Ayelet Waldman spent her life struggling with debilitating mood swings, anger and depression. Then she discovered LSD.

Waldman is no stranger to controversy. When her novel Love and Treasure was not included in the New York Times' 100 Notable Books list, she unleashed an attention-grabbing, obscenity-laden Twitter storm.

Ten years earlier she provoked outrage from mothers everywhere for confessing, in a now infamous column in the Times, that she loved her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, more than her children.

Sorry, this audio has expired Ayelet Waldman speaks to RN

So a month-long experiment microdosing an illicit psychedelic drug may not come, to some already appalled onlookers, as a surprise.

But how did this Harvard graduate, former public defender, law professor and mother of four find herself opening the small vial that arrived in her mailbox, placing two drops of LSD on her tongue and becoming a "self-study psychedelic researcher"?

Becoming a psychedelic explorer

For most of her life, Ayelet Waldman has been subject to fluctuating, unpredictable and at times debilitating moods. Following a particularly low ebb she contacted a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with bipolar II disorder.

Years later her diagnosis was revised; a second psychiatrist diagnosed her with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS, the symptoms of which would be familiar to many women.

She was able to stabilise her moods briefly, before the onset of perimenopause set in and things "took a turn for the worse". Despite years of psychotropic medications, Waldman found herself no closer to happiness.

Then she stumbled upon a book by psychologist and former psychedelic researcher, James Fadiman, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide.

The doses of LSD Fadiman advocates are "sub-perceptual", so small as to have no discernible sensory or hallucinogenic effect. As Waldman describes it, microdosing is "not so much going on an acid trip as going on an acid errand".

The promise of a really good day

Fadiman's research consists purely of anecdotal data, as no officially sanctioned study of microdosing has been conducted. This data shows that in the majority of cases, individuals reported better concentration, more stable moods and feeling "joy and gratitude".

Convinced by Fadiman's research, and seduced by the promise of a "really good day", Waldman enlisted herself as a "self-study psychedelic researcher".

This involved taking microdoses of LSD — a microdose being 10 micrograms or one tenth of the dose required to experience an altered state of consciousness — on repeating three-day cycles.

Ayelet Waldman took a microdose of LSD on a repeating three-day cycle. ( Flickr.com: syvwlch CC-BY-2.0 )

Microdosing has been reportedly taken up with some enthusiasm in Silicon Valley, but inside the academy, many researchers remain cautious.

Stephen Bright, a research fellow at the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University, warns that without randomised, controlled trials, it is hard to say what is happening inside the brain.

And there are plenty of risks involved. As well as the legal consequences of buying illicit drugs, Dr Bright says a lack of quality control and differing purity levels pose serious problems.

"Somebody might try microdosing LSD, thinking they're taking quite a small dose of it and ... turn up to the workplace tripping," he told ABC South West WA last year.

A month of relative peace

Despite living in Berkeley, sourcing LSD proved more difficult than Waldman anticipated. "I seem to know the only Burning Man attendees who don't do LSD," she jokes.

But finally she learned about a very old professor, a man who had been microdosing for decades. A week later, Waldman opened her letterbox and there, among the utility bills and the homeware catalogues, found a little brown package.

It was decorated with very old stamps, sent from "Lewis Carroll", and contained a small blue bottle.

On the first day after taking her first microdose, Waldman looked out the window and noticed a dogwood tree in bloom.

"That I stopped and I noticed that dogwood ... that was really remarkable." ( Flickr.com: Voldy Morton CC-BY-ND-2.0 )

"It was a beautiful tree and it was looking exceptionally beautiful," she says.

"I am not a stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of gal; I am a bullet-from-one-task-to-the-next kind of person. That I stopped and I noticed that dogwood, and that I appreciated it and that it gave me pleasure in a time when I had been so utterly anhedonic — that was really remarkable."

What followed was a month of relative peace: her mood stabilised, creativity flowed more freely, she had enormously productive days.

It wasn't "a wonderful month of joy and roses", she says, but it did stop her lowest moods.

From lawyer to criminal

Despite improvements in her mood, Waldman understood that LSD, even in microdoses, was illegal.

A former public defender and law professor, she is familiar with America's federal drug laws, which classify LSD as a Schedule I drug. That means it, like marijuana and heroin, is considered to have no medical use and carries the risk of significant harm.

That wasn't always the case. The drug, first synthesised by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman was trialled in a range of cases, from mental health professionals who studied its effects on their psychotic patients to investigations into its use as a treatment for alcoholism and addiction.

Albert Hofmann, who first synthesised LSD, cautioned against using the drug recreationally. ( Wikimedia Commons: Philip H. Bailey CC-BY-SA-2.5 )

The golden age of research into the therapeutic benefits of LSD came to an end, however, in the late 1960s when it became bound up the counter-cultural campaign of tune in, turn on, drop out.

"It became very threatening to the United States government that hippies would be protesting against the war [and] joining forces with African Americans in the civil rights movement," Waldman says.

"It felt to mainstream white America like a very dangerous time."

The criminalisation of LSD in the 1960s can be seen, then, as part of a conservative reaction to a movement that seemed to represent a profound threat to the social and political order.

The gift of insight (if not joy)

Waldman is also no stranger to the ways in which the criminalisation of drugs in America has been used to perpetuate a war on the poor and minorities.

Throughout her experiment, she understood that, despite its illegality, she was at little risk of prosecution, her race and her class offering her relative immunity.

It made her reflect on the "racism" of America's drugs laws — which, she argues, remain "the single most important driving factor in the ever-escalating incarceration of people of colour in the United States".

For Waldman, her own personal experience of family, marriage and mental illness is part of a much larger story about the neurochemistry of psychedelics, the history of psychedelics, and the history of the war on drugs.

Waldman is no longer microdosing, but the impact of her experiment has been enduring. While it began as a search for happiness, she came to realise that "happiness, though delightful, is not really the point".

"The microdosing lessened the force of the riptide of negative emotions that so often sweeps me away, and made room in my mind not necessarily for joy, but insight," she says.

"This, not the razzle-dazzle of pleasure, was its gift."