Ben: The manual was all about how to obtain information from quote resistant sources. It went on to become the basis for the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. This is Part 5. Duncan: Well, I think that I would feel sad about that. [citation needed]. That was in December of 1959, and according to the lawsuit (via the Consumer Law Group), Cameron diagnosed Morrow as having "nervousness and tension." With the results of the Manhattan project, Cameron feared that without proper re-organization of society, atomic weapons could fall into the hands of new, fearsome aggressors. [27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. Ben: Did you ever get a sense of at least some of the things that he was trying to accomplish while he was at the Allan? Alison said that when her mother returned, it was no longer her mother. Kinzer: This idea of some evil scientists taking control of someone else's mind is a wonderfully appealing trope, and it's been used repeatedly in very popular movies and books and stories. Skip . He didn't pull punches, saying, "We hanged Nazis for doing the sort of things Cameron did.". from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. father. He studied Medicine at the University of Glasgow and obtained his degree in 1924. . In 1928, Cameron left Baltimore for the Burghlzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, where he studied under Hans W. Maier, the successor of Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking. Hebb submitted his findings to the CIA, and it ended up being just the beginning. (Rubenstein LS. What started as short-term depression before the Allan, morphed into chronic depression, as well as diagnosed schizophrenia and bipolar disorder afterwards. In 1933, he married Jean C. Rankine, whom he had met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. Duncan Cameron: No. He argued that people with mental illnesses could spread and transmit their diseases. Cameron wanted to build an inventive psychiatric institution to determine rapid ways for societal control while demanding a psychological economy that did not center itself around guilt and guilt complexes. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. [8] Donald Hebb the psychiatrist who started the whole mess with his sensory deprivation experiments had even less kind things to say: "Cameron was irresponsible criminally stupid. Donald Cameron of Lochiel (c.1700 - October 1748), was an influential Highland Clan Chief known for his magnanimous and gallant nature. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, money from John Wilson McConnell of the Montreal Star, and a gift of Sir Hugh Allan's mansion on Mount Royal, the Allan Memorial Institute for psychiatry was founded. He published a book called Remembering[18] and extended psychiatric links to human biology. This must be very difficult, very complicated for them. Today, we're talking to one of the only people who will stand up for Dr. Cameron. Scottish-American psychiatrist Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron led and conducted these experiments. He actually has a smile. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. Ben: OK. Fair. You can try, The 1963 "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, "CIA's Secret Brainwashing Experiment" (1984), "Brainwashed: The Secret CIA Experiments in Canada" (2017), Jim Turner and Joseph Rauh's lawsuit debrief: "Anatomy Of A Public Interest Case Against The CIA,", Send us a direct message on Reddit. We put this to Harvey Weinstein, the psychiatrist we heard from earlier, whose father was a patient at the Allan. If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 4 yet, you can find them here, here,here,and here. Hes in his mid-80s now. Were they *destroyed* or did you just take the patients name out? He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the CIA. And, later on to guidebooks for what we now call enhanced interrogation at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. To see some of the things that have happened are very upsetting. The victims and their lawyers want us to remember that this story isnt over. In 1926, he served as assistant medical officer there[9] and was introduced to psychiatrist Sir David Henderson, a student of Swiss-born US psychiatrist Adolf Meyer. Camerons techniques have no therapeutic validity whatsoever; they were comparable to Nazi medical atrocities. So you can see that the work of Ewen Cameron, filtered through Gottlieb, definitely informs the interrogation techniques, if we want to call them that, that the United States has been using on its prisoners in Guantanamo and in black sites around the world. And Mary Morrow? After he left, his position as chair of the department of psychiatry was handed to Robert Cleghorn. Take a guess. Duncan: He probably did, but I dont think I could remember the specifics of it. Ex-husband of Enid Agnes Maud Watson. It is a rare thing that a psychiatrist of his worldwide reputation and capacity should be a resource available to a small mountain community. For years, the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron or, more accurately, the families of those patients have been trying to get compensation for the unthinkable experiments their loved ones were subjected to. AIan Cameron followed in the footsteps of his father and became a director at Panmure Gordon in 1957. North America. And so even all these years later, it's part of my life. . He did technically, because nothing says "wonders" has to be a good thing. And one of these risks was the treatment that he was using. And he put Camerons treatment program under the microscope. Case of Gail Kastner: The shock treatment turned the then 19 year old honours student into a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle and urinated on the floor. At that point her affluent family abandoned her and she lived in poverty. He had various people record the tapes sometimes including the patient's loved ones and it was, on the whole, incredibly traumatizing. Donald Ewen Cameron was the key figure in the Montreal experiments. He clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research long before the Agency