Uncover - S8 "Brainwashed" E2: Psychic Driving

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Dr. Ewen Cameron, an internally renowned psychiatrist, was once the director of the World, American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. So how did he come to develop his controversial treatments? And what was the real purpose behind his experiments? This is Uncover: Brainwashed. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/brainwashed-transcripts-listen-1.5734335

Hi there, I'm Gavin Crawford. I'm a writer, an actor, and a comedian. And for the last eight or nine years, I have been navigating life with my mother's increasing dementia. Has it been sad? Yeah. Has it been funny? Also, yeah. That's what my podcast series, Let's Not Be Kidding, is about. It's the true story of my life as a comedian, my mom, and dementia. Let's not be kidding. With me, Gavin Crawford.

Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. So we are on 800 Main South West. This is the American Psychiatric Association and they've actually pulled what I understand is three banker boxes of files on Dr. Cameron. Hi. Hi. How are you?

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Michelle. This is Chris. The American Psychiatric Association Archives is on Main Avenue in Washington, D.C. They moved into this location in 2018, and everything about it feels new. Fresh white paint, huge clean windows with sweeping views that include just a sliver of Capitol Hill. I'm here to find out all I can about Dr. Ewan Cameron. Dr. Cameron was once the president of the American Psychiatric Association, and he went on to lead the Canadian and World Psychiatric Associations too. and he went on to lead the Canadian and World Psychiatric Associations too.

Cameron had also been the doctor in charge of the devastating treatments given to unwitting psychiatric patients at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. We know his resume, but we wanted to know what motivated him. What exactly was he doing at the Allen and why? exactly was he doing at the Allen, and why. Dena Gorland, the APA Foundation's archivist and librarian, is our guide. There's the library. Well, I'll show it to you later, but let's get you guys down to business. We're sorting through hundreds of pages. Speeches Dr. Cameron gave, carbon copies of his correspondence, reports he wrote. This is so incredibly well organized. Look at this.

The opening address at the Allen Memorial Institute. This is actual speech. Oh god, this paper is so thin. July 12th, 1944, Professor Dr. Ewan Cameron. The Institute is now opening its doors and those who have come here to attend this event must reflect upon what this may mean. The setting into action of a new center of inquiry and of healing is always an occasion of importance and solemnity. For passing forward in time, one can conjecture upon, and in some measure foresee the later consequences. I think he needs a bit of an editor.

Then-producer Chris Oak comes across a thick file. Nuremberg. Folder 4 Nuremberg. Yeah, that one's interesting. This is CBC News Roundup. Tonight, Matthew Houlton discusses the fate of the men in the dock at Nuremberg. The Nuremberg trials prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the wake of World War II. Today at Nuremberg, the 21 defendants heard the justices read in relays the 250-page judgment,

which pronounced Nazism a criminal system and condemned its leadership for conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. One of the defendants, Rudolf Hess, the number three man in Hitler's Germany, arrived at Nuremberg claiming to be suffering from amnesia, and a group of 10 internationally renowned psychiatrists were asked to assess this claim and determine whether Hess was mentally fit to stand trial. Dr. Ewan Cameron was one of those experts. The tribunal is of opinion that the defendant Hess is capable of standing his trial at the

present time. capable of standing his trial at the present time. The doctors found that he suffered from psychoneurosis and there was some genuine amnesia, but he faked the rest. They concluded he was sane enough to stand trial. It's judgment day at the Nuremberg trial. The greatest trial of all time is nearing its end. And the tribunal later found him guilty. It's ironic that Dr. Ewan Cameron was involved in the evaluation of Hess at Nuremberg,

especially considering the trial that followed. the evaluation of Hess at Nuremberg, especially considering the trial that followed. The prosecution of Nazi physicians who conducted cruel and often deadly experiments on prisoners and civilians. It was known as the Doctors' Trial. Their crimes shocked the world and the scientific community, leading to the creation of the Nuremberg Code, a promise that this kind of human experimentation would never happen again. A promise that would be broken again and again by Dr. Cameron himself. I'm Michelle Shepard and this is Brainwashed, Episode 2, Psychic Driving. Let this trial be a warning.

