Louis Jolyon West

In 1999, West died at his home in Los Angeles at age 74. His family said the cause of death was metastatic cancer. However, West's son John would later assert in a 2009 memoir that he helped his father end his life at the latter's choice by using prescription medication due to the terminal illness.

According to West, Scientologists attempted to discredit him and get him fired, using methods similar to those used in Operation Freakout. This was allegedly done after his contributions to a 1980 textbook that classified Scientology as a cult.

During Patty Hearst's 1976 trial, West was appointed by the court in his capacity as a brainwashing expert and worked without fee. Believing that Hearst displayed all the classic signs of coercion, brainwashing, and the Stockholm effect, West wrote a newspaper article after the trial, asking President Carter to release Hearst from prison. Some weeks after her arrest, Hearst repudiated her SLA allegiance.

Following the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas in 1963, his assassin Jack Ruby was held in an isolation cell in police custody. West was appointed as Ruby's psychiatrist, and pronounced him psychotic and delusional, and suggested further interrogation under the influence of sodium pentathol and hypnosis.

One of the more unusual incidents in West's career took place in August 1962. He and two co-workers attempted to investigate the phenomenon of musth in elephants by dosing Tusko, a bull elephant at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, with LSD. They expected that the drug would trigger a state similar to musth; instead, the animal began to have seizures 5 minutes after LSD was administered. Beginning twenty minutes later, West and his colleagues administered the antipsychotic promazine hydrochloride; they injected a total of 2800 mg over 11 minutes. This large promazine dose was not effective and may have contributed to the animal's death. It died an hour and 40 minutes after the LSD was given. Later, many theories developed about why Tusko had died. Some researchers thought that West and his colleagues had made the mistake of scaling up the dose in proportion to the animal's body weight, rather than its brain weight, and without considering other factors, such as its metabolic rate. Another theory was that while the LSD had caused Tusko distress, the drugs administered in an attempt to revive him caused death. Attempting to prove that the LSD alone had not been the cause of death, Ronald K. Siegel of UCLA repeated a variant of West's experiment on two elephants; he administered to two elephants equivalent doses (in milligrams per kilogram) to that which had been given to Tusko, mixing the LSD in their drinking water rather than directly injecting it. Neither elephant expired or exhibited any great distress, although both behaved strangely for a number of hours.

West was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant father and a mother who taught piano. He grew up in poverty in Madison, Wisconsin. He subsequently attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a year and, after completing prerequisite coursework at the University of Iowa under the aegis of the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II, earned his M.D. from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1949. Thereafter, he completed his residency at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of Cornell University on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1952.

West was an officer in the United States Air Force Medical Service from 1948 to 1956, attaining the rank of major. While assigned to Lackland Air Force Base after his residency, he was appointed to a panel to discover why 36 of 59 airmen captured in the Korean War had confessed or cooperated in North Korean allegations of war crimes committed by the United States. Amid speculation that the airmen had been brainwashed or drugged, West came to a simpler conclusion: "What we found enabled us to rule out drugs, hypnosis or other mysterious trickery," he said. He observed that "[i]t was just one device used to confuse, bewilder and torment our men until they were ready to confess to anything. That device was prolonged, chronic loss of sleep." The airmen avoided being court-martialed for these events as a result of West's research.

Louis Jolyon West (October 6, 1924 – January 2, 1999) was an American psychiatrist involved in the public sphere. In 1954, at the age of 29 and with no previous tenure-track appointment, he became a full professor and chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. From 1969 to 1989, he served as chair of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.