front started to fund him. Results were telling: They became super sensitive to the sensory stimuli they did receive, and then, things started getting really weird. A notoriously tough climb, he did it with his son James, and when he got to the top, he had a heart attack and died almost instantly. Most of the patient files are gone, and according to WBUR, they weren't just misplaced, they were destroyed. Cameron Cemetery. Ewen married Agnes Cameron (born Bell) in 1867, at age 35 at marriage place. Amory: Theres a reason that all the photos of Ewen Cameron are from more than 50 years ago. Amory: This is information that may have proven invaluable in holding Cameron, as well as McGill, the CIA, and the Canadian Government accountable for what happened at the Allan. Amory: Duncan knows how to be very careful about what he says. Amory: And, they delivered, with a full transcript of Duncans deposition from November, 1983. Which suggests it was for purposes of, not closure, but of not wanting information to come to light that was in the papers. [clarification needed] Those Germans affected by the events that led to World War II were of utmost concern. Some would bang their heads against the walls relentlessly, trying to get the helmets off and that's when he realized he could just put them back into a medically-induced coma and play the tapes for as long as he wanted. Montreal's CTV says that by the time she died in 2011, she had spent the last 20 years of her life as an "infant," unable to allow anyone near her head without a terrible reaction. Amory: Sarah Anne Johnson, whose grandmother Val Orlikow was a patient of Ewen Camerons, has a response to Duncan that, considering what her family has been through as a result of his fathers experimentation, is surprising. Memorials. And they found his work next to worthless. Donald Ewen Cameron ((1901-12-24)24 December 1901 (1967-09-08)8 September 1967)[1] was a Scottish-born psychiatrist. If I put you through this program, within 24 hours to 48 hours you'll be in a diagnosable psychotic state. McGill's then-director of psychology, Dr. Donald Hebb, took the money and set up experiments using his ready-and-waiting pool of test subjects: students. He has an open, amused look on his face. Its in the Netflix show, Stranger Things: Amory: Or the hit video game Call of Duty: Ben: They're talking about it on The West Wing:C.J. In 1984, New Scientist reported on a lawsuit filed on behalf of some of the people who ended up a part of MKUltra's Sub-project 68. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? He demanded that political systems be watched, and that German people needed to be monitored due to their "personality type", which he claimed results in the conditions that give rise to the dictatorial power of an authoritarian overlord. Heres John Marks again. Lloyd Schrier, son of Cameron patient Esther Schrier, told the CBC, "Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say." And he didn't achieve that either. The described types would have to be eliminated from society if there was to be peace and progress. Birthdate: June 04, 1906. In the late 1940s, Cameron presented his ideas in a lecture entitled Dangerous Men and Women. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all senior partners in the company. Indian River. And he always had a little book of science fiction by the bedside. And, until theres true accountability for what happened and what is still happening, it never will be. Ben: Sure, but I mean, in terms of trying to help cure people of mental illness or anything like that, not necessarily his process, but his end goal. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allen, a small town in Scotland, on December 24, 1901. That was the case for people like Phyllis Goldberg. So we don't have. Amory: He said he did not destroy documents, that he didn't know about that. He moved to Upstate New York where he studied aging and memory at two hospitals in Albany. The U.S. wanted to know just how such a thing could possibly happen, and Dr. Ewen Cameron had a theory: brainwashing. And it was a great shock to everybody because he was 65 and in many ways, you know, going full throttle and at the top of his career. She had no idea how to boil water, much less care for a child. Operating under the umbrella of MKUltra were as many as 162 sub-projects, with as many as 80 different organizations involved in research. [1] In papers published during this time he linked RNA to memory. The idea that people needed to sit down and talk about their problems was the old way of doing things, and Cameron was living in an era where things were getting more and more automated. Under that program, more than 80,000 suspected North Vietnamese sympathizers were interrogated by US forces and their allies. Ben: Camerons research could never happen today at least not lawfully. In the final installment ofMadness," we sit down with Duncan, and we explore the shocking ways his father's methods are still being used today. It was reported that none of the patients sent to the Radio Telemetry Lab showed any signs of improvement. In Cameron, the CIA had a psychiatrist, conveniently outside the United States, who was willing to do terminal experiments in electroshock, sensory deprivation, drug testing, and all of the above combined. She said that at the time, Cameron was something of a celebrity. Another patient was suffering from leg pains that no one had been able to diagnose. Both of her brothers were heavily into drugs by the age of 10 and dealt with serious mental illness throughout their lives. According to Cameron's psychiatric analysis of the German people, they were not suitable to have children or hold positions of authority because of a genetic tendency to organize society in a way that fostered fearsome aggression and would lead to war rather than peace; he would repeatedly use the German as the archetypal character structure on which to ground the most psychologically deviant humans. [citation needed]. And there some of them were high risk ones. A Canadian government dismissed the CIAs role as a side issue or red herring; Ottawas Justice Department denied legal responsibility, offering each victim a