Endless Thread - Bonus: Making 'Madness'

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

"Madness," our 5-part series about the history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments, involved a lot of research and a lot of interviews -- most of which you heard excerpts from in the series, but some of which… you didn’t. Or, at least, not everything we wanted to share. In this bonus episode, we play highlights from the cutting room floor, answer listener questions, and share more about the making of this series. If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 5 of "Madness" you should listen to those episodes first. *** You can make a donation to Endless Thread and WBUR at the link below. All monthly contributors will continue receiving special Endless Thread bonus material: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/trustees-of-boston-university/endless-thread-madness-fundraiser

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. As we mentioned last week, we're working on upcoming episodes that address the protests we're seeing around the world, and the racism, police brutality, and killings that sparked them. We still want to hear from you. What are you seeing and hearing and experiencing right now? What conversations are you having with friends and family members or anyone else?

online or in real life. Record a voice memo on your phone and email it to endless thread at wbUR.org. Thank you. We'll have that for you soon. And in the meantime, we're going to take you behind the scenes of our recent special series. Here's the show. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. Ben.

Amory. Endless thread producer Josh. Hello. The gang's all here for a bonus episode to our first. five-part series, Madness, the secret mission for mind control and the people who paid the price. Which, if you haven't heard all five parts of yet, pause, go back, listen to those and catch up with us later. We will be here waiting. I mean, we won't actually wait for you. We're going to keep going now, but you're picking up what we're putting down. You get it. Yeah, and if you are up to

speed, congratulations and thank you for listening. This series involved a lot of research and a lot of Most of which you heard excerpts from in the series, but some of which you didn't, or at least not everything we wanted to share. Every episode we make has material that doesn't get used because it just doesn't quite fit for one reason or another. So this is an opportunity for us to play some highlights from the cutting room floor to answer some of your questions and to share more about the making of the series. And this episode isn't everything we want to share.

We're going to be releasing even more bonus material. to everyone who becomes a monthly supporter of the show. So chip in a few bucks every month to keep the show going, and you'll get extra special bonus Endless Thread episode goodies. There's info on how to get in on that in the show notes, and it's at the top of our homepage, wbUR.org slash endless thread. And this is kind of a new experiment for us, and we're super excited to get your help in raising money

to keep the show in your feed and give you something back for your generosity and awesomeness. So thank you for considering. And everybody ready? Yep. Yehaw. Ben, do you want to start us off with something you loved that didn't make it into the series? Sure.

It's one of our adventures that we didn't really get to tell you about. Hi. You were told to go up to the ninth floor. We're seeing Ginny. So we went to visit the American Psychiatric Association Archives in Washington, D.C., more specifically. Emery, what's it called? the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, Melvin Sapshin, M.D. Library and Archives. Yeah, and we promised we would say the full name so that they would let us in the building, right?

Not exactly, but something like that. Yeah, we said we would do it. So there it is. Whatever the case. It was worth it, though, because they have the largest collection of personal notes and papers from Dr. Ewan Cameron, the psychiatrist at the center of a scandal involving the American and Canadian governments, McGill University and the Allen Memorial Institute of Montreal, also the CIA. Anyone who wants to know everything there is to know about Dr. Cameron's ideas and his approach to treating mental illness comes here. All right. File three. Is that what you want to start with? Folder three. Speeches and articles.

Speeches and articles, 1930 to 1967. I think I was driving you a little bit crazy, Amory, maybe, like even more than usual. You know. Like you do, yes. You're making me very nervous. Hey, just relax. You're making me nervous. No, because you're bending.

You're like crinkled the page a little bit. Do you just absolutely love it when I tell you to relax? Is that like one of your favorite things? Serenity now, Ben. Serenity now. All right. Luckily, Emery had to head to another interview. So despite maybe deserving it, I did not get smacked and was allowed to stay at the archives for a few hours.

taking photos and reading through documents, thousands of pages worth. It's kind of amazing to look at this stuff. Dr. Cameron's treasure trove of notes, long, meandering dictations, taken by secretary, speeches, revisions of speeches, observations about patients, ideas about inventions,

there are weird diagrams with stick figures in here. This has all informed the books and papers that have been written about Dr. Cameron. All of these papers that he's written and all of these notes and these observations. And I don't know, it just kind of flies off the page. Like, he seems clearly brilliant. But it also feels like almost he's like insatiable.