Let it be a milestone on a long, hard road from barbarism to universal peace. The Nuremberg Code is actually a set of ten principles, ethical and legal guidelines for experiments conducted on humans. The first principle of Nuremberg states that the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. That means the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent, should be able to exercise free power of choice, and that they should know the consequences of participation in this. This is Harvey Weinstein. I'm sorry I have to clarify this, but your name is Harvey Weinstein. Unfortunately, yes. It is a tough name to have these days. I usually introduce myself by saying Harvey

Weinstein, the other one. This Harvey Weinstein is a doctor, a psychiatrist, and he has spent a good part of his life thinking about and researching Dr. Cameron and the Allen. So Nuremberg, they also say that the duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon the individual who carries out the experiment. That's the bedrock. And that's what did not happen at the Allen. And Dr. Cameron would know the Nuremberg Code. I would certainly assume so, yeah. Dr. Cameron's patients came to the island

willingly, hoping to seek relief from their psychiatric ailments. They had no idea they were going to be part of a medical experiment, essentially human guinea pigs. Dr. Cameron's goal was to determine whether something he developed called psychic driving could fundamentally alter the minds of his patients. The story is that he heard about these language courses where you put a loudspeaker under your pillow at night and you learn Spanish or French or whatever. Around 1948, there was a fad called sleep teaching. The idea being that you could master a new language

or break a bad habit if you just listened to tapes played during the night. Dr. Cameron was curious. And in Montreal at the Allen Memorial Institute of McGill University, a new technique called psychic driving has been developed. Here is Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Institute and Raymond Hazan of the CBC. Would you describe the new treatment, Dr. Cameron? and Raymond Hazan of the CBC. Would you describe the new treatment, Dr. Cameron? This is essentially an attempt to modify and improve our methods of carrying out psychotherapy.

In the institute, we have been attempting to find ways of speeding up psychotherapy, and one of the ways is to find methods of bringing out into action important and valuable parts of a patient's personality that have hitherto been repressed. The driving consists in the repetition on a tape or a record of a statement which deals with the desirable repressed characteristics. A good example of this is... Here's one of the recordings Dr. Cameron used on a patient

who came to him with what would now be known as postpartum depression. You can get along with people by now. You are not afraid of others and you are very pleased to be with them people like you and your relationship with people is good you are an adult and you want to accept the responsibilities of a wife and a mother as you feel, you like to see things neat and tidy. If you see things disorderly, like papers on the floor, you pick them up. You look after things as you look after yourself. That line about picking up the papers on the floor was added to test whether the messages were being absorbed. But not all the messages were positive.

And he had two kinds of messages. He had positive messages, like you're a good person, you're kind to everybody, because that was supposed to change the behaviour. And negative messages, like you're an awful person, you're mean to people, etc. And he would first have people listen to negative messages and then to positive messages.

Sometimes he would use what was called auto-psychic driving in which he used the patient's own words. Sometimes it would be hetero-psychic driving in terms of how the physicians interpreted how these messages were being created in the patient's own mind. These voices were played through headphones, helmets, or speakers, sometimes installed right inside patients' pillows. installed right inside patients' pillows.

The positive and negative messages would be repeated over and over for periods of up to 20 hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake. So patients could sometimes hear the same messages up to half a million times. He thought that if he could have people listen to these kinds of messages over and over, that it would ultimately result in their changing their attitudes and behaviors. He actually thought it would change the physiology of their brains because it's likely that psychotherapy actually does that at some level. 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 because what we are attempting to do is to bring into operation aspects of the patient's own personality we are not trying to impose upon the individual things which are probably might be quite foreign to him and which would be at marked variance as in the case of brainwashing with the kind of person that he naturally is does it have any adverse effects on the patient's health or mental outlook after he's been treated with it? No, and otherwise we wouldn't use it. The patient is usually very much better afterwards, and our problem is to ensure that that improvement is lasting.

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. When we were in the APA, the American Psychiatric Association Archives, some of Dr. Cameron's papers talked about psychic driving. Hi. That's Dina, the archivist.

