Endless Thread - Madness, Pt. 1: The Sleep Room

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

In our first episode, we share powerful accounts of abuse at a psychiatric hospital in Montreal, and we introduce the renowned doctor who conducted these disturbing experiments on his unwitting patients. *** "Madness" unravels the shocking history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments. Co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, along with producer Josh Swartz, investigate how the stigma around mental illness, combined with government secrecy, can silence the truth. *** Join us for an episode discussion via Zoom on Thursday 4/30 at 7pm ET. RSVP here: http://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2020/04/24/madness-part-one-the-sleep-room

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 Marotra 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. Produced by the I-Lab at WB-B-U-R, Boston. Check, check, check, check. Once again, Amory Severson and I are setting up our recording kit. I was going to make you just, like, hold the umbrella over my head in the kit.

It is a stormy day in Montreal, and we are in an Erie place, known as the Allen Memorial Institute. I did reach out to the Allen Memorial for an interview, and they did not want to talk. So we're not here to talk, just to look. The Allen is really where the story we're going to tell you today all started. I mean, the weather certainly isn't helping right now, but it does look like a prison. Yeah. Emery and I are making our way down a mountainside towards this group of buildings, perched on the eastern slope of Mount Royal Park,

an ancient volcanic mountain that gave the city of Montreal its name. You can see why. Mount Royal is this big bump of green that rises up out of the middle of the city. It's pretty. On a less gloomy day, so is the Allen, sort of. Originally, this was a mansion. It consists of two old stone buildings that make up 53,000 square feet, the mansion itself and a horse stable.

The stable at one time had its own special name. the sleep room. Oh yeah, there's the sleep room. Where? It's right there. So let's just keep it chill. Over the mansion's main entrance hangs the stone bust of a snarling dog

and a large stone face staring blankly out over the city below. Its lips just slightly parted. The shipping magnate who had this compound built in the 1860s Hugh Allen called this place Ravens Crag. It's very separate from Montreal. It's very removed.

Yeah, like if you were making a horror film about a psychiatric facility, this is like central casting building-wise, I would say. This place is a psychiatric hospital. The mansion was eventually given to McGill University, and that's how it became the Allen Memorial Institute. And while it might seem like a good movie location, what happened at the Allen decades ago is real and really disturbing. This is where people were kept for weeks, months, years sometimes induced and experimented on.

There's so much history here, and it's history that at least the victims really would like people to know the story of this place and what happened here. light deprivation, shock treatment, hallucinogenic drugs, and she lost her soul. Cameron didn't seem to have the slightest hesitation about destroying the lives of his subjects. He was willing to try the most extreme techniques. People have a hard time listening and grasping the reality of this. It shatters their belief system. During the 1950s and 60s, the alum was run by one powerful doctor, a man who was considered an innovator, maybe even a visionary,

a man who spent his days trying to cure the mentally ill with cutting-edge techniques, and his nights reading science fiction. His name was Dr. Ewan Cameron, and his work at the Allen Memorial Institute was actually part of a huge, secret government-funded program that stretched its tentacles around the world. We'll get to all of that. But for now, here's what you should know. In the U.S., this secret government program was run by the CIA. It had a name and a mission. Its name was M.K. Ultra. MK.K. Ultra is almost too unbelievable to believe. And its mission was mind control.

What is less well known is the key role that the Allen Memorial Institute and its director played in this weird, dark chapter in Western history. Today, we are going to tell you about what happened at the Allen and who it happened to. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sebertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. And we are bringing you part one of a special series, Madness.

The secret mission for mind control and the people who paid the price. Back in October of 2019, the day before Amory and I were walking the grounds of Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute, we sat down to talk with someone who had been treated there almost 60 years ago. My name is Nancy Layton, and I was a victim of treatments of the Allen Memorial from five to six months. Nancy was sent to the Allen in September of 1961. She went in at just 18 years old. And by all accounts at the time, Nancy was bright and beautiful and talented. Now there are deep, dark circles under Nancy's eyes.

Her long hair is completely white. Her skin is like tracing paper. Her speech is slurred. And throughout her conversation with us, she repeats things. I'm healthy, well, and I'm healthy and well. I want to say that I'm healthy well. I'm free of it. Nancy says she's healthy and well now.

But when she was a teenager, she went through a program designed by the director of the Allen Memorial Institute, Dr. Ewan Cameron. At the time, Dr. Cameron was supposedly doing something exciting. He was wiping out mental illness in people and rebuilding them. Nancy spent just six months at the Allen. She was pulled out in March of 1962. And even though members of her family put Nancy into the Allen, they now say that because of what happened there, she's never been the same. So my name is Angela Bardosh.

