Neşe Devenot // Neurodivergent perspectives inspired two of the biggest environmental justice movements of 2019—Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future”—and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. For her part, Thunberg garnered widespread media attention for linking her global impact to having Asperger’s, an autism-spectrum condition that Thunberg calls her “superpower.” According to Thunberg,…
Tag: psychedelics
From the Desert to the Laboratory: Mike Jay’s ‘Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic’
David Robertson // It was a ‘bright May morning’ in California in 1953 when the British author Aldous Huxley swallowed 400 milligrams of the hallucinogen mescaline and ‘sat down to wait for the results.’ Thirty minutes later Huxley ‘became aware of a slow dance of golden lights’ and, soon after, ‘sumptuous red surfaces swelling and…
Weaving the Tapestry of the History of Psychiatry: Anne Harrington’s ‘Mind Fixers’
David Robertson // Over the last twenty years, considerable scholarly contributions have been made to the history of psychiatry. We have had historical analyses of the concept of “nerves” and “neurasthenia,” of “trauma” and the emergence of diagnoses such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.[1] Historians have examined the material settings of neuropsychiatric efforts to localize brain…
Review—Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds by Lauren Slater
John Carranza // “I wrote this book because I have been taking psychotropic drugs for thirty-five years, with different drugs or drug combinations during different decades of my life.”[1]Lauren Slater’s frank disclosure of taking psychiatric medications and the effect they had, and continue to have, on her body opens her new book Blue Dreams:…