Abruptly and unexpectedly, Dr. Cameron suffered a life-ending heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967. 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. And in that sense, I think his ambition overrode his skills and his ability to do the research. 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. It's hardwired into the brain. And he didn't achieve that either. The insecure man "They are the driven crowds that makes the army of the authoritarian overlord; they are the stuffing of conservatism mediocrity is their god. Ben: Did he have any favorite sayings or idiosyncrasies or things like that that you remember or that made an impression on you when you were younger? Amory: Ben and I are in an apartment in Washington D.C. thats bursting with morning light and books, and were flipping through some of our hosts old family photos. Alison believes those random phrases her mother would sometimes say were from the recordings that she'd been forced to listen to for hours. According to The Guardian, it started with playing tapes designed to tap into the reason the patient sought help in the first place. Duncan: I started work at the State Department just a day or so before Kennedy was assassinated. Her family sued, first based on the treatment alone, then again, after discovering she was a part of the MKUltra program. It was reported that none of the patients sent to the Radio Telemetry Lab showed any signs of improvement. Her life was sad. His list of credentials was so long it's impossible to list them all, but for starters, his resume included the University of Glasgow and Johns Hopkins, and in the 1930s, he was lauded for setting up a series of psychiatric clinics. When it came time to evaluate Nazi leaders ahead of the Nuremberg Trials, he was one of a group of internationally renowned mental health professionals who were sent to decide just what was going on in the heads of some of the worst war criminals the world had ever seen. Cameron was born on December 24, 1901, in Scotland and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. She said that at the time, Cameron was something of a celebrity. 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. The guilt of her baby's deadly staph infection stayed with her, and when she became pregnant with her second, and the CBC says she went into Cameron's care in February of 1960. [citation needed][21]. I mean his father was a very prominent psychiatrist, so destroying rather than preserving personal papers of someone of that prominence is a very unusual thing, especially for a family member to have done. 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. Indian River. That's absolutely the stuff of a terrifying Netflix horror series, but it was very real and it destroyed an unknown number of lives. On March 10, Cameron's notes read: "She is disoriented as to time only and is probably in her second stage of depatterning. 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. Ben: When Amory and I spoke to Duncan Cameron about his dad, he also told us about his own work, as a lawyer. Here, patients were exposed to a range of RF and electromagnetic signals and monitored for changes in behaviour. And he admits that the papers he removed are now destroyed. Ewen Donald Cameron. Cameron used his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and parent in society. Donald Ewen Cameron ((1901-12-24)24 December 1901 (1967-09-08)8 September 1967)[1] was a Scottish-born psychiatrist. Her family sued, first based on the treatment alone, then again, after discovering she was a part of the MKUltra program. He tried a variety of things, including multiple electroshock therapy sessions a day and massive doses of drugs including LSD. Donald Hebb and Ewen Cameron were competitors; they did not collaborate, though Cameron incorporated Hebb's sensory isolation techniques into his own diabolical arsenal of psychiatry's instruments of torture. 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. The first was for 18 days and the second for 29 days, all while hearing endless recorded messages and being subjected to a series of electroshock therapy sessions. The psychiatric community could have questioned his methods, but they remained silent. He reported that "the subject's very identity had begun to disintegrate," and that's when someone should, ya know, stop. [25], Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by "erasing" existing memories and "reprogramming" the psyche. In 1938 he moved to Albany, New York, where he received his diplomate in psychiatry and thus was certified in psychiatry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cameron continued his work on memory and its relationship to aging. Patients were tested in the Radio Telemetry Laboratory, which was built under Cameron's direction. We love making Endless Thread, and we want to be able to keep making it far into the future. The only cure for mental illness, he theorized, was to eliminate its "carriers" from society altogether. Duncan: Well, I didnt destroy the documents. [citation needed]. The title is The Understanding Man. Lake Placid in particular, and the northern Adirondacks in general, have lost suddenly, tragically, but in a sense, beautifully, probably their most distinguished citizen. That right there is getting into some shady territory, but the promise of a $10,000 grant the equivalent of just over $100,000 today had to be pretty tempting. Though he did visit the Allan Memorial on occasion. Amory: He doesnt explicitly say that he was the one who did the destroying. Cameron began to abandon the Freudian unconscious in favour of a social constructivist's view of mental illness. (McCoy, 2007) Indeed, Hebb and Camerons contribution as pioneers who designed the psychological paradigm for torture used by the CIA was acknowledged by The McGill Daily, in 2012. Cameron's concerns extended to his policies determining who should have children and advance to positions of authority. Her niece later said, "She had electric shock equipment put on her head so many times that it [remained] in her subconscious." If he had a choice he would have kept living forever. In fact, he might have enjoyed those more. Memories are not the most reliable form of evidence. This must be very difficult, very complicated for them. Or do you remember any of --. . 