Melbourne's Forgotten Psychedelic Era - Part Two -
The Psychedelic Pioneers: Melbourne’s Groundbreaking Years in Psychedelic Therapy
Content warning: This article discusses the use of psychedelics for psychotherapy in Melbourne hospitals from 1955-1975 and its association with cult activities. It includes references to psychological, physical and sexual abuse, including of children. Reader’s discretion is advised.
Reimagining Ourselves: The Doors of Perception
Formative years
Reflecting on the early history of psychedelic medical research offers insights into a pioneering era filled with optimism and experimental spirit. This part focuses on the experiences of a patient who underwent psychedelic-assisted therapy in Melbourne from 1964 to 1972. Explored in the context of the prevailing psychiatric theories and practices of the time, it examines the transformative impact of these treatments on individuals as well as the broader medical community during those foundational years.
The following testimony was recorded through an interview and email correspondence with Evelyn Harrison, who, at the time, was 91 years old and living in Queensland, Australia. Evelyn’s story is historically important (especially as we embark on a new era of psychedelic-assisted therapy in Australia and around the world) as it presents a largely positive side of the narrative often absent from the literature. Evelyn has no history of recreational drug use and all of her experiences with psychedelics occurred in a clinical environment through psychedelic-assisted therapy. To her knowledge, most of her experiences were conducted with psilocybin. She reports only once knowingly having taken LSD, which has a much longer duration and is generally more overwhelming and draining than psilocybin.
Evelyn Harrison
Evelyn was born in Albert Park, Melbourne, in 1932. She married and had a daughter, Kim, in 1958 at The Alfred Hospital in Victoria. Soon after the birth, Evelyn found that she had not recovered well from the pregnancy and was “not herself”. Although she loved her daughter very much, she was unable to bond or care for her as she had hoped. Evelyn suffered from severe depression, which we now recognise as postnatal depression (PND). Observing her struggling and seeing no improvement, her General Practitioner suggested she try an emerging experimental treatment. Evelyn describes this time in her life: “I had a doctor who knew about this research, and he said, would I consent to going?”. Evelyn explained that she consented as she wished to “attempt to understand why I was depressed, while having been given the gift of a beautiful daughter I loved dearly”.
Evelyn was included in a new experimental group that began in 1964, consisting of around ten participants. This group was made up of voluntary patients like herself, along with two individuals mandated to participate: one referred by the courts due to offences related to paedophilia and another who was suffering from schizophrenia. The treatment regimen combined new drug therapies with both individual psychiatric consultations and group therapy sessions which were held at Newhaven Private Psychiatric Hospital, Kew, a facility now known for its experimental and controversial practices.
The psychiatrists
The experimental group was managed by Dr William Russell Richards, a psychiatrist at Newhaven who incorporated psilocybin and LSD into patient treatments during this era. Several other psychiatrists played significant roles in the program, including Dr. Harry Bethune, Dr John Mackay, and Dr Howard Whitaker. Ronald Conway, a consulting psychologist, also occasionally contributed to the sessions at Newhaven Hospital. Evelyn described the diverse makeup of the group and the importance of proper supervision: “Our group of about 10 people included a paedophile bound over by police to attend, homosexuals, both male and female, people with drinking, smoking, and depression issues. Also schizophrenics—the latter did not respond well to the treatment…This is why treatment always needs to be supervised by responsible, medically-trained professionals”.
Evelyn Harrison in the early 1960s (Photo courtesy of Evelyn Harris)
The sessions
Evelyn attended approximately two to three sessions per month, which typically included three phases: first, the dose of psilocybin; second, the “trip”, during which Dr Richards would have some limited, therapy-based interactions but which were largely self-guided; and third, a group-based therapy session after the peak experience. In Evelyn's words, “We were all singly put in a room… and the doctor came in, gave the injection and stayed for a little while till we got settled and our journey started. And then he went out”. Following the trip session, “We all got together in a common room… And we'd all sit in there… for a couple of hours, we had lunch at the place, and we sat in this room and talked about our experiences. So everybody got to hear why the people were there [seeking treatment]... And I used to write my experiences down.”
