More than 100 psychiatric patients at Worcester State Hospital were given LSD in the 1950s as part of federally funded experiments to study the drug's potential for understanding mental illness, according to state records released yesterday.

One study gave 40 patients, primarily schizophrenics, successively increasing doses of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, beginning at 50 micrograms and going as high as 300 micrograms, until a psychiatric change was noted.

In a related study, the reactions of 18 schizophrenic patients and 18 normal subjects were compared, with each subject drinking water alone one day, and LSD in solution the next day.

Still another Worcester State study, looking at the resistance of schizophrenic patients to LSD, included a total of 73 patients over a few years. A fourth study compared pupil dilation in response to LSD in 10 schizophrenics and nine normal subjects, including scientific staff and maintenance personnel from the hospital or the nearby Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology.

The hospital received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health for some of the studies, according to the hospital's 1958 annual research report.

"There was this theory that if you give schizophrenic people LSD, that would have a paradoxical effect and take away the craziness, the psychotic symptoms," Dr. Annette Hanson, deputy commissioner of the Department of Mental Health, said in an interview responding to the records released yesterday. "It didn't, and they stopped using that."

The Department of Mental Health released the research records in response to media inquiries into experiments at state institutions, prompted by the recently publicized nutrition studies using radioactive tracers at Waltham's Fernald State School in the 1940s and 1950s.

The report on Worcester State's studies follow the report last month of LSD experiments done in the 1950s at what is now known as the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.

The records released yesterday included nurses' handwritten notes on patients' response to LSD, as well as US documents outlining the federal funding for LSD experiments that the state requested from the National Institute of Mental Health.