In this, he hoped to establish a suitable method to reinstate a form of justice in Germany that could prevent its society from recreating the attitudes that led it from the Great War to World War II. Alison Steel says her mother was never the same after undergoing. When it came time to evaluate Nazi leaders ahead of the Nuremberg Trials, he was one of a group of internationally renowned mental health professionals who were sent to decide just what was going on in the heads of some of the worst war criminals the world had ever seen. And one of these risks was the treatment that he was using. . You can see out a window. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron did experiments so horrifying he's been called "Scotland's Mengele." Here's why MKUltra's top brainwashing scientist was a nightmare. ", "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,". Heads up that some elements (i.e. Despite the horrific abuse, the American and Canadian psychiatric establishment closed ranks. Amory: They bounced around between foster homes and orphanages for years, experienced emotional and physical abuse. [28] His work was inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also involved with the intelligence services and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage. Heres part of Duncans transcript: Duncan (from the transcript): I recall contacting the American Psychiatric Association and asking them if they would have an interest in holding his papers in their archives, and they expressed an interest in doing it. It petered out in the early 60s as the programs director, Sidney Gottlieb, came to a realization. Even as he wrote about Cameron's "warmth [which was] never allowed to appear as intimacy," he wrote about a pretty big blind spot: Cameron had apparently hired a few assistants with "psychopathic personalities.". We encourage you to research and examine these records . . He theorized that attitudes and beliefs should reinforce the overall attitudes of the desired society. Do you remember that? To prevent this, the West would have to take measures to reorganize German society. Ben: Im Ben Brock Johnson, and youre listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. Jean Steel was another one of Cameron's patients, and like the others she didn't sign up to be a part of MKUltra, depatterning, or psychic driving at all. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method. It was reported that none of the patients sent to the Radio Telemetry Lab showed any signs of improvement. Amory: Marians mom died three ago. Duncan Cameron: No. With the results of the Manhattan project, Cameron feared that without proper re-organization of society, atomic weapons could fall into the hands of new, fearsome aggressors. The program is widely believed to have been partly funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency as part of their top-secret MKULTRA program. And in a lot of ways, modern psychiatry has completely left behind the man who once dominated its ranks. Amory: You're welcome to pull it out now. It is true. The guilt of her baby's deadly staph infection stayed with her, and when she became pregnant with her second, and the CBC says she went into Cameron's care in February of 1960. For Cameron, the traits were contagions and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. According to The Washington Post, Cameron was recruited in 1957, and he was a big deal. Stephen Kinzer: In the end, Gottlieb was forced to conclude that there's no such thing as mind control and that everything he had done had been for naught. Tell us about your reaction to this episode or send us a story idea. They also asked him for clarification about what happened to his father's personal papers and patient records, and he replied, "Well, I didn't destroy the documents. The legacy can be seen in the torture techniques employed in Northern Ireland and in Guantanamo Bay. And here I am looking much younger than I am now. The manual got updated in 1980, but the techniques that have come about including things like waterboarding and restraint in a "coffin-like wooden box" still harken back to that original research. Donald Hebb the psychiatrist who started the whole mess with his sensory deprivation experiments had even less kind things to say: "Cameron was irresponsible criminally stupid. Those were right out. Or do you remember any of --. Peterborough County. And he was always very fascinated by what the future held for us all. The insecure man "They are the driven crowds that makes the army of the authoritarian overlord; they are the stuffing of conservatism mediocrity is their god. Allan Cameron. Thus, this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease. This must be very difficult, very complicated for them. [15], Before his arrival in Nuremberg, Cameron had written The Social Reorganization of Germany, in which he argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized. Because it would seem to me, or I was concerned as a lawyer, that it might be a breach of the patient-doctor privilege. Memories are not the most reliable form of evidence. His response? She very slowly recovered mostly and died in 2017. Ben: Perhapsthis is Dr. Cameron's most enduring legacy. Ben: The study also said that these treatments, the de-patterning and psychic driving programs including LSD injections, induced comas, sensory deprivation and electroshock had a detrimental impact on patients memories, which, in retrospect, might have been part of the point. His list of credentials was so long it's impossible to list them all, but for starters, his resume included the University of Glasgow and Johns Hopkins, and in the 1930s, he was lauded for setting up a series of psychiatric clinics. Toby Ziegler:In the '50s, it was the CIA mind control research program begun in response to the Chinese attempt on U.S. prisoners. He wanted to know if it was possible to wipe a person's mind and reinstall a new personality. Amory: The study, which was published a few months before Cameron died, found that Camerons methods exposed his patients to unnecessary risk, and that there was no clinical proof his methods were any more effective than standard forms of treatment. He has an open, amused look on his face. The behaviour of a mental patient could resemble the