My generation are widely described as the most depressed in history. Signs of an acute mental-health crisis are visible everywhere.

Having written my undergraduate dissertation on how LSD, which was once viewed as a groundbreaking mental health treatment, became a scorned psychedelic, I kept coming back to one question: have we been sitting on a potential solution for nearly a century? And, if so, would this mental-health crisis look different today had we embraced the therapeutic potential of psychedelics like LSD?

While hallucinogenic substances like mushrooms and LSD were pushed to the margins for decades, the tide is finally starting to turn. Momentum is building as funding for research on psychedelics grow, with recent trials showing LSD’s ability to reduce anxiety, improve symptoms of depression by up to 72.5% and even help treat Alcohol Use Disorder – with one trial reporting 83% of participants no longer met AUD criteria after psychedelic use.

It’s important to say, more research is needed as the studies remain preliminary with small sample sizes. But, when evidence shows this much promise, it’s hard not to ask why this research was pushed aside for so long. Here we must consider how the cultural revolution and social turbulence surrounding psychedelics in the 1960s shaped their medical trajectories. If that cultural moment hadn’t drowned out earlier scientific research, would LSD and other psychedelics be prescribed today in the same way drugs like Prozac and Lexapro are?

So, what is LSD and what does it do to our brain?

First synthesised in 1938 by Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz research labs in Basel, LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) was discovered while developing new treatments for migraines. It wasn’t until 1943 that Hofmann accidentally ingested “five times the average effective dose of LSD” and experienced intense hallucinations during his cycle ride home. Indeed, the drug is astonishingly potent – measured in micrograms rather than milligrams. The visions and altered perceptions Hofmann experienced resulted from LSD acting on the brains 5-HT2A receptor, increasing thalamocortical connectivity. Here, scientists compare what happens in the brain to a skiing analogy. Without psychedelics we tend to ski down the same slopes repeatedly, getting stuck in a rut of depressive or anxious thought. Taking psychedelics is like stepping off-piste – it gives us a chance to see the mountain from a new perspective and explore alternative routes.

Struck by LSD’s intense potency and mind-bending effects, in 1948 Hofmann and Sandoz pushed it onto the international scientific stage. Thousands of studies were conducted exploring LSD as a treatment for mental-health and addiction disorders, producing promising early results, and by the late 1950s, LSD was known as a “miracle cure for alcoholism.” The possibility that LSD might be a cure for mental illness and addiction initially “generated unparalleled political support”.

But why didn’t this “miracle drug” become what its creators hoped?

In the public imagination, LSD’s clinical beginnings were soon replaced by an association with an emerging radical youth. The 1960s were a period of profound social upheaval. Post-war conservatism was cracking, and young people – energised by a growing culture of protest, deepening distrust in authority during the Vietnam War, new reproductive freedoms, and a rising demand for civil rights – were ready to push hard against the old order. Out of this friction came a kind of utopian counterculture, proudly anti-establishment and hungry for new ways of seeing the world. It was in this zeitgeist that LSD’s offering of an alternative worldview was warmly embraced.

Those living in the world’s psychedelic epicentre in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district quickly became the media’s eye candy. Free ‘acid tests’ drew thousands of people across the Bay Area to ‘freak freely’ and experience the drug’s mind-expanding effects. Disgraced Harvard professor Timothy Leary spread his mantra, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” urging Americans to escape the establishment’s reality in a single trip. Those in power panicked, with President Nixon labelling Leary “the most dangerous man in America,” seeing him as a threat national productivity.

This visibility of this countercultural movement reshaped how the drug was portrayed. Warnings about the dangers of LSD were front page of the news. Stories of bad trips and misleading ‘evidence’ of chromosomal damage, foetal abnormalities and potential memory impairment came to dominate the media. Between 1962 and 1963 nearly every important American magazine had printed a major article about LSD. This reached a peak in the 1967 Summer of Love when people flocked to Haight-Ashbury searching for life-changing meaning, only to encounter dangerous substances like heroin and speed.

The widespread moral panic that followed pushed the U.S. government to criminalise LSD and its research in 1968. The most devastating setback to LSD research however, came with the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which classified LSD as a Schedule I drug – “with high potential for abuse” and no accepted medical use – bringing an end to around 60 active studies across the U.S.

While some clinical trials persisted after LSD’s criminalisation, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that research regained momentum. What’s more, despite this revival unfolding in a markedly different scientific context, LSD’s strong ties with the 1960s counterculture meant researchers “avoided LSD in the early days of the psychedelic revival,” and its rehabilitation has instead ridden on the growing legitimacy of less-stigmatised substances like psilocybin.

Whilst it is encouraging to see LSD being taken more seriously in scientific circles, this revival also makes the cost of decades of stalled research feel even more stark. LSD’s journey from a promising psychiatric tool to a countercultural taboo reveals just how profoundly public imagination can reshape a drug’s medical fate. If we are serious about addressing this mental health crisis, we cannot afford to let stigma or historical baggage continue to dictate the boundaries of scientific inquiry.

With substances like ketamine and MDMA now undergoing clinical trials for a range of mental-health disorders, the broader need to dismantle entrenched stigma around drugs with recreational associations becomes even clearer. Today’s psychedelic renaissance demands a more measured path – but it also demands political, social and institutional support – that sees beyond the manufactured stigma of the sixties.