Evelyn noted several times that since it was an experimental group, there was some variability in the drugs administered across her session and over the years of treatment. In these times the participants were rarely informed beforehand about the substances or dose they would receive, leading to fluctuations in their experiences as the doctors experimented with dosage and drug interactions, trying to find the optimum results for their patients. However, according to Evelyn, patients were usually discharged the same day, which is consistent with the use of psilocybin as a therapy. Other possible psychedelic research chemicals that are reported to have been used at the time, on their own and in conjunction with psilocybin and LSD, are 4-HO-DET and psilocin, both also associated with Albert Hofmann and Sandoz pharmaceuticals. According to the literature of the time, non-psychedelic compounds that were explored in conjunction with psychedelic-assisted therapy included methylphenidate, sodium amytal, methylamphetamine and nicotinamide. If the patient was emotionally distraught or uncontrollable, the ‘trip’ could be dampened or terminated with the use of chlorpromazine, reserpine or azacyclonol.
Committing to a long-term treatment program, Evelyn volunteered for psychedelic-assisted therapy for eight years. She explained her willingness to continue the treatment over this extended period, citing significant personal issues she aimed to resolve: “I went to group therapy for postnatal depression, determined not to inflict my problems on my daughter. It was a gruelling journey, rather like crawling over broken glass and hard work. I had to deal with a Catholic upbringing, dysfunctional parents and a disturbed marriage”.
Evelyn viewed the experimental therapy group as a very serious and professional affair, where confidentiality was paramount, and the selection of participants carefully considered. She said: “these sessions would be designed to help people with real problems… The whole idea was for you to tell them how you felt… I doubt [Dr Richards] would take anybody... He would have vetted his group pretty carefully, I think… So he was very good… and it was conducted very strictly. We weren't supposed to communicate with each other outside [the sessions]”.
The therapy
Dr Richards’ approach underscores that the therapeutic objective of psychedelic-assisted therapy at the time focused on accessing the unconscious mind to unearth trauma (often from childhood) and distressing events. The goal was to bring these memories to the forefront, allowing patients to engage with them using their 'adult mind,' thereby facilitating a deeper understanding and healing of traumas from any period of their lives.
It was—and remains—a commonly held belief in psychiatry that many adverse events occurring during childhood can remain hidden from the conscious mind and stay unresolved. The aim of psychedelic-assisted therapy was to address these types of trauma, particularly in patients who were treatment resistant. The combination of psychedelic drugs and therapy was considered a very effective option for facilitating this process. The therapeutic approach encourages patients to regress or remember formative childhood memories and re-experience negative memories, with the goal of integrating and ultimately resolving these issues.
This process was largely self-directed; the memories or experiences that surfaced during the dose sessions (“trip”) often stemmed from material previously unconscious, now consciously engaged by the patient. Often the psychiatrist was not present in the room. Instead, the setup allowed patients to explore their inner landscapes independently, which was believed to help them confront and work through deep-seated emotional wounds more effectively. This testimony from Evelyn helps us better understand how therapy sessions and psilocybin effects were utilised and experienced:
“The whole thing about it is it gives you total recall – not just what you think you thought at the time. It gives you total recall like a film going in front of your eyes….It’s like crawling over broken glass. But we did. And it really did help; hearing the other people also talk about how they had had a bad time made you suddenly realise that, you know, there’s a lot going on and it just, it just changed your whole attitude.”
Childhood trauma
Albert Hofmann wrote, “Another significant psychotherapeutic valuable characteristic of LSD inebriation is the tendency of long forgotten or suppressed content of experiences to appear again in consciousness. Traumatic events, which are sought in psychoanalysis, may then become accessible to psychotherapeutic treatment” (Hofmann, 2009, p. 74). A significant portion of Evelyn’s testimony illustrates the objectives of this regression treatment facilitated by psychedelic-assisted therapy. Below, she recounts experiences from one of her dose sessions and describes the therapeutic process used to address the insights and memories that surfaced.