Well, we just read through the whole psychic driving one. It's really interesting. Yeah, I think so too. I think, like, just the concept of it. Dina goes on to tell us that a year before we visited, she had another request for those files. Okay, so his son came. His name is Duncan Cameron. He called me in 2018, and he said,

you know, I understand that you have the archives of my dad, and I'm just extremely, extremely upset that the way he's being portrayed, because that was only one part of his life at a certain time, because he did so many other things and he was, you know, really upset. Dina had a lot of empathy for Dr. Cameron's son, Duncan. It's understandable. Psychiatry has a very ugly past. You know, there's Hannibal Lecter type machines. You know, you had lobotomy. You had, you know, bloodletting was huge. We didn't know. Nobody knew. It can't be easy living with your father's legacy when the only story told is what

he did to patients at the Allen. You know, and he's just like, but my father was such an intelligent man, and they're just bashing him, they keep bashing him about his references. Hello? Hi, Duncan. It's Michelle here. Oh, yes. Hi, Michelle. How are you?

Fine. I'm in a little room here with all sorts of electronic equipment around me. They've got you all set up? Yeah, I think I am. Okay. Well, why don't we start by just getting you kind of formally to introduce yourself. Just tell me your name and a little bit about who you are. Okay. Well, my name is Duncan Cameron. I'm the oldest son of Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron. I'm the oldest son of Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron. And I live in Washington. And I have

spent most of my life practicing law. Duncan Cameron is now a retired lawyer. He's 85 years old. And you mentioned on the phone to me that you had a Canadian connection, but you wanted to wait to tell me in person. Well, all right, now I will. Well, I was born in Canada, in Brandon, Manitoba, where my father's first appointment was at the Brandon Medical Institute. I think it has a slightly different name than that, but it was in Brandon, Manitoba. Ewan Cameron was born in Scotland in 1901,

the son of a Presbyterian minister. After medical school, he did his residencies in psychiatry in London, Zurich, and in the U.S. at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was recruited to Manitoba in 1929 to the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases. Dr. Cameron lived with his family in Canada on and off for nearly three decades, but he never sought Canadian citizenship.

He moved to Montreal in 1943 and became the director of the Allen. And how old would you have been around that time when you moved there? I would have been about nine years old or ten. What are your recollections of your dad? about nine years old or ten. What are your recollections of your dad? Well, if I got up early in the morning, I'd see him before he got to work.

Then I would see him at night at dinner. But he was a very busy man, and I think he was always very concerned about our education. Occasionally we would do something on the weekend, but he was very busy. I can remember also he could be quite strict about bedtime. How so? What do you remember? Well, I could remember listening to a hockey game past bedtime, but I very quickly hid it under the sheets and blankets as he passed by the door, except my thigh accidentally hit the volume button, and suddenly this great

noise of the hockey game came out. Oh, no, and what happens then? Well, punishment, of course. Not a serious one, though. I think another thing that we did as a family was we hiked. He loved the outdoors, and particularly loved climbing mountains, which I think probably has its very beginnings in Scotland. Duncan said he was happy to talk to us, but only if we focused on his father's character, not his work specifically.

He did love the outdoors. Many people describe him as quite charming and charismatic. Yes, he can be. The ladies loved him. He always had some good jokes. On the other hand, he was not sort of somebody that just liked to go out to have a drink with the boys. He was busy most of the time. But he did mention that his father was searching for a cure for schizophrenia and that this mission drove some of his work at the Allen.

Some colleagues said Dr. Cameron's life ambition was to win a Nobel Prize. I think the work that he was engaged in trying to find a solution to the problem of schizophrenia, that work in Montreal, it was unfortunate that people then concluded that the treatments that he gave were reflected on his character. I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I just don't quite understand what you mean by that. Well, he was not a harsh, unfeeling sort of person. I think he was ambitious. harsh, unfeeling sort of person. I think he was ambitious,

and I think he was genuinely excited by the field of psychiatry and the opportunities that it provided for breakthroughs in many areas. I've admired most of the things he's done. Not all. You can't get along with people by now. You are not afraid of others, and you are very pleased to be with them. People like you, and your relationship with people is good.

