Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Grand Rounds

Psychiatry's Early Experiences with LSD: A Cautionary Tale

Joel E. Dimsdale, MD
Regent Edward A. Dickinson Emeritus Professor • Distinguished Professor Emeritus • Dept. of Psychiatry • UC San Diego School of Medicine

About the speaker:
Dr. Dimsdale attended Carleton College and then Stanford University, where he obtained a MA in Sociology and an MD degree. He obtained his psychiatric training at Massachusetts General Hospital and then completed a fellowship in psychobiology at the New England Regional Primate Center. After serving on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976-1985, he moved to UC San Diego, where he is now the Regent Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor and a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus.

His clinical subspecialty is consultation psychiatry. He is a former career awardee of the American Heart Association and is past-president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He is editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychosomatic Medicine and is a previous guest editor of Circulation, Drug Therapy, Psychiatric Clinics of North America, the International Journal of Hypertension, and the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. He has been a consultant to the President’s Commission on Mental Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academies of Science, the Department of Justice, NASA, and NIH, and was advisor to the UC Regents Health Sciences Committee. He was a member of the DSM-5 taskforce and chaired the workgroup studying somatic symptom disorders. Dr. Dimsdale is also the former chair of the UC San Diego Academic Senate and a recipient of the Oliver Johnson Award for distinguished leadership.

His major research interests center on stress physiology and sleep, cultural factors in illness, quality of life, and psychological reverberations of the Holocaust. He is the author of more than 500 publications, including the books Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals and Dark Persuasion: The History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media.

Learning objectives:
Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

• Identify at least two flaws in experimental design of early psychiatric research on psychedelics
• Identity at least two centers where early psychedelic research took place

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In addition to the Pritzker Building, DPBS members can also watch this event live at Mount Zion (Room B730) and ZSFG (Bldg. 5, Room 7M30), as well as on Zoom (psychiatry.ucsf.edu/watchgrandrounds).

Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Grand Rounds presentations are for educational purposes and intended only for behavioral/mental health professionals and clinical providers.

Continuing education (CE) credit is available for physicians, psychologists, nurses, and therapists who participate in this activity.