-Caveat Lector-
http://www.radix.net/~jcturner/980106-Fifth-Estate.htm
This week on the fifth estate --
"The Sleep Room" [January 6, 1998]
When Canadians first learned that CIA brainwashing
experiments had been carried out on Canadians... in
Canada... with the knowledge of our government, it was
tremendous shock. As the fifth estate was first to
report in 1980, the work that Dr. Ewan Cameron oversaw
at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal was
shocking. Now, the story of Cameron's experiments and
the victims' struggle for justice have been made into
a riveting movie, to be broadcast on CBC Television
this Sunday and Monday nights. For the victims of The
Sleep Room, the horror has never really ended.
-------------------------------------------------------
VELMA ORLIKOW (patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron): The man
who I had thought cared about what happened to me
didn't give a damn. I was a fly, just a fly.
VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER: Revisiting Canada's infamous
Sleep Room.
LINDA MACDONALD (patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron): I
was...had to be toilet-trained. I was a vegetable.
VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER: In the 1960s, Dr. Ewen Cameron
conducted CIA-funded experiments on troubled Canadian
patients he was meant to help.
ROBERT LOGIE (former patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron): It
wasn't treatment for anything. It was out and out
guinea pigs for brainwashing experiments.
VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER: A fifth estate investigation
revealed how one Canadian government secretly
supported these horrific experiments, and then another
blocked the victims' fight for justice.
JAMES TURNER (lawyer): The Mulroney government, in
effect, stabbed its citizens in the back at every
turn.
VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER: Linden MacIntyre with the
real-life victims of the Sleep Room, and, behind the
scenes of a new CBC movie about this nightmare chapter
in our history.
* * * * *
VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER: The fifth estate with Trish
Wood, Victor Malarek, Francine Pelletier, and tonight
Linden MacIntyre.
LINDEN MACINTYRE: Welcome to the fifth estate. When
Canadians first learned that CIA brainwashing
experiments had been carried out on Canadians in
Canada, with the knowledge of our government, it was a
tremendous shock. As the fifth estate was first to
report in 1984, the work that Dr. Ewen Cameron oversaw
at his Montreal clinic was shocking. Now the story of
Cameron's experiments and the victims' struggle for
justice have been made into a riveting movie, to be
broadcast on CBC television this Sunday and Monday
nights. For the victims of the Sleep Room, the horror
has never really ended.
Even if you don't know the history of the Allan
Memorial Institute in Montreal, it looks like a
natural setting for a movie, a horror movie maybe. But
then, the truth about what happened to hundreds of
psychiatric patients there a long time ago is a horror
story. And now it has become a movie, a dramatized
account of a bleak chapter in the history of Canadian
psychiatry, produced by a former fifth estate
documentary maker, Bernard Zuckerman. The central
character in the TV movie is a world-renowned
psychiatrist at the Allan in the early sixties. His
name was Dr. Ewen Cameron.
BERNARD ZUCKERMAN (producer, "The Sleep Room"): It's
the classic story of good turning to evil in its most
simplistic terms. Dr. Cameron started off as someone
who was probably one of the most enlightened
psychiatrists in the country, but then something
happened. And whatever happened, suddenly here is this
enlightened doctor, this noble doctor, who begins
doing more and more and more bizarre experiments on
his patients, to the point where he is destroying the
minds of hundreds of people.
DR. EWEN CAMERON (clip): These are the days and hours
of the ....
MACINTYRE: Inspired by the exuberant post-war optimism
in technology, Cameron thought he'd achieved a major
scientific breakthrough: how to repair a damaged human
mind. The media rejoiced, even coined a phrase which
would become a tragically silly oxymoron: beneficial
brainwashing.
Linda MacDonald was a young mother with five children
under the age of five when she started feeling low.
Her family doctor knew just the man to make her
better.
