Hallucinogens as hard science: the adrenochrome hypothesis for the biogenesis of schizophrenia.

Working in a psychiatrically innovative environment created by the Government of Saskatchewan, Canada, Abram Hoffer and Humphry F. Osmond enunciated the adrenochrome hypothesis for the biogenesis of schizophrenia in 1952, slightly later proposing and, apparently, demonstrating, in a double-blind study, that the symptoms of the illness could be reversed by administering large doses of niacin. After placing the hypothesis within its ideological framework, the author describes its emergence and elaboration and discusses the empirical evidence brought against it.

Lessons from the periphery: psychiatry in Saskatchewan, Canada, 1944-68.

The government of the Saskatchewan Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, when elected in 1944, established programmes for the state-funded care of all those suffering from mental illness. It enacted legislation covering the care and treatment of the mentally ill and created a division of the Department of Public Health, the Psychiatric Services Branch (PSB), which both recruited and trained psychiatric staff, meeting the need for nonmedical staff by creating a programme for the training of psychiatric nurses in Saskatchewan. The PSB devised the Saskatchewan Plan for the delivery of rural services, centred on small mental hospitals of a revolutionary design.

John Rickman, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, and the origins of the therapeutic community.

The history of psychiatric therapeutic communities is complex and obscure. Nevertheless, one can make a reasonable case for saying that the first true therapeutic community was created at Northfield Military Hospital, Birmingham, England, in 1945. That community had its origins in the thought and practice of two British psychoanalysts, John Rickman and Wilfred Ruprecht Bion.