I'm Nancy Leighton's daughter. I'm here to talk about things that had happened to my mom long time ago when she was only 18 at the Allen Memorial. In 1961, Nancy had just recently started her first big job out of school. And I went to Nashville friends and worked for them for a year or two, and then I became a bit sick. It was a little more complicated than that. Nancy was working for Canada's Defense Department, where there were a lot of men,

some of whom started giving her unwanted attention, but would probably qualify today as sexual harassment. Nancy, her family, and her doctors all seem to agree on this part of the story. But as Angela reads from her mother's medical documents, you get the sense that Nancy's doctors thought she might have been seeing some things that weren't really there. She soon found herself in difficulty because she felt, that men were looking at her and making passes at her. This was quite possibly true, and she's quite attractive. She began, however, to build up aggressive beliefs

that she was being spied upon and began to see significance in minor actions, the way people move their arms. Nancy's sister also said that she had started to act strange. That's when Nancy's parents got involved. My mother said, we'll talk, we'll talk to the camera, and see what he had doing. He admitted me, and that's when the other link started. The whole thing that started was that Nancy's mother, a medical nurse herself,

had an idea of how to tackle Nancy's problems. She knew of a guy named Dr. Cameron. He'd been running the Allen since the 40s, but by the early 60s, he'd become a giant in the field. He brought prestige to McGill University's new psychiatry department. And these were heady days for the field of psychiatry. Dr. Cameron was doing some of the most boundary-pushing, exciting work in the Western world. People describe Dr. Cameron's reputation as godlike.

He was in magazines. He was an innovator, a disruptor. He was always giving inspiring speeches about the nature of humanity and how to fix some of our greatest mental health challenges. ...is that many of us repress so much that it is almost as though we had a second person within us, someone who constantly endangers the first

by attempting to take over. There arises an aversion to mental illness. an aversion spreading out and covering the whole field of mental health. So that this great area of medicine... Dr. Cameron had a guiding theory that you could eliminate someone's mental illness by wiping their mind clean. He developed a rigorous regimen of inducing prolonged periods of sleep,

giving his patients electroshocks multiple times a day, and giving them intense cocktails of barbiturates, hallucinogens, and so-called truth serums. He would put patients in chemically induced, reduced comas for days or months at a time, use sensory deprivation techniques, even play aggressive and insulting messages at them, all designed to reduce the mentally ill to a childlike state, remove them entirely from time and space so that he could rebuild them. He called this technique depattering.

Cameron and his colleagues were reportedly eager to have Nancy and other people like her come to the Allen. She was a perfect fit for the kinds of experience. they were doing. Cameron admitted Nancy and got her started on his cutting-edge regimen. The doctor suggested shock treatment. He started giving me these treatments, and at one course, my heart stopped in the beginning. And they had to, yeah, heart stopped. I went to cardiac arrest, and they had to bring me out of it. Electroshock therapy, or what is now called electroconvulsive therapy, wasn't all that unusual in the early 1960s. But what was how

happening at the Allen under Dr. Cameron's direction was very unusual. The form of electroshock he was using was 20 to 40 times more intense than the standard dose, and his patients could receive them two or three times a day. This was just the beginning of what Nancy went through. That we know. There's just one big problem. Nancy, what do you remember about being at the Allen? Hardly anything in the beginning because I was in a room. I remember waking up in February, waking up near the end, and they said, we'll take you back to your room now after I came out of the sleep. Remember the horse stables at the Allen, how that building had another name, the sleep room?

Nancy went into the Allen in September of 1961, and yet all that she remembers is waking up in February of 1962. Angela spent a long time trying to get more information about her mother's treatment at the Allen. It was a very painful process of just getting the records, reading the records. What she got eventually, it's shocking to read. She had five days asleep and five ECTs. She was taken out of the sleep room on October 30th. However, she immediately showed signs of relapse.

By the first week of December, the patient had had 87 ECTs. She was then changed from Largactyl to 150 milligrams QID to try Lafon. By March 23rd, she had had 129 ECTs. Nancy had been administered 129 intensive electroconvulsive therapy treatments in six months, and she'd been heavily sedated with a mix of antipsychotics and barbiturates. Things like Pentathol, a sedative. When Angela looked that one up, she found out it was a drug that for many years was used in higher doses for lethal injection.

