Uncover - S8 "Brainwashed" E1: Ravenscrag

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

This is Uncover: Brainwashed. The Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal was an innovative new hospital where patients sought cutting-edge psychiatric care. But instead of being helped, many were subjected to shockingly brutal experiments: massive doses of LSD or other drugs, electroshocks, and sensory deprivation. How — and why — could this be allowed to happen? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/brainwashed-transcripts-listen-1.5734335

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, and I do the show, FrontBurner. It's a daily news program, five days a week, a deep look at one story you actually want to know more about. One of the coolest parts of this job is when people show me how often one of our episodes comes up in their group chats. It's a real range of topics, too. Rent gouging, Trump and Elon Musk, the Middle East. Even culture stuff that has real consequences, like Diddy, for example. So if you are one of those people sharing our stuff in your group chat, I just want to say thank you. And if you aren't yet, please find and follow FrontBurner wherever you get your podcasts,

and please get it in the chat. This is a CBC Podcast. Where are we right now in Montreal? We're downtown and we're facing McGill University. That's it right there. That's McGill up ahead. Yeah. You got it. I'm hoping we can make a left turn there somewhere.

Do you want me to keep going right for now or? Oh, you're not in Ontario, dear. Oh, that's illegal? Oh, yeah. Because on the island of Montreal, we are not considered adult enough to make a right turn on a red light. Sorry about that.

That's okay, I don't care. This is Alan Tanney, and he's a character. See, I don't remember this. You never came with him? Came once kid, but did you ever go back? No. It looks, in the photos, it always looks so ominous. Yeah. We've come to the Alan Memorial Institute, perched on the side of Mount Royal.

It's a dark, imposing building, adorned with columns, chiseled crests, stony faces, and snarling creatures. It was formerly known as Ravenscrag. This was once a mansion built by shipping magnate Sir Hugh Allen. 34 bedrooms, a library, a ballroom and out back large horse stables. His family later donated the majestic home to the Royal Victoria Hospital and McGill University. In 1943 it became a psychiatric hospital and training institute known as the Allen. Is this still a hospital?

Yeah, for the mental patients. Okay. Okay. Take care. Hi, sir. We're just taking a look in the lobby here. We have a recording outside. Recording my sarcasm. He just wanted to see the inside.

He just wanted to see the inside. My father was an inmate here many years ago. Really? Yeah. Okay, but there's nothing really from the inmate. I know. I just wanted to see if you remembered anything. Well, if the letters like this over here... If only, as the saying goes, these walls could talk.

What happened inside this building changed Alan Tanney's father's life forever. He was drugged and forced to undergo so-called medical treatments that were much closer to torture. His father was part of a larger, darker chapter of history involving secret human experiments and the search for mind control. It was really ugly. I mean, they took basically healthy people and turned some of them into vegetables. They ruined piles of lives. I was yelling. I was screaming,

leave me alone, you can't do this. It was just horrible. He took my life and shattered it all over the place. What happened at the Allen over half a century ago has consequences that are still felt today. And not just for the psychiatric patients in Montreal and their families, but in how intelligence operations are conducted around the world in places where medicine and the military collide.

And no one has ever been charged. No one has been disciplined. Which allows history to keep repeating itself. I'm Michelle Shepard and this is Brainwashed. Episode 1, Ravenscrag. Welcome to our satellite newsroom. It took me about 45 minutes, I think, in the garage downstairs. Oh, really?

Oh, it's unbelievable. Alan Tanney is now 72. He has a law degree from McGill University, but had to take over his father's business before he got a chance to practice law. And I know you've done lots of this, and I really appreciate you talking about it again. Oh, no problem. Like his father before him, he turned out to be a pretty talented salesman. His latest business venture is selling snowblowers,

something Montreal needs desperately in the winter months. I buy snowblowers for $100,000 and hope that I can sell them for $125,000 and that nothing goes wrong and I don't have to get caught on the warranty. That's my gamble. Montreal's a vibrant city, filled with Victorian-era architecture and lots of quaint French bistros. But Alan says we've missed Montreal's golden age, back in the 1950s, when he was growing up. It was fantastic. Seriously.

When I compare it to the childhood of my children, boy, did they miss out on a lot. We had a great... God, we did whatever we wanted. The weekends I would go out, there was literally, you know, maybe 50 kids to go and play ball hockey with, and we would set up in teams, and we would play from 9 in the morning to 6 or 7 at night. What did your mom and dad do?

My father ran a surplus business. He was buying army surplus, but he was into other things. When they built the Saint Laurent- class destroyers in the 50s. My father was manufacturing or having manufactured for him all electrical boxes and stuff like that and he was bringing in street lights from from Europe and my mother was helping him. Charles Taney's business was booming in the 1950s. This was after World War II, at the start of the Cold War, when the U.S., Soviet Union, and China were fighting for supremacy. Now, what was your relationship like with your dad? What do you remember?

