Current Day Auto-Experimentation of Psychotropic Medications by French Psychiatrists

ABSTRACT

Auto-experimentation is a relatively unknown practice, albeit central to the history of medical discoveries. Outside of the context of research, auto-experimentation with psychotropic medications by psychiatrists currently persists in an informal manner. However, this contemporary practice has never been studied so far. This study was conducted by distributing an electronic questionnaire to French hospital-based psychiatrists and residents of psychiatry in the summer of 2016. Lifetime prevalence of taking psychotropic medications and the context of this ingestion were questioned: “therapeutic”, “auto-therapeutic”, “research protocol”, “auto-experimentation/curiosity”, “recreation” or “other”. We only studied “auto-experimentation/curiosity” in this article. Participants were also asked their age and gender. Seven hundred and sixty-four participants were included. 15.1% of participants declared having already taken psychotropic medication at least once in the context of “auto-experimentation/curiosity”. We found that those who reported taking medication for “auto-experimentation/curiosity” had a significant association with being male (p < .001) but no relationship to age. This practice highlights and questions psychiatry’s relationship with formal and informal knowledge, the importance of the subjectivity of each professional in psychiatry and the epistemological foundations of our discipline. The strong ambivalence of the medical field toward this relatively taboo practice deserves further exploration.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoexperimentation
• psychotropic drugs
• history of medicine
• psychiatrists
• knowledge
• self-experiment
• epistemology

Disclosure statement

The author discloses no conflicts of interest. No drug manufacturing company was involved in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, writing of the report, or in the decision to submit the report for publication.