behaviour of a patient with, for example, syphilis, and then a somatic cause could be deduced for a psychological illness. Duncan: I started work at the State Department just a day or so before Kennedy was assassinated. Rauh: So any documents that would show the treatment of the plaintiffs in this case were destroyed? Ben: When Amory and I spoke to Duncan Cameron about his dad, he also told us about his own work, as a lawyer. Ben: But, as human experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute, and MK-ULTRAs mind control efforts, fade into history, reduced to references in tv shows and video game plot points, there are troubling examples of these techniques still in use today. And people talk about the transmission of trauma through generations. What Hebb and Cameron both have in common is their contribution in establishing the scientific foundation for CIAs two-stage psychological torture method. About 55 families of victims who underwent medical experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s are suing for millions of dollars. There must have been names of patients. And when you get up to the top, its completely wooded, so theres no panoramic view after all the hard climbing. When asked about the decision to involve Cameron in MK-ULTRA, John Gittinger, the CIA officer in charge of monitoring his work said, quote, Now that was a foolish mistake. My recollection was that I wasn't able to provide him with much information that he didn't already have. According to The Guardian, it started with playing tapes designed to tap into the reason the patient sought help in the first place. While he didn't name names or give specifics, he did say that papers "related to patients were destroyed.". Cameron further argued that "the weak" must not influence children. He did and he got it. Though he does seem to imply that it was done by him or someone in the family. He also organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the province, establishing 10 functioning clinics; this model was used as the blueprint for similar efforts in Montreal and a forerunner of 1960s community health models. The work of Dr. Ewen Cameron may have been discredited by mainstream psychiatry, but that doesn't mean it went away completely. He had patients. That was the case for people like Phyllis Goldberg. And then she came back from Montreal and she was never the same. You can see other fellow humans. They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. He never got one. Her life was sad. Duncan: This is at the Lake Placid Club in Lake Placid, New York. Agnes was born in 1844, in Richmond Victoria Australia. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.. He published a book called Remembering[18] and extended psychiatric links to human biology. By that time, information on Cameron's sleep room projects was coming out, and there were all kinds of people who were very quick to distance themselves from it. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? And the funeral was yet another opportunity for Marian and her siblings to learn more about the mother who had been absent for so much of their childhoods. And these are pictures of him, these are both in the Adirondack Mountains. It was a heart attack and was very sudden. In his analysis, culture and society played a crucial role in the ability for one to function according to the demands necessary for human survival. Did he ever talk about that? I'm sure that they loved him very much and knew him in a very different way. Jean spent three months under Cameron's care, and spent two periods in a drug-induced coma. Canada. She had no idea how to boil water, much less care for a child. She was a former captain of the Scottish field hockey team, a competitive tennis player,[11] and lecturer in mathematics at the University of Glasgow. Donald Hebb and Ewen Cameron were competitors; they did not collaborate, though Cameron incorporated Hebb's sensory isolation techniques into his own diabolical arsenal of psychiatry's instruments of torture. For example, something like rock music could be created by mentally ill people and would produce mentally ill people through infection, which in turn would be transmitted to the genes. ", So, they went back to a 1983 court transcript, where Duncan was called to the stand to testify about what happened to his father's documents. That was just something we wanted to get clarification on. And so even all these years later, it's part of my life. [citation needed]. John Marks: The Allan Memorial Institute under Cleghorn commissioned a study of his work, which is absolutely or almost absolutely unprecedented in the psychiatric field. Hij is getrouwd met (Niet openbaar), ze kregen 1 kind. She wasn't able to joke and laugh She would blurt out something like: 'We must do the right thing!'" Ben: Camerons research could never happen today at least not lawfully. So you can see that the work of Ewen Cameron, filtered through Gottlieb, definitely informs the interrogation techniques, if we want to call them that, that the United States has been using on its prisoners in Guantanamo and in black sites around the world. Our username is. Indian River. It describes various personalities that he believed were of marked danger to all members of society. You can buy the full book for only . Sarah Anne Johnson: I imagine this is very difficult for his family. She was left with permanent impairments: She was unable to recognize faces, had impaired spatial recognition, and lost a good portion of her memory. I then *went through* the papers, because I felt that it would be improper to leave in the papers any paper that identified patients. She never did get her children back. Duncan: Not really, I certainly don't know anything about the treatments he was using, I didnt know anything about that. He commuted from Lake Placid, New York to Montreal every week to work at McGill's Allan Memorial Institute and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKUltra experiments there, known as the Montreal experiments. In addition to LSD, he experimented with various paralytic drugs such as curare and electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression; many were permanently debilitated after these treatments. 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