We quoted from these documents in our series, in part because this archive is practically everything Cameron's ever put onto paper, but not quite everything. Yeah, so while I was going through this stuff, something weird happened. I pulled out a folder looking for a specific set of documents detailing Cameron's procedures, his, quote, depattering treatment meant to help wipe the brain clean. And it wasn't there. So I called up Josh.

Can you describe what I just sent to you? I just, it strikes me as weird that it would be listed in the archive, but not in the archive? And Josh, I feel like we never really got an answer to this question, right? Like why it was missing? Nope. Yeah, it might have just gone missing. It might have been purposefully removed. We don't really know.

Something that was in the archives really crystallized a piece of our story. And that piece of our story was around this idea in these anecdotal reports from Cameron's son, Duncan, and also some of his former colleagues, this idea that he loved science fiction and actually based some of his treatments on sci-fi. So in the archives, I came across this speech, or maybe it was an article he wrote, it was hard to tell, from 1946. It's written by Cameron for the Canadian Industrial Editors Association, and it's about what Cameron calls fantasy thinking. So Cameron's argument in this paper seems to be to not underestimate the power of fantasy and fictional storylines as personality motivators. and I'll just read you a quote from this article or speech, not sure which it is, but this thing he wrote. Our fantasy thinking, whether it is our very own

or whether it is something dreamed up for us at a cost of 47 cents at the movies, provides us with someone or something with which we can identify ourselves, which will make us bigger, stronger, more successful, and more serene. It would be a mistake, however, to consider that this fantasy thinking was only pleasure giving.

It also quite clearly reinforces motives. And what's fascinating to me is that over and over, we see examples of Dr. U. and Cameron being kind of a shrewd observer of some aspects of human behavior. And yet at the same time, he's known for using this fantasy thinking in his own life, like for informing pretty problematic treatments in pursuit of success. So it's just, I don't know, it's just interesting to see,

see his writing about this idea and to know that in a way he was also motivated by fantasy and maybe in ways that he didn't realize were problematic. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. It's like, if you can dream it, you can build it. And if you haven't dreamed it yet, you're not going to build it. I thought it was if you can dream it, you can do it. Well. And if you build it, they will come.

Okay, we have a listener question. This is from Luke from Chicago, Illinois. He asks, How has investigating MK Ultra affected you all? Did it change how you think about some stuff, like the government, psychology, whatever? Anything you just look at differently after this experience? Hmm.

I think for me, what was really shocking was just the amount of, like, human experimentation and really what all of us think of is, like, really terrible behavior of Nazis and fascists and these people who we were fighting in World War II, how much of that got incorporated into our own arsenal as a country when fighting the Cold War or trying to prepare to fight the Cold War. And also, I just, I kept wondering over and over, well, if this was like 50, 60 years ago, and the CIA was doing this kind of thing.

In some ways, the world seems just as scary now. And so how is that fear motivating what the CIA and other sort of secretive government institutions are doing now in the name of protecting the U.S. from foreign influence? And I don't know the answer to that, but it seems. kind of scary to think about. Yeah, this is tricky because when you're covering a story that has to do with secret government dealings and that feels kind of conspiratorial in nature, it's easy to go further down that path and to question whether you can trust any government organization. And I asked Jim Turner about this. He was one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs in Orlico v. United States back in the 1980s.

And he said, the CIA is not a boogeyman. It's not monolithic. He said there are a lot of good people within the agency. And I think that's probably very true. But I also just want to say, and especially in this moment, the government works for us. Law enforcement works for us. And we have a right to ask questions. We deserve answers.