I know it's hard to talk about somebody else's motives, but I think among the guests that we're speaking to, you probably have researched the most about what Dr. Cameron was doing and talked to the most people who knew him. How would you best describe his motivations for this? A complicated question. This is Dr. Harvey Weinstein again. I have to acknowledge that in many ways, Cameron was a unique psychiatrist. He was heavily influenced by social psychiatry in which people look at those with emotional disturbance in the context of their social situation, the context of their families, and context of society. I also have to acknowledge that initially, he wrote quite clearly about the brain as

a biological entity and trying to understand issues related to memory, etc. So all that's really good. But what happened, it seems, is that he became motivated by a desire to be famous, to win a Nobel Prize. He was very ambitious and known to be very ambitious. and known to be very ambitious. And in many ways, he was very successful in terms of being recognized around the world as an amazing psychiatrist. The second thing is that Cameron was invited to evaluate Rudolf Hess at Nuremberg after the Second World War ended and became heavily influenced by what he surmised had happened in Germany in the 30s and 40s, that evil people had taken over, people who were sociopaths or were very passive or very ambitious or whatever. And one of his takeaways, interestingly enough, was that social scientists,

psychiatrists, psychologists, and other sociologists needed to be very careful to control those people and to decide who should be in power, basically, and who shouldn't. It is just a very interesting kind of takeaway in which he assumes power to particular disciplines, and that's very troubling. So you have a combination of a very ambitious man, somebody who thinks that psychiatry should be the discipline that determines the kind of future for society, and being the person to cure schizophrenia. And I think he got carried away. You are not afraid of others, and you are very pleased to be with them. Cameron was having difficulties with his initial experiments with psychic driving. Patients were resistant to listening to messages looped over and over.

You are not afraid of others, and you are very pleased to be with them. He decided that he had to come up with a method for breaking down these defenses. A way to break minds down so that he could build them back up. And he didn't have to look very far for one potential solution. A colleague at McGill, a brilliant researcher and the head of the university's psychology department named Donald Hebb, was doing some groundbreaking research. You did an experiment here with students at McGill,

an experiment in sensory deprivation. Could you describe for me the way in which they were deprived? They were asked to lie on a hospital bed with a plywood cubicle built around it, to lie wearing goggles over their eyes. The goggles were translucent. They had light, but they saw nothing. They had a small speaker embedded in a foam rubber pillow around their ears,

which had a small buzzing noise. They wore cuffs on their arms so their joints could move freely. They would have no joint pains, but still couldn't explore the environment. And apart from that, they were asked to lie still. Do nothing. Be calm and peaceful on this hospital bed.

They were fed on request. They were taken to the toilet on request. They were allowed a cigarette if they were smokers after each meal, each time they wanted to eat. Apart from that, they did nothing. The result of that experiment was with the subjects who stayed more than three days, they found it very difficult. We were paying them $20 a day, which at the time was the rate at which you'd pay an associate professor. But when they stayed for

three days or so they began to see things. They had some magnificent hallucinations of squirrels marching across a snowy field wearing snowshoes and carrying packs over their backs, or little men in bathtubs rolling into the scene and rolling across the bathtub on wheels. Here's a student interviewed after the experiment. Toward the end of the experiment, I began to feel very uneasy. I thought as if my whole body was going to be torn apart, possibly because I had nothing to do and just lie there.

He said he wouldn't go through with it again, even if he was given $400 a day. Dr. Cameron was inspired by Hebb's work with sensory deprivation. But unlike Hebb, who paid students well for being test subjects and let them stop the experiment as soon as they wanted, Dr. Cameron used unwitting psychiatric patients. The longest any student lasted before asking Hebb to stop the experiment was five days. One of Dr. Cameron's patients spent 35 days in a sensory isolation chamber, which is basically a box that he had built in the converted stables behind the hospital. Dr. Cameron's patients spent 35 days in a sensory isolation chamber,

which is basically a box that he had built in the converted stables behind the hospital. Cameron thought that confining his patients to a dark box may force them to better accept psychic driving messages. And he went far beyond this extreme sensory isolation. He drugged patients, too, with LSD or a variety of barbiturates. Some patients would also undergo electroconvulsive shock therapy up to 30 times what was considered normal. He called this depatterning. The goal of this intensive shock therapy

was to reduce patients to a childlike state, often with no memory, unable to speak, or even go to the bathroom. He believed that he could, quote, break up the pathways of the brain, and then repattern them with new psychic driving messages. Breaking someone's resistance down by all these massive drugs and electroshocks and insulin comas and sleep and sensory deprivation.

