In memoriam: Humphry Osmond - Shroomery

Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 257–258
In memoriam: Humphry Osmond
R. Sommer*
Department of Art, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-8528, USA
‘‘A roman candle of new ideas’’ and ‘‘The most
creative person I ever worked with’’; I have used these
phrases many times to describe psychiatrist Humphry
Osmond. Humphry was a guru of the 1960s psychedelic
movement. Most of his research with hallucinogenic
drugs took place in the early 1950s when Timothy Leary
and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Das) were
graduate students. Humphry was a grandfather of
environmental psychology, in the same lofty category
as James Gibson, Roger Barker, and Heini Hediger in
terms of directly influencing those individuals responsible
for creating and formalizing environment-behavior
research. He established connections between psychiatry
and architecture in the 1950s, at the cusp of the postwar
boom in mental hospital construction. The hospital he
directed in Weyburn, Saskatchewan became a design
research laboratory. He collaborated with architects
Kiyo Izumi and Art Allen to improve ward environment.
He encouraged Clyde Dorsett and Coryl Larue
Jones at NIMHto fund research and training programs
in EBR, advised Roger Bailey and Calvin Taylor who
initiated the University of Utah’s innovative architectural
psychology program, and assisted Hal Proshansky,
Bill Ittelson, and Leanne Rivlin at the start of the
CUNY environmental psychology program. Humphry
developed the concepts of sociopetal and sociofugal
space and introduced design researchers to the seminal
ideas of zookeeper Heini Hediger on using systematic
methods to identify appropriate species habitat.
Humphry Osmond was born in Surrey, UK in 1917,
completed secondary school at age 18 intending to
become a banker but instead went to work for an
architect. Following this, he attended Guy’s Hospital
Medical School. During the Second World War he
served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and
took special courses to become a ship’s psychiatrist.
After the war, he had a formal residency in psychiatry
and married a London nurse, Jane Roffey. During his
psychiatric residency, he came across Albert Hoffman’s
graphic description of the psychological and behavioral
effects of LSD. Humphry saw these outcomes as very
*Tel.: +1-530-752-0105; fax: +1-530-752-0795.
doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.03.001
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similar to the florid symptoms of early schizophrenia,
and with his colleague John Smythies, came up with a
novel theory that an LSD-like substance was responsible
for the symptoms of schizophrenia, launching decades
of searching for a compound, called variously by
different investigators adrenochrome, adrenoxin, adrenolutin,
and ‘‘the mauve compound’’. As this idea ran
counter to the Freudian-dominated mental health
establishment in England, Humphry and Smythies
emigrated to North America in 1951 in search of a
more congenial intellectual environment. They ended up
at a large, isolated, custodial mental hospital on the
windswept plains of Saskatchewan. The Superintendent
resisted innovation and was soon deposed by a
rebellious young staff. Humphry became superintendent
and proved to have amazing administrative skills.
Applying his divergent thinking to organizational issues,
he was responsible for numerous innovations, resulting
in a prestigious Hospital Improvement Ward from the
American Psychiatric Association. He revamped training
for attendants, who became psychiatric nurses and
created a new category of nurse consultants to assist the
ward staff. He helped psychologist Ted Ayllon establish
the first mental hospital ward based on principles of
operant conditioning. He reversed the previous irrational
authority system, making nurses responsible for
ward administration, with psychiatrists and psychologists
serving as their consultants. This put authority for
the first time where it belonged, with ward nurses on the
line, rather than pretending that it resided in remote
physicians who occasionally showed up to sign medication
slips and ward records.
In Saskatchewan, Humphry began LSD work on
several fronts. He obtained a sizable grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation for biochemical studies which
were done mainly by his colleague Abram Hoffer at the
University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He also
investigated the drug’s psychological effects, in particular
the way it altered perception of time and space.
Under his supervision, architects took LSD and spent
time on hospital wards to consider designing more
appropriate mental health facilities. His longstanding
interests in perception inspired his colleague Tadeasz

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Weckowicz to undertake laboratory studies on size and
distance constancy, which Humphry felt were critical to
the perceptual changes in schizophrenia. He was also
interested in Galton’s theories of visual imagery, and in
using this as a personality typology.
Humphry explored the use of LSD in treating
alcoholics and psychopaths who were resistant to other
forms of treatment. He coined the terms psychotomimetic
to describe the ways in which LSD created a
model psychosis (root mime or mimic) and psychedelic
(psyche for mind and delic from the Greek delein, to
make manifest). In 1953 he administered 400 mg of
mescaline to Aldous Huxley, an episode described in
Huxley’s well-known book The doors of perception.
Humphry persuaded architect Kiyo Izumi to take LSD
to learn about the perceptual world in schizophrenia. If
the biochemical research had been successful in finding
an LSD-like substance in people with schizophrenia,
there would have been a Nobel Prize and worldwide
recognition.
Humphry made a lasting contribution to the field he
called socioarchitecture which later became environmental
psychology. His 1957 article ‘‘Function as the
basis of psychiatric ward design’’ was a classic during
the early years of EBR when mental hospital architecture
was on the front burner. Humphry advocated
small, sociopetal buildings, with bedrooms clustered
around lounge areas in a circular pattern. It was this
article that brought me to Saskatchewan for the most
exciting and rewarding years of my research career.
Several times a week, sometimes daily, I received handprinted
memos bubbling with new ideas, written in a
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R. Sommer / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 257–258
personal shorthand that he claimed saved him over a
hundred hours of writing time per year.
Like a few other creative thinkers in the behavioral
sciences, including George Herbert Mead and Kurt
Lewin, Humphry lacked the patience to write his own
magnum opus. Fortunately, there were colleagues to
lend assistance, resulting in over 11 co-authored books,
including The chemical basis of clinical psychiatry (with
A. Hoffer), Psychedelics (with B.S. Aaronson), The
future of time (with H.M. Yaker and F. Cheek), and
Models of madness (with M. Siegler). Some of his most
intriguing ideas were found in unpublished memos. I
recall his belief that if there were a biochemical
abnormality behind schizophrenia, it should be possible
to train dogs to sniff out individuals with this condition.
Like psychologists William James and Gardner Murphy,
Humphry believed that much could be learned
from spontaneous reports of paranormal experience.
After leaving Saskatchewan, Humphry became director
of the Bureau of Research in Neurology and
Psychiatry in Princeton NJ, and after that, served a
ward psychiatrist at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa AL
and adjunct faculty member in the University of
Alabama Medical School. With his Bryce colleague
Cynthia Bisbee, he developed a novel program in patient
education. Most everything Humphry did was novel, for
that was the way his mind worked. He was a good
example of what William James called ‘‘unhabitual
perception.’’ He and Jane subsequently moved to
Appleton, Wisconsin to live with their daughter
Euphemia (Fee) Blackburn and her family. Humphry
died quietly at home on February 6, 2004.