#AMPHETAMINE PSYCHOSIS SKIN#

Shaw and Woolley (1956) hypothesized that LSD might act on 5-HT receptors, and later Anden et al. Neuropharmacologists began to ask whether schizophrenia might be caused by chemical alterations similar to those produced by LSD. More serious individuals such as the famous author, Aldous Huxley also advocated the use of LSD “to make this trivial world sublime,” and even took the drug on his deathbed.

His phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out!” became an anthem of the hippie movement. Timothy Leary, an advocate of psychedelic drugs, was fired from Harvard University, where he was a lecturer from 1959 to 1963, and founded the League for Spiritual Discovery (L.S.D). In the 1960s, the use of LSD and other recreational drugs spread among young people across the Western world.

#AMPHETAMINE PSYCHOSIS SKIN#

LSD was synthesized in 1938 by Hofmann (1980), but its hallucinogenic properties were not discovered till Hofmann accidentally spilt some on his skin 5 years later, when he recalled later “I happened to experience its unforeseeable effects in my own body – or rather, in my own mind,” seeing uninterrupted streams of “fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors”. The first drug to attract major attention as a possible model of psychosis was LSD. Thus, experimental studies examine those effects of drugs that resemble the positive symptoms (e.g., hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and disorganized thinking) and negative symptoms (affective flattening, anhedonia, amotivation, attentional impairment, and cognitive impairment) of schizophrenia ( D’Souza et al., 2004). A drug with psychotomimetic actions is one which induces temporary states of altered perception ( McGraw-Hill, 1993), often mimicking the symptoms of psychosis, including delusions, and/or hallucinations (“psychoto-” from psychosis, and “-mimetic” from the Greek μιμητιℵ?ς “in imitation of”).

The clinical definition of a psychotic disorder restricts the term to those illnesses with delusions and/or prominent hallucinations, with the hallucinations occurring in the absence of insight into their pathological nature (DSM-IV). However, before we discuss these issues it is appropriate to remind ourselves of a few definitions. Here, therefore, we examine the evidence that acute administration of drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), amphetamines, phencyclidine (PCP), and cannabis can induce psychotic symptoms, and consider the implications for our understanding of schizophrenia. Since the mid-twentieth century, more knowledge has accumulated concerning this than any other causal factor. One environmental factor which has been curiously neglected is the evidence that certain drugs can contribute to the onset of schizophrenia-like psychosis. It appears that multiple genetic and environmental factors operate together to push individuals over a threshold into expressing the characteristic clinical picture ( Tsuang et al., 2004 Di Forti et al., 2007a). Liability to this syndrome is highly heritable but the fact that concordance between monozygotic twins is less than 50% suggests an important role for environmental influences ( Tandon et al., 2008 MacDonald and Schulz, 2009). The prevalent view among researchers today is that schizophrenia is a syndrome rather than a specific disease. In this review we examine the main hypotheses resulting from the link observed between the most common psychotomimetic drugs (lysergic acid diethylamide, amphetamines, cannabis, phencyclidine) and schizophrenia. In the last 60 years, improved understanding of the relationship between drug abuse and psychosis has contributed substantially to our modern view of the disorder suggesting that liability to psychosis in general, and to schizophrenia in particular, is distributed trough the general population in a similar continuous way to liability to medical disorders such as hypertension and diabetes. One environmental factor which has been curiously neglected is the evidence that certain drugs can induce schizophrenia-like psychosis. It appears that multiple genetic and environmental factors operate together to push individuals over a threshold into expressing the characteristic clinical picture. Liability to schizophrenia is highly heritable. The prevalent view today is that schizophrenia is a syndrome rather than a specific disease. Division of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, UK.

Amphetamine psychosis