According to Alan, his father Charles was a real workaholic, the kind of guy who never took a sick day and prided himself on that. He just kept his head down, working on his business, and helping raise three kids. Life was pretty good until the spring of 1956. That's when Charles Taney's face began to hurt. It was a pain that started on the right side near his eye and extended down towards his mouth. Excruciating pain. My father had something called trigeminal neuralgia.

There's a nerve that comes down in here and down like that. So along your cheek. Yeah, and the pain from everything I've read is horrific. The main treatment in those days was to cut the nerve. And then you'd be disfigured on that side of your face. And plenty of people, including some people that I knew, had it and did it. My father did not wish to do that.

This is not a man who got sick. It's not a man who would take a day off of work, God forbid. And here he was, instead of going to work, he was sitting at home lying out on the couch and chewing ice cubes all day long to try and freeze it from the inside. And he had apparently in 1940 had had a similar attack that eventually went away. This time it was months long. Charles Taney went to his doctor in search of relief, but with no success. They tried all kinds of things and I think they finally decided that it was psychosomatic. He was working like a dog and he was under a lot of pressure.

So it was, I guess there was a lot of stress and he had this attack. And so that's how Charles Taney ended up at the Allen. Psychiatry at the time was a relatively new field, and mental illnesses were deeply stigmatized. Insane asylums were essentially where people were housed to be out of the public's sight. Lobotomies, insulin comas, and shock therapy were some of the only treatment options. Hospitals were chronically underfunded. At the large English hospital outside of Montreal, there was often just one psychiatrist for every 300 patients. So the Allen Memorial Institute was going to take a new approach. Charles Taney felt fortunate.

He could afford what was considered to be the best, most cutting-edge psychiatric care available. The modern mental hospital still has a long way to go. The modern mental hospital still has a long way to go, but here and there are models of science, of intelligence, and of compassion. Such a model is the Allen Memorial Institute of Psychiatry of Montreal, one of the foremost mental health institutions in the world. The person who comes to the Allen Memorial Institute comes voluntarily and leaves voluntarily. There are no bars. There are no locked doors. Perhaps it was the Allen's lofty reputation that made no one question the hospital's unorthodox treatments.

My father got admitted. He got put to sleep for 56 days. Being asleep means essentially 21 to 22 hours a day. They wake him up to use the bathroom, although they didn't want him to use the bathroom. They wanted him to go in the bed. Incontinence was very important to them. They wanted to bring him back to the stage of being a baby. The family did not know exactly what was happening to Charles while he was in the hospital's care. That would take years to find out. Alan's brought some documents with him for reference,

even though he knows their details by heart. They're his father's medical records. And if drugging patients and putting them to sleep for such prolonged periods sounds a bit excessive for nerve pain, it gets worse. There was two machines that they used for the shock treatment. According to these hospital reports, Charles was also given round after round of electroshock therapy. So my father was on the first one, and then a doctor went in and wrote his daily report

and came up with the very alarming problem. My father asked to see my mother. So even when he's in the sleep room, he comes out enough to... My father asked to see my mother. They were horrified that he actually remembered that he had a wife. That's when Alan says they upped the intensity of his father's shock therapy and a second, more aggressive round of shocks were administered. The goal, it seemed, was to make Charles forget everything. So instead of giving one shock and that was it, this one would give like six.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. This extreme form of ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, was known as the Page-Russell, named after its inventors. He had been running at the rate of two Page-Russells a day because of his hostility and violence. He is struggling against eating and has to be tube-fed. By day 41, Charles Taney's medical chart notes that he is confused and occasionally incontinent.

This is his 48th day of sleep. He has no knowledge of where he is. A lot of the time he is pretty cheerful and childish, though at other times he will show little bursts of hostility. Taney would not take the medication willingly for the most part. His records state he had to receive it by injection. He was very heavily dosed on drugs, all kinds of barbiturates, but unlike most patients, he did not get LSD.

Unlike most patients, he did not get LSD. There were many patients at the Allen who did. They received the new psychedelic drug without any warning or consent. It was all part of these extreme so-called treatments. They started out with LSD, and they gave me sodium amytol. I started out with LSD. They gave me sodium amytol.

They gave me electric shock treatment. From what I understand, they were 100 times more powerful than what was considered acceptable. And then they put me to sleep for 23 days. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. I had never been ill before in my life. And when I had my daughter, I became very depressed. In those days, we didn't know anything about postpartum depression. I just knew that I didn't have much zest for living. So I went to the head of the Department of Psychiatry and said, look, I want to go away and get better.

And we chose the Allens. I remember having a helmet, like it was a football helmet with speakers in the ears. And I remember sitting on the floor, and they played tapes ongoing all day long, which went on for, I think, a little over a month. Well, I saw a tray with a needle, a syringe, and the card on it had my name,

so I looked a little more closely and it was lysergic acid diethylamide and my husband was a druggist and I knew a lot of drugs but I'd never heard of that one. I took the injection and I didn't like it and it really did create a poisonous psychosis. During the night they'd wake us up and give us another half glass of pills. The room became very distorted and I thought my bones were all melting. Well, I was hallucinating and they kept telling me, you're getting smaller and smaller and they kept bringing me back in time and asking me all kinds of questions.