It's an attempt to break down any of the normal coping and resistance mechanisms that individuals have to deal with stress. By the way, Dr. Weinstein's interest in Dr. Cameron and the Allen, it isn't just academic. It's personal. His father, Lou Weinstein, was one of Cameron's patients.

Reading about sensory isolation is one thing, and then recognizing that my father is in this room for two months in sensory deprivation with his eyes covered and his hands covered and hearing voices hundreds of thousands of times. I mean, it's mind-boggling. Well, what happened was that over the Christmas holidays of 1955, my father's anxiety attacks increased, particularly his panic episodes.

He had been seeing a psychiatrist in Montreal and was feeling that nothing good was happening. And my father was someone, as part of his needing to have the best, was looking for the best psychiatrist who could treat him. And at that time, Ewan Cameron at the Allen Memorial was world famous. When I finally got his records it just corroborated what I had been reading about in terms of Cameron's papers. But the actual wording, the nursing notes, the lack of empathy shown by Cameron was astounding. The pitiful pictures of my father that are painted in the notes are a little difficult to to read frankly and it's it's unbelievable to hear the aggressive attempts to break down my father and to

basically turn him into a two-year-old. I mean he was soiling himself, urinating, just sort of an experimental animal unfortunately. One day my father went into the hospital age 49 and that was the end of his life and the end of my life, the end of my childhood, as I knew it. Cameron did write reports about his work that were published in various medical journals, but the full extent and the impact of his experiments were not revealed until decades later. He never had to answer for his methods or face justice. He died climbing a mountain with my youngest brother. Dr. Cameron died at the age of 65, just three years after resigning from the island.

He had a heart condition that he had not disclosed to me and probably should not have taken that hike, but it was up one of the mountains that he really wanted to climb. It was one that he frequently talked about. And there were about three quarters of the way up and he stopped for rest. And my youngest brother looked around and he had passed out and had died. Dr. Cameron was celebrated in his obituaries as a man dedicated to science and medicine. People like you, and your relationship with people is good. A year before he left the Allen, Dr. Cameron did admit that psychic driving,

those repetitive messages, did not work. And once he left the Allen, the next director launched an evaluation of depatterning the extreme electroshock treatments. The treatment was found to be ineffective and damaging and was banned. Not all of Cameron's documents are in the archives at the American Psychiatric Association. Before Cameron's family donated them, his son Duncan removed certain files and they were destroyed. He later claimed he was concerned about the privacy of patients. But what other information might be missing from the archives? What if these experiments weren't really about advancing medicine and finding a cure for schizophrenia?

What if there was another goal behind learning to control people's minds? That went way beyond the Allen. On June 1st, 1951, a meeting took place at Montreal's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which brought together the military, medical and scientific elite from Canada, the UK and the US. Cameron's colleague, Donald Hebb, was invited to that meeting because there was great interest in his work on sensory deprivation. We were asked by the Defence Research Board to see if we could find any means of defense against the brainwashing procedure for the Canadian soldier who fell into the hands of an enemy. Also at that Ritz meeting were agents for a new American spy service called

the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. They were interested in Hebb, but it was what Cameron was doing, his adaptation of Hebb's work, his psychic driving treatments, that really interested them. So a CIA front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, paid him a visit, suggesting he apply for a grant. And that's how the CIA started funding Cameron's experiments, which now made him part of a much, much larger clandestine program, which the CIA called MKUltra. That's next time on Brainwashed.

Under the cover of MKUltra, the CIA hired prostitutes to give LSD to their clients in order to help the United States fight communism. It was Operation Midnight Climax. 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.

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