/3fa8mv ) in Saskatchewan, which eventually
> spread to the rest of the country and is now widely considered to be a
> fundamental pillar of Canadian democracy). In 2004, Douglas was voted
> "Greatest Canadian" in the Canadian version of the television show
> franchise that was played in many countries that year.)
>
> Chris
> --
>
> Christopher D. Green
> Department of Psychology
> York University
> Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
> Canada
>
>
>
> 416-736-2100 ex. 66164
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
>
> ==========================
>
>
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> The great daily CBC radio news programme "As It Happens" (also carried on
>> NPR in the US) carried an item recently (on the same broadcast where they
>> interviewed Robin's husband on the Ig Nobels) on the closing of the
>> Weyburn, Saskatchewan mental hospital.
>>
>> Who cares, you say? Well, as AIH pointed out, the hospital has a
>> distinguished history in psychology and psychiatry. The controversial
>> psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond was at Weyburn where he pursued some of the
>> first experiments with the hallucinogenics mescaline and LSD on mental
>> patients, coined the term "psychedelic", and supplied Aldous Huxley with
>> some (the result was Huxley's famous "The Doors of Perception").
>>
>> An interesting obituary of Osmond, who died in 2004 (Wikipedia has it
>> wrong, by the way, with its date of 2008) was published in the British
>> Medical Journal (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/328/7441/713).
>>
>> There's also a NY Times obit at http://tinyurl.com/4w5wjt which has this
>> charming anecdote about the origin of the term:
>>
>> Huxley had sent Dr. Osmond a rhyme with his own word choice: ''To make
>> this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.'' (Thymos
>> means soul in Greek.)
>>
>> Rejecting that, Dr. Osmond replied: ''To fathom Hell or soar angelic,
>> just take a pinch of psychedelic.''
>>
>> AIH had it right on Osmond at the Weyburn. What they didn't add was that
>> the famous pioneer in applied behaviour analysis (operant conditioning),
>> Theodoro Allyon, also carried out his first studies at the Weyburn. These
>> eventually led to his development of the token economy (at Anna State,
>> however).
>>
>> See Ayllon, T., and Haughton, E. (1962). Control of the behavior of
>> schizophrenic patients by food. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of
>> Behavior, 5, 343-352. Available on-line at. http://tinyurl.com/3mzvrk
>>
>> One of his memorable studies, if unethical by present standards, was his
>> operant conditioning of broom-carrying behaviour by a schizophrenic
>> patient at the hospital. He then called in the psychodynamic
>> psychiatrists (they all were, in those days) to "interpret" the symptom,
>> which they did with imagination and enthusiasm. He revealed his hoax in
>> print (Ayllon, T. and Haughton, E. (1965). Interpretation of symptoms:
>> fact or fiction? Behavior Research and Therapy, 3, 1-7.)
>>
>> Curiously, I can't find any news reports (other than AIH) that say the
>> Weyburn is to be demolished, just this one saying it's under
>> consideration:
>> http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2008/08/05/weyburn-
>> hospital.html or http://tinyurl.com/3mzvrk
>>
>> The Weyburn frist for psychedlics and operant conditioning too. Not bad
>> for an obscure hospital somewhere out on the prairies. R.I.P.
>>
>> See more pics of the hospital at
>> http://www.saskurbex.prairiepast.com/main/weyburn/weyburn.htm with some
>> non-professional notes on this history.
>>
>> Stephen
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Stephen L. Black, Ph.D.
>> Professor of Psychology, Emeritus
>> Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> 2600 College St.
>> Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7
>> Canada
>>
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