nugatory $20,000 nuisance payment. Marian: It's become so embedded in our narrative, in our pop culture, without people really understanding that it happened It was real. Ewen Cameron experimented on people right up until he left the Allan in 1964. That's absolutely the stuff of a terrifying Netflix horror series, but it was very real and it destroyed an unknown number of lives. Many spent this period of time in what he called the "sleep room," where they were drugged into a medically-induced coma that they were brought out of only to be given three meals a day and the occasional trip to the bathroom. In 1938 he moved to Albany, New York, where he received his diplomate in psychiatry and thus was certified in psychiatry. Duncan: I'm Duncan Cameron. We love making Endless Thread, and we want to be able to keep making it far into the future. Amory: In spite of Camerons ambition and prestige, he never helped find a cure for mental illness, he never won a Nobel Prize for psychiatry. Everyone who makes a monthly donation will get access to upcoming bonus content from the making of our series. Cameron's work was funded under MKUltra's subproject 68. Did he ever talk about that? Amory: Dr. Ewen Cameron will never be able to respond to the intergenerational trauma created by his work. He reported that "the subject's very identity had begun to disintegrate," and that's when someone should, ya know, stop. Cameron decided that Germans would be most likely to commit atrocities due to their historical, biological, racial and cultural past and their particular psychological nature. Canada's McGill University has owned up to the part it played in MKUltra's Sub-project 68, and they say that it really started before Dr. Ewen Cameron even got involved. And I feel for them for that. Heres journalist John Marks. Anyone with any appreciation of the complexity of the human mind would not expect that you could erase an adult mind and then add things back with this stupid psychic driving. And we would take off. Ironically, his lasting impact would be on how to destroy the human mind, not how to repair it. Amory: This is a hard reality for the family that Ewen Cameron left behind. Kinzer: Later on, it became the basis for manuals that the CIA provided in the 1980s to police forces in Latin America that were known to practice torture. As time has worn on, its become the families of those victims who shoulder the burden. She was a former captain of the Scottish field hockey team, a competitive tennis player,[11] and lecturer in mathematics at the University of Glasgow. [17] Cameron argued that it was necessary for behavioral scientists to act as the social planners of society, and that the United Nations could provide a conduit for implementing his ideas for applying psychiatric elements to global governance and politics. Cameron titled this procedure "intrapsychic" (a term derived from the psycho-somatic relationship of hospital patients). He recruited psychoanalysts, social psychiatrists and biologists globally to develop the psychiatry program at McGill[12] From its beginning in 1943, the Allan Memorial Institute was run on an "open door" basis, allowing patients to leave if they wished, as opposed to the "closed door" policy of other hospitals in Canada in the early 1940s. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. memorial page for Donald Ewen Cameron (1852-5 Feb 1892), Find a Grave Memorial ID 170055188, citing Cameron Cemetery, Indian River . Kinzer: If Cameron had failed to find an effective means of mind control despite carrying out the most reckless experiments, in which he was willing to take any kind of a grotesque step in an effort to find that key, this must have helped feed Gottlieb's conclusion that the whole thing didn't exist. . Stephen: So they created a manual, which basically was for intelligence personnel. Ben: Robert Cleghorn, a former member of Camerons staff, took over after Cameron stepped down. This personality type poses a danger to those closest to them, especially children. There was also Donald Hebb, who ran McGills psychology department at the time Cameron was running its psychiatry department. Amory: They bounced around between foster homes and orphanages for years, experienced emotional and physical abuse. "Now, that was a foolish mistake. [30][bettersourceneeded], In 1980, the Canadian investigative news program The Fifth Estate interviewed two former patients of Cameron's who were among several of his ex patients who were at that time suing the CIA for the long term effects of Cameron's treatment. According to what his son, Duncan, told WBUR, it was 1967 when he decided to climb Street Mountain in the Adirondacks. [31][2] In her book, In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada,[32] author Anne Collins explored the history of Cameron and Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute. She said she received 12 boxes of her husbands papers after he died, but that, quote, If I had these papers, I wouldnt necessarily let you see them. There are a few ways to reach us: This content was originally created for audio. Marian believes all of this was a result of her mother going into the Allan. I then *went through* the papers, because I felt that it would be improper to leave in the papers any paper that identified patients. Traces of some survived, including documentation on Sub-project 42 also known as Operation Midnight Climax and sub-project 68. Amory: Duncan struggles dealing with his dads legacy because he cant speak to why his dad did what he did. And he was always very fascinated by what the future held for us all. Their diagnosis was amnesia and hysteria, per a short commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He died three years later. Amory: In the early 60s, MK-ULTRA director Sidney Gottlieb took the so-called treatments Cameron used on his patients at the Allan and brought them back to the CIA. Duncan: And I've said Im unable to do that. Toby Ziegler:In the '50s, it was the CIA mind control research program begun in response to the Chinese attempt on U.S. prisoners. In some cases, the same phrases reappear all through these. 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