Do you remember Dr. Cameron himself? Oh, yeah. What do you remember about him? I remember being on the stretch of the lying bed and him giving me my injection. You could before I went to have the treatment, have the shock treatment. He was the one that gave me the shot in my arms to get me to sleep. The injection Dr. Cameron gave Nancy was some kind of barbiturate. a sedative to put her into that deep sleep.

If he was going to wipe her mind, he needed to shut it down first. Do you remember anything else about anything he said to you? You can hear Nancy's daughter, Angela, there, trying to jog her memory. Angela says that Nancy's grip on her own memory is tenuous at best. Sometimes Nancy remembers things in the wrong order.

Sometimes she doesn't remember anything. Sometimes things come back in bits and pieces. I was in the room and I was awake in the morning and I was coming back to her life. And then my mother came a few days later and they took me out. And do you remember anything about sort of how your mother reacted to the treatment you were getting? She said that Cameron was an old fool.

Was he, though? Dr. Cameron was treating people all the time. Maybe those treatments just didn't work for everyone. But in the time that Nancy was at the Allen, her parents had done a 180 on the treatment she was receiving under the direction of Dr. Cameron. They wanted her out. Nancy came out of the Allen almost 20 pounds heavier,

her memory impaired, and her independence gone. She's relied on antipsychotic drugs basically ever since she left, almost six decades ago. Yes, Nancy was having psychological problems when she went into the Allen. But Angela says her mom was never the same after she was treated there. That's echoed in the official diagnosis when she was taken out and in the observations of her family. Six months later to come out with a lot of memory loss, experiencing, you know, then further delusions and really schizophrenic behavior and being diagnosed officially as acute

schizophrenic from this, I really. believe that she was turned into a schizophrenic. And then as you're, you know, you live a life like that after six months of going through hell, how do you regain your life? How do you even go about? Originally, doctors at the Allen had suggested they could help Nancy. By the time she was released, Dr. Cameron was saying she couldn't be made whole again. And in a letter, Dr. Cameron wrote to the new doctor who would take care of Nancy after she left the Allen, He describes Nancy's family in terms that don't feel very empathetic. Her father was a drug salesman, but now retired.

He's 68 and has always been dominated by his wife. Anyways, the mother is a driving, assertive, over-talkative woman who tends to misinterpret things. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, let's pause on that. The father has always been dominated by his wife. an over-talkative woman who tends to misinterpret things. This sounds a lot like a doctor trying to undermine the ability of Nancy's mother, a medical nurse, to be her advocate in care going forward. After she left the Allen, Nancy went into another psychiatric facility,

where she fell in love with another patient, Angela's father. They had Angela, but Nancy continued to be in and out of treatment. She couldn't work. She couldn't take care of her daughter, let alone herself. Angela's father and Nancy got divorced when Angela was four. She was raised by her grandparents. She didn't see much of her mom growing up. But eventually, she had to step in and take care of Nancy. When you first went to see where your mom was living

and what her life was like and you made a choice to become more involved in your mom's life, how was she living? What did things look like? Yeah, it was tough. It was tough to see. It was despicable. There was cockroaches. Things haven't been washed in many weeks, even just pots and pans were not cleaned.

You know, garbage was everywhere. This was when Angela was just beginning her own life as an adult. Angela says she had to become a mother to her own mother. She had to put parts of her life on pause. She had to teach her mom how to buy groceries, how to do her finances. And as she's flipping through the documents that it took months for her to get, she is angry, especially when she reads how. doctors at the Allen wrote about their communication with Nancy's dad during her treatment.

He has been reassured that the present planned treatment is the most appropriate for his daughter's case and that it will not induce any permanent injury to her brain or personality and that she is receiving the best possible nursing care. Angela says this line is crucial, that this is how her mother's family was lied to. According to them, the Allen's treatment did cause permanent damage. It was not the best possible treatment plan at all. For me, just to read that, it's so disturbing. Having not only the information, the knowledge, and everything that has gone through,

it's just incomprehensible of how this was done at the time. This is just one thing that happened to one person. 60 years ago. One long and lonely story, especially for Angela. It's been a wish of mine for many, many years just to not be alone anymore in this process. But here's the thing. Angela and Nancy are not alone. Not even close.

