The Weyburn Mental Hospital, also called the Saskatchewan Hospital at Weyburn, was a provincial psychiatric hospital in southern Saskatchewan. A 2025 architecture article says it was the largest building in the British Commonwealth when it opened in 1921, with long, crowded corridors (Canadian Architect, 2025). Historians Erika Dyck and Patrick Farrell call it one of the most notorious mental hospitals in North America (Dyck and Farrell).
Humphry Osmond moved there from England in 1951 (BMJ, 2004) and ran clinical research for about a decade (Lett and Dyck, 2023). Many of its patients had alcoholism that other treatments had not helped, and Osmond and Abram Hoffer tested LSD on them (BMJ, 2004). Dyck writes that “psychedelic” entered English in 1957 from a Saskatchewan asylum superintendent (Dyck, 2009).
The hospital also shaped new building design. The architect Kiyoshi Izumi took LSD under Osmond and Hoffer’s supervision to understand patients’ experience of space, and the Yorkton Psychiatric Centre, finished in 1964, was planned as its opposite (Canadian Architect, 2025). The research used LSD and mescaline, not psilocybin.
Sources
- Canadian Architect, 2025: Yorkton Psychiatric Centre
- Dyck and Farrell: Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley
- Humphry Osmond obituary, BMJ, 2004
- Dyck, 2009, Health & Place
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