And if you're harmed as a result of something the government or, you know, some other public servant has done or funded, you have a right to justice. So, if anything, I'm probably more determined than ever to keep asking questions and to keep demanding answers and action. Um, on a maybe more positive note, I'm glad that society seems to be moving in the right direction in terms of bringing mental illness out of the shadows. We still have a long to go, of course. But I think the fact that you hear more and more public figures talk about their own struggles with things like depression and anxiety and talking openly about having a therapist, I think that that makes it harder to kind of other and to hide away people with mental illness

the way that many of Dr. Cameron's patients were. Yeah, I think my biggest takeaway is just, it's almost similar to yours, Amory, except with the less positive takeaway, which is just that MK Ultra was such a huge program. Really, it was 149 different subprojects, and it took decades to kind of piece together the extent of everything that happened. And there's a lot that we'll probably never know.

And so the extent of the damage that was done also will probably never fully understand. And just getting to hear from some of Cameron's victims and families of victims who didn't even know they were a part of these experiments, MK Ultra-funded experiments or CIA-funded experiments for so long, it's disheartening to me to kind of come to terms with the fact that there may never be a satisfying resolution for so many families. Okay, Amory, are you ready to give us your entry for madness bonus material?

Yes. So speaking of the effect that working on something like this can have on us, I talked about this with Anne Collins, who we all heard from in part two of the series. She spent years researching Dr. Cameron for her book in the sleep room. And she told me that she started to have this recurring dream about Cameron. And every time I dreamed of him, he would always just walk out the room before I got up, caught up to him. So to say I was obsessed for a while about why all this happened is very accurate. If you could have ever reached Dr. Cameron in that dream, what would you have asked him? I think I just wanted to look him in the eye.

And I think what I mostly wanted to know was was he aware of the damage he was causing. Had it been worth it to him, what did he think a doctor was supposed to do? And of course I would have wanted to ask him, was he witting? Did he know? Did he know that his research was being funneled back to the CIA for nefarious ends? So we ask in the series why Cameron was doing these experimental, you know, so-called treatments. And that's obviously an important question. But this last question from Anne, I think is a big piece of that.

Because if Cameron truly didn't know that he was getting money from the CIA because they wanted to apply. his work to their own mind control efforts, then it's easier to believe that he was really trying to help these people. And he was still doing so recklessly and dangerously and without their consent. But maybe not for the benefit of the CIA. Maybe. So we asked Cameron's son, Duncan, about what it was like to find out that the CIA had supported his father's work. Well, I'm a great surprise. Certainly another reaction I had was that my father had only knowing that he would never have never have taken money from them. Meaning that the organization that he was receiving money from was coming from the CIA.

CIA, yes. Yeah. Why do you think you would have taken issue with that? Well, he would have. he would not have wanted to be part of anything like that, nothing like that. Because he maybe wouldn't have felt good about the way that the CIA conducted itself in trying to fight the Cold War, or what do you mean? I don't think he would have wanted to be part of a program which was doing research for the CIA.

So that's Duncan's belief. And a lot of people feel differently, but that's just one of those things that we're probably never going to know definitively. Right. So I guess we can't answer that question, but we will answer more of your questions, dear listeners, in a minute.

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Hit me. This is from Casey in Boston. Casey writes, Have there been any insiders, doctors, nurses, that have come out to say that they knew what was going on at the time? Did anyone try to come forward while this abuse was happening? Casey, who is an endless thread super fan, I believe, we love you. Thank you for sending us a question. I think a lot of his colleagues, you know, as with all of these things, after the fact,

when everybody realizes that something bad was going on, a bunch of people who were present for it or witness to it or like, oh yeah, I was there, it was terrible. Whereas at the time, they might not have spoken up as much. Yeah, in Ann Collins's book, she interviewed a nurse. And this nurse worked pretty closely with Dr. Cameron. And she said that, you know, the messaging from Dr. Cameron at the time was that they were helping people that were beyond help or who had, you know, tried to be treated at another facility and nothing was working for them and they at the Allen Memorial Institute were these people's last resort. And so this nurse told Anne Collins that, you know, yes, were the treatments extreme? Yes. But they thought that they were doing the cutting edge work that was going