That's coming up in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Our story about what happened at the Allen is an old one. 60 years old. A lot of the people involved in this story are dead, and a lot of their family members didn't even know they were part of this story. A few years ago, the CBC show The Fifth Estate, did an episode about Dr. Cameron's experiments. It's erasing your memory. I mean, how dare they do that to a human being? How dare they do that to a human being? It included the story of a woman named

Alison Steele, who received compensation from the Canadian government for the so-called depattering treatment that her mother had received at the Allen in the 50s for postpartum depression. A lot of people saw this episode, and for some, the details felt familiar. Word started to spread. Like the Fifth Estate? If it wasn't for those programs, a lot of the people wouldn't know what's going on. It turns out what happened at the Allen was much bigger than what happened to Allison Steele's mother, and to Nancy.

There are lots of other stories. just like theirs. Stories of people who went into the Allen for treatment and came out forever damaged. A new wave of victims and their family members have started coming forward and getting organized. They call themselves Saga, survivors allied against government abuse,

and last year, they filed a class action lawsuit. Because what happened at the Allen didn't just involve Dr. Ewan Cameron. The Allen Memorial Institute was part part of McGill University and Canada's Royal Victoria Hospital. And the extreme treatments being done there were being funded in part by the government. Not just the Canadian government either, but also the CIA. And now the plaintiffs in that class action lawsuit want all of these institutions to take responsibility.

Last October, right around the same time Amory and I were roaming the grounds of the Allen in Montreal. members of Saga were standing in the rain just a couple hours away in Ottawa, Ontario, on Parliament Hill, Canada's capital. There are maybe 60 or 70 people here, crouched under umbrellas and holding up signs that say things like, lives destroyed, justice for victims, memories erased, and the megaphone gets passed around. Wiping out their memories, the very essence of who they were in the process, destroying their lives, robbing their children of a parent, a spouse of a partner, a parent of a child,

and altering the lives of countless family members. Some people hold up photos of a family member wrapped in plastic to protect them from the rain. This is my mother before she went in with the children, but we all went into foster homes because my mother was so sick from it, she had to keep going back for psychiatric care, and she couldn't care for us. We're here to protest the atrocities that were taking place on our family members, and us specifically our great uncle, Guido de Giorgio, who was tested on in 1945 and 1947. His life was ruined, his life was taken from him at 32.

And I just feel like he deserves some kind of justice and we have to do this to make sure that at least it never happens again. The story has to be told. Some of the people here had family members who didn't even go to the Allen for serious mental illness. And those patients reportedly got the same extreme treatments. My father was in there for hypertension. They just kept treating him, but it never worked. They put him into schizophrenia big time.

And at the end, he just sat in a wheelchair, not in a wheelchair, but just his rocking chair, and quit. It was like brain dead. And nobody's been accountable for it. Accountability is like a ghost. The Ottawa rally may have only drawn about 70 people, but the estimated number of people who could qualify as victims of human experiments at the Allen Memorial Institute is in the hundreds and counting. People are still coming out of the woodwork.

All of these people have a connection to one man, Dr. D. U.N. Cameron. But for 20 years, Dr. Cameron was a highly respected member of the medical community. He led the World Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association. People traveled far and wide to be treated by him. He was a titan in the field of psychiatry, whose methods are now considered a black mark on the institution he once ran. How could anybody be so simple-minded as to think you could wipe a brain and then reprogram the brain and then everything would be peachy again? a man whose work had mysterious funding sources. A man whose methods may also echo an even more disturbing chapter in history.

Ewan Cameron actually is at the seat of what we now realize is state endorsed psychological torture. Was Cameron a visionary or a mad scientist? Could it be that he was both? In our next episode, we look further into the mind and the methods of Dr. Ewan Cameron. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer. Iris Adler is our executive producer. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus.

Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit. Editing help from our managing producer Kat Brewer, extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Our interns are Frank Hernandez and Kaya Williams. Also, shoutouts to former interns, Magdialamata and Noah Boston, who were both instrumental in making this series possible. Noah actually pitched us this story idea, of course, from Reddit, and it eventually became this special series. Maggie, Noah, we miss you.

Thanks to Ash Abraham for being our eyes and ears at the Saga rally in Ottawa. And voices you heard from that rally were Julie Tanny, Judy Henry, Janice Shaw, Marlene Levinsen, Francesco de Giorgio, Marion Reed, Chantal Jacob Siddiqui, and Ewan Graham MacDonald. On Reddit, we are endless understead. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. You can also go to our official subreddit, endlessthread.redd.com. Or you can email us, endless thread at wb u.bure.org.

My co-host and the senior producer is Ben Brock Johnson. My co-host and producer is Amory Siebertsen. I'll let myself out.