LINDA MACDONALD (former patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron):
I was tired, I was depressed, my back was hurting, and
so he said to the children's father, Why don't you go
to Montreal and visit this Dr. Ewen Cameron, this
famous man, who has all of these accolades, and have
an assessment? So we went. My medical file even says
that I took my guitar with me. And that was the end of
my life. Within three weeks Dr. Cameron decided to
call me an acute schizophrenic, and ship me up to the
sleep room.
MACINTYRE: How long did they put you to sleep for?
MACDONALD: I was in a coma for 86 days.
MACINTYRE: Eighty-six days of unbroken sleep.
MACDONALD: Eighty-six...comatose, yeah, total comatose
state.
MACINTYRE: The theory was simple: erase a disturbed
mind and start all over again. One of Dr. Cameron's
colleagues at the time was Dr. Peter Roper.
DR. PETER ROPER (former colleague of Dr. Cameron): The
aim, I think, really, was to wipe out the patterns of
thought and behaviour which were detrimental to the
patient which was sick, and replace them with healthy
patterns of thought and behaviour. I think this may
have been stimulated by the effects of the American
prisoners-of-war in Korea, how they seemed to have
been brainwashed.
MACINTYRE: The movie, called "The Sleep Room",
dramatizes one technique for brainwashing: extreme
sessions of electro-shock therapy -- massive jolts of
electricity, three or four times a day for weeks.
According to her hospital records, Linda MacDonald had
100 of these treatments. She entered hospital for
treatment of what we can now guess was postpartum
depression; her records show the results of shock and
radical drug therapy: May l5th, "Shows some
confusion..."; June 3rd, "Knows her name, but that's
about all..."; June llth, "Doesn't know her name...".
MACDONALD: I had to be toilet-trained. I was a
vegetable. I had no identity, I had no memory, I never
existed in the world before - like a baby, just like a
baby that has to be toilet-trained.
MACINTYRE: She eventually went home, her depression
gone, and her entire previous life gone with it.
MACDONALD (looking at photo album): ...and this is one
of the twins, it was in '62, before I went to the
Allan. And this is the same one, I think. I just look
at the pictures and I know who that is, who they are,
but I don't remember them as my children at all. I
mean, I know that they came from my body, but there's
no ... that's all. I don't know ... and that's because
I was told that. So these are my children.
MACINTYRE: Robert LOGIE was little more than a child
himself when he was referred to Dr. Cameron. He was
18. He had a sore leg; his doctor thought it was all
in his head and sent him to the Allan. Like Linda
MacDonald, he went through a nightmare of shock
therapy and drugs, including LSD.
ROBERT LOGIE (former patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron):
Well, I was given LSD about every second day,
injected, and sometimes it was mixed with sodium
amytol and other drugs.
MACINTYRE: Most of the drugs were experimental, but
seemed suitable for brainwashing, or as Cameron
preferred to call it, "de-patterning". Then, during
the long sleep, the patient would be forced to listen
to subliminal message that were supposed to print new,
sometimes bizarre thoughts on his blank mind.
LOGIE: I was aware of the speaker under my pillow, I
was aware of the words.
MACINTYRE: Which were?
LOGIE: You killed your mother.
MACINTYRE: You killed your mother.
LOGIE: Yeah.
MACINTYRE: Who was alive and well.
LOGIE: Who was alive and well. And
MACINTYRE: Over and over again this voice is....
LOGIE: Well, like I say, it takes about two seconds to
say that message, and this was going on for 23 days.
And when I went home, after being there, when I went
home, my mother was there, and why was she there,
and...it didn't make any sense.
MACINTYRE: So what was going on here? Dr. Ewen Cameron
was, at one point, head of the World Psychiatric
Association, and is still admired by some of his
former colleagues. Dr. Peter Roper:
(to Dr. Roper) What is the possibility that we had a
good, well-motivated man whose ego and ambition took
charge of his professionalism and led him into some
fairly dark places?
ROPER: Well, I would put that chance as pretty slight.
I think it's more likely that, if he'd been around to
defend himself when this story came out, we'd have a
totally different picture of it.