to help people that seemed otherwise unhelpable. And so it's hard to, it's much harder to question the methods when you think that you are a person's only hope. But we also, in talking to Jeff Orrinstein, who is one of the attorneys representing the SAGA plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, when I was talking to him about gathering evidence for the case, he piped up at one point and said this. I forgot to mention when you were asking things we're doing, we're actually looking right now at witnesses, people that worked at the hospital, for example, people that were patients at the hospital and we're looking to interview them and put them on video now because, as you correctly state, they're not so young anymore. Some of them have already died. And so we're actually looking

to preserve evidence as well. Jeff, did you say that there are people who used to work at the hospital or who worked there during the time that Dr. Cameron was there that you've found and are able to talk to about their experience working for him and what was being done there? The answer is, Yes, but I don't want to go into more details at this time now. Okay. Because that is one of the things that we have not been able to find. I haven't been able to find anyone who is around still, who is there at the time and can speak to any of that. So let me interview them first, and then I will be happy to give you the information.

So you can hear Jeff Orrinstein and Andrea Grass there before he answers me at first, kind of whispering to each other. I don't know if they were trying to figure out how much to tell me, but I will be following up with them and trying to stay on top of their evidence gathering process to see if we can also talk to some of these people. So if we do reach former Allen employees and colleagues of Dr. Cameron's, we will definitely let you know. Okay, so I think we're going to end on the question that we've gotten the most during the series, which is, of course, where did the idea of this series come from?

Josh? All roads lead to Reddit, of course. But it really started with a guy named Stephen Barnes. His grandmother was one of Cameron's patients. History can have a tendency to repeat itself, and Ewing Cameron's story is one that is unfortunately not talked about as much as it should be. Like so many other people we spoke to,

Stephen's grandmother went into the Allen with postpartum depression, and she left with chronic mental illness. She wasn't unable to recognize her own husband and her own children. So Stephen's whole career, Rear has basically been shaped by wanting to learn more about what happened to his grandmother at the Allen. Yes, and originally my intention was to go into the field of psychiatry, but then I started becoming involved in psychological research, and a lot of it has been driven by trying to understand not only my grandmother's situation

and the treatments that have been administered over the years to people with psychiatric disorders, for better or for worse, but also to try to understand my own condition as well. His own condition is bipolar disorder, but he never talked about his own mental health or his grandmothers with his family. I believe that largely has to do with the stigma associated with mental illness. I mean, mental illness was not something that my family talked about. Stephen's now an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. He incorporates Cameron's story into his intro courses, basically a cautionary tale about the consequences of rushing to treatment without evidence the treatments are effective.

So I tell them the story and then I ended on the note that my grandmother was one of his patients. Wow. What was the reaction? Silence. Absolute silence. One of Stephen's students was a redditor named Andrew. He was so moved by Stephen's lecture that he left a detailed post about Dr. Ewan Cameron's work. You know, it's just there's all these ways that it can be explained and become so normal even though it's so horrific. and the question on that, the Reddit post that I responded to is just so pointed, like how could this, something like this, go on for so long? Andrew's post in the Ask Historians community on Reddit

is actually how we at Endless Threads started working on this whole series. And just to close the loop, Amory told Stephen about the impact he had. Yeah, and I have to point out that if you hadn't mentioned Cameron's work in that neuroscience class, Andrew wouldn't have known about it. He wouldn't have left that Reddit comment, which means we likely wouldn't have known about Cameron either. And we definitely wouldn't be making a series about it as we are now. So I guess we have to thank you in part for that too, of course.

Yes, okay. That's very encouraging to hear that. Teachers matter. This is a great example of how important teachers are. Hell yeah, teachers. Yeah, teachers. But also, yeah, Reddit rabbit holes. All right, that is it for this.

bonus episode of Madness. And remember if you want more bonus content from the series and from Endless Thread in general, and we are super excited to come up with some interesting things to put into that feed, you have to become a monthly supporter of the show. So find the link in the show notes, or go to our homepage, WBUR.org, slash endless thread. We look forward to hearing from you and giving you some of that sweet, sweet bonus content. Thank you again for listening to Madness. If you haven't already, please, please, please tell a friend about it, write us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to us. It really does help more people find the show, which, you know, makes it possible for us to keep making the show. So spread the word and we'll be back next week. See you then.

Bye! I'll let myself out. Good job, Josh. Nicely done.