“I was sitting on something, I wouldn’t look at it because it was too painful. So I got an intravenous injection, which took me straight back to it, and I remembered I was seven years old…We were in the botanical gardens in Melbourne, my mother and father walking through the gardens. And I was just playing around, and there was an old stone building at the side, and I ran around, and there was a man there, and he exposed himself and put my hand on his penis. And said, if you tell your parents, I’ll kill you. And I ran back to my parents and I was too scared to say anything. Then for years, even when I was happy… I would think oh something awful is going to happen. And I couldn’t understand why. I always felt this. But when I returned to that incident and saw what had happened, that feeling went completely away. I no longer had any fear of anything going wrong for me, like that. So if that’s how it worked, it took you to look at with an adult brain at what a child was seeing. ”
Evelyn thought of this work as self-help:
“What we did was come into the group and we would talk about what came up and Doctor Richards would comment on certain things, but he wouldn’t tell you what to do—you had to do it yourself. It was definitely a self-help thing, and it was very tough because some of the things that came up were very painful, and they’ve been put away, and you never wanted to look at them again. ”
Dr David Livingstone summarises the potential of psilocybin and LSD for treating childhood trauma in a paper in the New Zealand Medical Journal from 1966 on the usefulness of LSD, psilocybin and mescaline in psychiatry:
“‘LSD.25, psilocybin and mescaline all have the power of producing hallucinations and vivid fantasies. When used in the treatment of psychiatric disorders under the careful direction of a therapist, they may bring into consciousness incidents and situations from the individual’s early life, which have long been repressed and held unconscious by fear, guilt, or other factors binding psychological resistance mechanisms…the drug appears to cause a selective undoing of ego functions bringing progressively earlier images and emotional states into consciousness” (1966, p. 658).”
Hard work and lasting outcomes
From Evelyn's descriptions, it is clear she experienced lasting positive outcomes from her sessions, demonstrating the potential benefits of long-term psychedelic-assisted therapy. Over time, she began to actively engage with the therapy to enhance her results: “I learnt to analyse my past and re-shape it—hard work, but worth every minute. I learnt to direct the drug to look at areas I needed to examine, old thinking that had to go. I had wonderful breakthroughs that lit up my world”. However, the advantages Evelyn gained from this therapy extended beyond her personal breakthroughs. Not only did she recover from her postnatal depression, but more significantly, she says, the therapy allowed her to identify, better understand, and ultimately work up the courage to end her dysfunctional marriage. She explains, “It got me out of a destructive marriage and made me realise how little I knew and how much I had to learn… I think the ability to leave my husband, of seeing things, understand what [my husband] was doing, and I think that was a big thing. I was able to just leave. I just walked out”.
Evelyn's psychedelic-assisted therapy was a regular, long-term commitment. She had great respect and trust for her therapist, Dr Richards, and approached each session with clear goals and purpose. While Evelyn's outcome from psychedelic-assisted therapy was largely positive, we lack data or stories from other patients in the same group. Evelyn admitted that not everyone in the group benefited as much as she did; there may have been negative outcomes associated with other patients receiving similar treatment under Dr Richards’ care.
Image of Evelyn Harrison and her daughter Kim (Photo courtesy of Evelyn Harris)
Testing the waters: Australia’s first psychedelic-assisted therapy trial
In the early 1960s, Dr Howard Whitaker embarked on a novel study at Newhaven Hospital to evaluate the efficacy of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as an adjunct to psychotherapy. He discusses his methods and research in the first of two papers about the study, titled “Lysergic acid diethylamide in psychotherapy. Part i: clinical aspects” in the Medical Journal of Australia on January 4, 1964. His work aimed to determine whether the outcomes of psychotherapy could be significantly enhanced through the controlled use of LSD. This clinical trial involved 100 patients at Newhaven Hospital, suffering from various psychological disorders, including psychoneuroses and personality disorders. Each patient was given an average of three or more sessions of psychedelic-assisted therapy. The patients were compared to a control group that he put together from existing patients who received traditional psychotherapy without LSD.
