While researching the drugs at St George's, Osmond noticed that they produced similar effects to schizophrenia and became convinced that the disease was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
In 1952, Osmond related the similarity of mescaline to adrenaline molecules, in a theory that implied that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by one's own body.
In 1953, Aldous Huxley was a renowned poet and playwright who, in his twenties, had gone on to achieve success and acclaim as a novelist and widely published essayist.
Instead, he re-experienced his everyday surroundings, describing his heightened 'objective' awareness of the folds in his trousers, the drapes in the room, artwork, a drugstore, and the look of the Hollywood Hills while under the influence of mescaline.
[10] He said the word meant "mind-manifesting" (from "mind", ψυχή (psyche), and "manifest", δήλος (delos)) and called it "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations."
Huxley had sent Osmond a rhyme containing his own suggested invented word: "To make this mundane world sublime, just half a gram of phanerothyme"[11] (θυμός (thymos) meaning 'spiritedness' in Ancient Greek.)
But with psychedelics' growing reputation for enabling spiritual insight, Bill W. hoped to recapture a mystical state of consciousness that he had experienced, years earlier, without a drug.
He reported details of the ceremony, the environment in which it took place, the peyote's effects, his hosts' courtesy, and his conjectures about the experience's meaning for them and for the Native American Church.
He had interpreted and described the peyote ceremony he had experienced, with its tepee setting and its particular social pattern, in terms that drew attention to its contrast with the psychiatric institutions of his day.
Osmond began a line of research into what he called "socio-architecture" to improve patient settings, coining the terms "sociofugal" and "sociopetal", starting Robert Sommer's career, and contributing to environmental psychology.
Later, Osmond became director of the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry at the New Jersey Neuro Psychiatric Institute (NJNPI) in Princeton, where he collaborated with Bernard Aaronson in hypnosis experiments.