Mike Jay
British writer and cultural historian focusing on the history of drugs, psychiatry, and the mind; author of works such as High Society and Mescaline, a regular contributor to major publications, and a curator associated with the Wellcome Collection.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
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1. Psychonauts
Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
A sweeping cultural history tracing how self-experimenters—scientists, physicians, writers, and artists—used psychoactive drugs to probe consciousness from the 19th century to today, and how their insights reshaped psychology, psychiatry, and modern ideas of the self. Moving from early anesthetics and hashish salons through cocaine’s vogue and the rise, fall, and revival of psychedelics, it profiles charismatic explorers and the institutions that alternately embraced and suppressed their findings, revealing how intoxication has repeatedly expanded—and unsettled—the boundaries of mind and medicine.
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