22 Facts About Humphry Osmond

Humphry Fortescue Osmond was an English psychiatrist who expatriated to Canada, then moved to work in the United States.

Humphry Osmond is known for inventing the word psychedelic and for his research into interesting and useful applications for psychedelic drugs.

Humphry Osmond was born in Surrey, England, and educated at Haileybury.

At Weyburn, Humphry Osmond recruited a group of research psychologists to turn the hospital into a design-research laboratory.

In 1952, Humphry Osmond related the similarity of mescaline to adrenaline molecules, in a theory that implied that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by one's own body.

Humphry Osmond collected the biographies of recovered schizophrenics and held that psychiatrists can understand the schizophrenic only by understanding the rational way the mind makes sense of distorted perceptions.

Humphry Osmond pursued this idea with passion, exploring all avenues to gain insight into the shattered perceptions of schizophrenia, holding that the illness arises primarily from distortions of perception.

Yet during the same period, Humphry Osmond became interested in the potential of psychedelics to foster mind-expanding and mystical experiences.

Humphry Osmond had lived in the US for well over a decade and gained some experience screenwriting for Hollywood films.

Humphry Osmond's name appears in four footnotes in the early pages of the book.

Humphry Osmond was respected and trusted enough that in 1955 he was approached by Christopher Mayhew, an English politician, and guided Mayhew through a mescaline trip that was filmed for broadcast by the BBC.

Humphry Osmond first proposed the term "psychedelic" at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1956.

Humphry Osmond is known for a study in the late 1950s in which he attempted to cure alcoholics with LSD.

Humphry Osmond noticed that some drinkers were only able to give up drinking after an episode of delirium tremens and tried to replicate this state in patients by giving them high doses of the drug.

Humphry Osmond participated in a Native American Church ceremony in which he ingested peyote, regarded by the Native Americans as sacred.

Humphry Osmond's hosts were Plains Indians, members of the Red Pheasant Band, and the all-night ceremony took place near North Battleford.

Humphry Osmond published his report on the experience in Tomorrow magazine, Spring 1961.

Humphry Osmond reported details of the ceremony, the environment in which it took place, the peyote's effects, his hosts' courtesy, and his conjectures about the experience's meaning for them and for the Native American Church.

Humphry Osmond had interpreted and described the peyote ceremony he had experienced, with its tepee setting and its particular social pattern, in terms that drew attention to its contrast with the psychiatric institutions of his day.

Humphry Osmond's interests included the application of Jung's Typology of personality to group dynamics.

Later, Humphry Osmond became director of the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry at the New Jersey Neuro Psychiatric Institute in Princeton, where he collaborated with Bernard Aaronson in hypnosis experiments.

Humphry Osmond co-wrote 11 books and was widely published throughout his career.