It was just an absolute nightmare. I was absolutely crying for hours and hours and hours, I mean really from deep inside of me. I was in a comatose state for 72 consecutive days and in order to get me into that state I had over 109 electroconvulsive shock treatments. Their objective was to wipe my memory. I suffered. I suffered like hell. Former patients Robert Logie, Val Orlikow, Helene McIntosh, Jean-Charles Paget, and Linda McDonald.

There were over 100 patients who received these extreme forms of treatment, staying at the island for days, weeks, months. Many were women with mild symptoms, suffering from conditions we identify today as postpartum depression or anxiety. Most emerged fundamentally changed. This is Hilda Bernstein. She was at the island for three weeks. I didn't know my husband and my children,

my brother-in-law and his wife. And my sister-in-law at that time, when she saw me, she cried. She's a registered nurse, too, and she said she'd never seen such a change in a person in three weeks. But I looked really dreadful. And Linda McDonald. I had to be toilet trained. I was a vegetable.

I had no identity. I had no memory. I'd never existed in the world before. Like a baby. Just like a baby that has to be toilet trained. And Val Orlico. has to be toilet trained. And Val Orlico.

At one point, I thought I would just go out and jump in front of a car on a busy thoroughfare in Montreal. I stood there swaying for quite a while and then decided that all that would happen would be that, with my luck, I'd just be battered physically and I'd have that to contend with. But I don't know. It's very difficult

to think about sometimes. Brain injuries, memory loss, crippling depression, unable to relearn basic life skills, and suicide. Alan Taney's father, Charles, left the hospital after three and a half months. He was a completely different man. Alan was eight years old when his father returned home. Young, but not too young to remember what he was like before he entered. It was really ugly. When you're eight years old and your father is there and, you know,

you have your whole life, right, with him. And he comes back three months later and he's not the same person. It's like you look at him every day, but he's a stranger. And how was he different in terms of... Oh, he was completely different. You know, he was... He lost a sense of fun. He wouldn't do anything. It's not like he wasn't a great athlete,

but before he might throw a ball around, and it never happened again. Going to the football games or going to a hockey game, intermittently, we used to have season tickets for the Canadians too, but... He used to tell me to take my sister. One of my sisters, he just had no, no desire to go. But what's that like for a kid to have lost somebody

who's still right in front of you? Oh, my shrink spent a lot of time on that. He said it's devastating. It's very, very difficult to rationalize for a kid. He told me it's worse than from a death. Your father's gone, you know it. You adapt to it. But here, your father's gone, but you can never adapt to it.

You can never really deal with it, because every day you wake up, you look at him. There he is. In case you were wondering, all these drugs, the induced coma, the shock treatments, none of it cured Charles Taney's problem, the nerve pain in his face. About 12 years later, he had another attack. And by that time, there was a drug called Tegretol. They put my father in Tegretol a week later, it was gone. So, how could this have been allowed to happen?

And why? Part of that answer lies with the man who was running the Allen, one of the world's most well-respected psychiatrists. He was a very, very impressive man. And I was told he was the best doctor in North America. I thought, how could he possibly ever take me for a patient? Who am I? I mean, this great man who's done all these marvelous things.

And boy, I better work hard and I better do everything that he tells me to do. And, you know, I don't want to lose this opportunity to get well. He was constantly on the go, rushing about, highly articulate, always seemed to know what he was doing, commanding in his personal appearance and in his manner, self-assured and extremely ambitious. His ambition shone through just about everything else. He was an authoritarian, ruthless, power hungry,

nervous, tense, angry man. Not very nice. And he strode the halls like a giant. And people would say, oh, there but for God goes God. Everybody in the hospital was very much in awe of Dr. Cameron. On the next episode of Brainwashed, the Nuremberg Code, secret CIA projects, and a doctor named Ewan Cameron.

Would you describe the new treatment, Dr. Cameron? This is essentially an attempt to modify and improve our methods of carrying out psychotherapy. This type of recording, playing the recording back to the patient over and over again, sounds something like the conditioning technique in The Brave New World. Does it have any similarity at all to it or to communist brainwashing, for instance? No, it certainly doesn't. Brainwashed is written and produced by Lisa Ellenwood, Chris Oak, and me, Michelle Shepard. Sarah Melton is our associate producer. Sound design

by Cecil Fernandez. Our digital producer is Emily Cannell. The senior producer of CBC Podcasts is Tanya Springer, and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. Special thanks to Alina Ghosh, Keith Hart with CBC Radio Archives, and the CBC Reference

Library. For discussions, posts, videos, and pictures, find us on social media. Just search for CBC Podcasts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our theme song is Desert Novel by Key Witness. Brainwashed is produced by CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.