Louis Jolyon West

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Louis Jolyon West bigraphy, stories - American psychiatrist

Louis Jolyon West : biography

1924 – 02 January 1999

Louis Jolyon ("Jolly") West (October 6, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York – January 2, 1999 in Los Angeles) was an American psychiatrist and expert on brainwashing, mind control, torture, substance abuse, post traumatic stress disorder and violence.

Civil rights activist

West was also a civil rights activist. He was the first white psychiatrist who testified for black prisoners in South Africa during the attempt to end apartheid. He was a member of the White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966.

Early life

Louis "Jolly" West was born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian immigrant father, Albert Jerome West, and a piano teacher from Brooklyn, Anna Rosenberg, and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. His family was poor, but he was determined to get a good education. Shortly after he had entered University of Wisconsin–Madison, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the Army Specialized Training Program he studied at the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1948.

Career

While West was on his internship at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, he discussed with J.A. Winter the recently published book Dianetics and concluded that the "auditing" described in Hubbard’s book used hypnosis. Winter introduced West to Hubbard on one occasion but West said: "I guess I didn’t find the man very memorable. I was more interested in the book which described the auditing technique in which they had preclears—or prereleases if just beginners—count backwards from seven to zero repeatedly until they went into a trance, although Hubbard denied it was hypnosis." West followed the activities of Scientology from that time on and has openly said and written that he thought the organization dangerous.

He transferred to the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps, and five years later he was appointed Chief of Psychiatry Service at the Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. In this position he studied U.S. pilots and veterans after they had experienced torture and brainwashing and been forced to give false confessions as prisoners in the Korean War. He was ever since interested in the subject of brainwashing. He served as an expert witness in the case of Patricia Hearst.

One of the more unusual incidents of West’s career came in August 1962, when he and two co-workers attempted to investigate the phenomenon of musth by dosing Tusko, a bull elephant at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, with LSD. They expected that the drug would trigger a state similar to musth; instead, the animal began to have seizures 5 minutes after LSD administration. Beginning twenty minutes after the LSD, West and his colleagues decided to administer the antipsychotic promazine hydrochloride and a total of 2800 mg was injected over 11 minutes. This large promazine dose was not effective and may even have contributed to the animal’s death, which occurred an hour and 40 minutes after the LSD was given.West, L.J., Pierce, C.M., & Thomas, W.D. (1962). Science 138: 1100-1103 Later, many had theories about why Tusko had died. One prominent theory was that West and his colleagues had made the mistake of scaling up the dose in proportion to the animal’s body weight, rather than its brain weight, and without considering other factors, such as its metabolic rate.Harwood, P.D. (1963) Therapeutic dosage in small and large mammals. Science 139: 684-685Schmidt-Nielsen, K. (1972) How Animals Work. pp.86-89. Cambridge University Press Another theory was that while the LSD had caused Tusko distress, it was the drugs administered in an attempt to revive him that actually caused death. Attempting to prove that the LSD alone had not been the cause of death, Ronald K. Siegel of UCLA repeated a variant of West’s experiment on two elephants; he administered to two elephants equivalent doses (in milligrams per kilogram) to that which had been given to Tusko, mixing the LSD in their drinking water rather than directly injecting it as had been done with Tusko. Neither elephant expired or exhibited any great distress, although both behaved strangely for a number of hours.Siegel RK. "LSD-induced effects in elephants: Comparisons with musth behavior." Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society. 1984;22(1):53-56.