“Newhaven Hospital”, formally known as “Goldthorns”, was the site of Melbournes first LSD psychedelic-assisted therapy trial (Victorian Collections)
Dr Whitaker's approach was informed by the predominantly Freudian psychoanalytic theory of the day, which emphasised the impact of unresolved early childhood experiences on adult neuroses and personality disorders. He hypothesised that LSD could facilitate a deeper understanding and re-evaluation of these early experiences, potentially leading to significant therapeutic breakthroughs. During the trials, LSD was administered in a hospital setting and the experiences of patients were carefully documented and analysed. The patients were encouraged to wear earplugs and a blindfold, to assist them to focus on the drug effects. The sessions focused on enabling patients to revisit their formative experiences, reducing their defensiveness, and enhancing their emotional expression and self-evaluation. Much of the language used in the paper is now somewhat outdated, but the research remains relevant in many ways to current theories and practices used in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy today. The paper also gives a sense that one of Dr Whitaker’s motivations for his research was to find new tools for psychotherapy: “The main common feature in the literature is the repeated claim to results which seem spectacular, if not dubious, to anyone familiar with the difficulties and poor results usually associated with psychotherapeutic management of neurosis and character (personality) disorder” (Whitaker, 1974, p. 5).
The mixed results of Dr Whitaker's study were published in a second paper, “Lysergic acid diethylamide in psychotherapy. Part ii” in the Medical Journal of Australia on January 11, 1964, revealing significant insights. Significant methodological contrasts should be noted between Dr Whitaker’s therapeutic intervention and the now-broadly accepted “standard” approach to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which differ particularly in terms of set and setting, preparation and integration, the use of therapist dyads, and group versus individual therapy. Then, as now, not all patients benefited from LSD-assisted therapy—but those who did often experienced profound insights and improvements in their psychological conditions. The success of the treatment was particularly noted in patients who were able to engage deeply with the therapeutic process and establish a strong rapport with the therapist. Dr Whitaker reported that LSD could accelerate and enhance the psychotherapeutic process, but its effectiveness varied greatly among individuals. He concluded: “Psychotherapy with lysergic acid diethylamide has been shown to produce better results more quickly than equivalent psychotherapy without LSD” (1974, p. 41).
Techniques such as preparation, integration and harm reduction concepts such as “set and setting” are part of the standard approach to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAP) and are fundamental to the new training programs in Australia. PAP training emphasises creating a supportive environment where therapists guide patients in exploring and processing the emotions and memories that emerge during sessions. These experiences are then connected to and integrated with the patients' mental health and personal development, with the goal of enhancing the overall therapeutic impact.
1951 vial of LSD produced by Sandoz Laboratories, the employer of Albert Hofmann (origins.osu.edu)
Dr Whitaker’s study can also be critiqued on several fronts when evaluated by today’s standards. For example, the routine administration of barbiturates and antipsychotics to sedate patients and truncate their “trip”, was an approach that potentially cut them off from possible insights and valuable integration time. Furthermore, the patients treated in these early psychedelic therapy trials were selected within a social framework that largely no longer exists. The methodology of those early trials, and inclusion of patients with conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, would likely not be deemed appropriately safe for equivalent trials today. Safeguards for patients and outcomes are now better regulated, although there are still loopholes that can be exploited.
While Dr Whitaker conducted his study, he was a prominent figure in medicine, practising at the Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne, and lecturing at the University of Melbourne. However, shortly before his 1964 publications, he encountered Anne Hamilton-Byrne, possibly as a nurse working at Newhaven or through Dr Raynor Johnson. Around this time, the utilisation of LSD at Newhaven broadened significantly. Dr Whitaker began experimenting with LSD himself, discovering its profound effects firsthand. His practices soon began to blur the lines between medical use and psycho-spiritual exploration, as Anne Hamilton-Byrne's influence led him to employ LSD in ways that veered into manipulative and cult-like experimentation, pushing the boundaries of ethical medical practice. This set the stage for more than just a bad trip, leading to a web of brainwashing, control—and in some cases—trauma with long lasting repercussions.
Endnote: we welcome patients and researchers associated with early psychedelic research and therapy to share their experiences with Entheogenesis Australis - info@entheogenesis.org
Author: Jonathan Carmichael
Jonathan Carmichael is the co-founder, conference director, and President of Entheogenesis Australis (EGA), a charity dedicated to critical thinking and knowledge sharing about ethnobotanical plants, fungi, nature, and sustainability. He has been the driving force behind EGA for over two decades and is also a founding member of the charity Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine (PRISM). Additionally, Jonathan is a freelance photographer whose work has been featured in various exhibitions and publications. He is passionate about history and ethnobotanical activism, with a strong focus on social justice and environmental issues.
