Psychotomimetic means tending to produce symptoms like those of a psychosis. Dictionary.com defines it that way, gives LSD and mescaline as British-entry examples, and dates the word to 1955–60, from psychotic plus mimetic (Dictionary.com).
It reflects how researchers first approached these drugs. Historians write that LSD drew early interest because it seemed to produce a “model psychosis”, a temporary state that might shed light on schizophrenia (Dyck, 2005). Humphry Osmond’s 1957 paper was titled “A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents”, even as he proposed the gentler word psychedelic (Osmond, 1957).
The word has fallen out of favour for psilocybin and LSD in therapy research, where “psychedelic” is now standard, but it still appears in pharmacology, sometimes for other drug classes. Seeing it in an older paper is a clue to the paper’s assumptions: the drug was being studied as a way to imitate illness, not to treat it.
Sources
- Dictionary.com: psychotomimetic
- Dyck, 2005: Flashback, psychiatric experimentation with LSD
- Osmond, 1957, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Last checked .