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. He came up with the idea that if he presented the world and confronted the Germans with the atrocities committed during the war, the world and the Germans would refrain from repeated acts of extreme aggression. Ben: So its fitting that, today, most of what people hear about the CIAs search for mind control also seems to come from fantasy and popular fiction. And he was a fast driver. And it's still hugely controversial: In 2019, The New York Times published drawings done by prisoners who had been subjected to these torture methods at Guantanamo Bay, and it's not for the faint of heart. Yeah so it was sad. Patients would be subjected to messages repeated hundreds of thousands of times, as they were kept in their coma for up to a month. Think of all the books and the movies that are about mind control. Other similar psychiatric diagnoses of Germany were published during this time. So what led the CIA to get onto this fantasy? His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all senior partners in the company. She never did get her children back. The behaviour of a mental patient could resemble the behaviour of a patient with, for example, syphilis, and then a somatic cause could be deduced for a psychological illness. Josh Crane Twitter Producer, Podcasts & New ProgramsJosh is a producer for podcasts and new programs at WBUR. Ex-husband of Enid Agnes Maud Watson. Though he does seem to imply that it was done by him or someone in the family. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936. Shes also signed on to the class-action lawsuit against McGill University, the Canadian government, and the CIA. The idea was turning the mind into a fresh slate for the next part of the process, called "psychic driving.". The paper stated that German culture and its people would have offspring bound to become a threat to world peace in 30 years. We encourage you to research and examine these records . Cameron viewed German society throughout history as continually giving rise to fearsome aggression. Lloyd Schrier, son of Cameron patient Esther Schrier, told the CBC, "Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say." Cameron stayed there for seven years and was made physician-in-charge of the Reception Unit of the Provincial Mental Hospital. This is Part 5. And so even all these years later, it's part of my life. Husband of Marielene Schlumberger. The lawsuits were dismissed, even though it was later shown there were a higher-than-usual number of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, presumably to increase Cameron's subject pool. As for the ongoing lawsuits, some of the plaintiffs have actually contacted Duncan wondering if hed be willing to support their efforts. 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. Ben: Her dad couldnt afford childcare, so soon after Marians mother went into the Allan, social services took Marian and her two younger brothers away because there was no parent to take care of them. And that kind of explains why, when they were ordered to stop their depatterning and psychic driving of patients, they just sort of didn't. Then we brought them down I think it was probably during one of my infrequent jaunts up there I brought them down in my car, and I then took them over and deposited them at the American Psychiatric Association. Amory: In the Lake Placid community where Dr. Camerons family spent the bulk of their summers, his sudden death from a heart attack while hiking was big news. The human significance of his dark legacy was brought to public attention when nine of his Canadian victims filed lawsuits in 1980s twenty-one years after Camerons death. Amory: The study, which was published a few months before Cameron died, found that Camerons methods exposed his patients to unnecessary risk, and that there was no clinical proof his methods were any more effective than standard forms of treatment. Ben: But there is reason to believe that these documents arent just missing. But the government agency backing his experiments at the Allan did find a way to make use of his methods. These did nothing to calm the feud which continued through succeeding reigns to when Donald's grandson Ewen, the 13th chief, fought at the battle of Flodden where James IV was killed. You know, all of us not only respected him, but loved him, and not just myself, but my brothers. Amory: We definitely will. She's the exception, though, and the CBC says that 2020 saw others like Lana Ponting, who was just 16 when she was sent to the sleep room hoping that year, it would finally be their year, thanks to a class action lawsuit filed in 2019. . Amory: This is from The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, is the name of the paper. Did he ever talk about that? She had no idea how to boil water, much less care for a child. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association (19521953), Canadian Psychiatric Association (19581959),[2] American Psychopathological Association (1963),[3] Society of Biological Psychiatry (1965)[4] and the World Psychiatric Association (19611966). It is true. Amory: He remembers his dad working a lot during this time, which, definitely tracks. Rauh: A question that Mr. Turner wanted me to ask was what happened to the papers identifying the patients? The U.S. wanted to know just how such a thing could possibly happen, and Dr. Ewen Cameron had a theory: brainwashing. 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. Amory: But even on their long drives from Montreal to upstate New York, Duncan says his dad never really talked about work. Cameron reported to John Gittinger, an agent in charge of overseeing parts of MKUltra. Just as Sigrid Schultz stated in Germany will try it again, Cameron fostered a fear for Germans and their genetic determination. And they haven't been super successful. Please note . By that time, information on Cameron's sleep room projects was coming out, and there were all kinds of people who were very quick to distance themselves from it. 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. 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. And he put Camerons treatment program under the microscope. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Like Freud, Cameron maintained that the family was the nucleus of social behavior and anxieties later in life were spawned during childhood. The described types were the enemies of society and life. 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. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. That, says McGill University, was the work of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who performed experiments so horrifying he's been called "Scotland's Mengele." 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