MACINTYRE: What would he say? Put yourself in his
shoes. What would he say?
ROPER: I think he'd say, Look, I treated these
patients to the best of my ability. I didn't get all
of them well, but most of them I got better than they
were.
MACINTYRE: But in the movie, Dr. Cameron will not come
off so well.
MOVIE CLIP ("The Sleep Room"): Most of these people
were discharged as cured....
MACINTYRE: It accurately shows that many of his
patients, inaccurately diagnosed as schizophrenics,
were permanently damaged by his methods. Eventually
even Cameron had doubts about his experiments. He left
the Allan in 1964, died of a heart attack three years
later. By then the hospital had quietly abandoned the
experiments.
MOVIE CLIP: You destroyed these people for nothing.
You can't just walk away from this, Cameron. It's come
out and it'll ruin you. You can't walk away.
MACINTYRE: Nobody knows for sure exactly how many
people Dr. Cameron and his colleagues exposed to the
program of chemical and electroshock treatments they
called de-patterning and psychic driving, a process
which some experts have since called barbaric. But
many years would pass before there would be any public
or official acknowledgement of what those damaged
patients had been through. It would take a dramatic
disclosure in the late seventies that the Allan
Memorial had been part of a cold-war program of
brainwashing experiments, paid for, in part, by the
CIA.
Hidden among its most sensitive files were CIA records
documenting a project called MKULTRA. Between 1957 and
1961, a CIA front funneled about $62,000 U.S. for
brainwashing research by Dr. Ewen Cameron. The
American media got the story first, but the fifth
estate exposed the magnitude of the human tragedy.
ERIC MALLING (clip, the fifth estate): Experimental
drugs, including LSD, were administered to human
guinea pigs. The patients were never told that their
treatment was part of CIA experiment.
MACINTYRE: One of those patients was Velma Orlikow of
Winnipeg. She'd been at the Allan in the late fifties
for treatment of depression. She happened to be
married to a member of Parliament, David Orlikow of
the NDP. She'd considered Dr. Cameron a near saint.
Now she was being told she'd been betrayed by him.
VELMA ORLIKOW (former patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron): It
was an awful feeling to realize, when I found this
out, that the man whom I had thought cared about what
happened to me didn't give a damn. I was a fly, just a
fly.
MACINTYRE: First she felt hurt, then she got angry and
decided to sue one of the most powerful institutions
in the world, the CIA.
DAVID ORLIKOW (husband of Velma): As a matter of fact,
when she said she wanted to sue the CIA, I said,
You're crazy. How can a couple of ... how can a hick
from Winnipeg sue the CIA?
MACINTYRE: But she did, along with eight other former
patients, a massive lawsuit that would consume many
years and become an obsession for a distinguished
American civil liberties lawyer named Joseph Rauh.
JOSEPH RAUH (lawyer): ...Cameron, all he did was what
the CIA was in effect asking him to do, and what he
said he was going to do, and he did it.
MACINTYRE: Rauh and a young assistant named James
Turner knew they were up against a formidable opponent
in the CIA, but they thought the odds would be evened
a bit by help from a natural ally. They were in for a
disappointment.
JAMES TURNER (lawyer): Well, we expected to have a
very potent ally in the form of the Canadian
government, and unfortunately, instead of helping
their own citizens, because the Canadian government
was worried about its possible liability, the Mulroney
government in effect, stabbed its citizens in the back
at every turn in the litigation.
MACINTYRE: Ottawa actually helped suppress a key piece
of information, evidence that CIA officials at the
U.S. embassy had actually apologized to the Canadian
government when the CIA experiments were first
revealed. Jim Turner is still flabbergasted.
TURNER: You've got to understand how important these
apologies and expressions of regret were. This is an
admission, this is legally admissible in court because
it is one of the parties to the litigation saying, I
did something wrong and I'm sorry I did it. That is
prima facie evidence of negligence and of wrongdoing
that goes a long, long way to bringing the case to a
timely conclusion, instead of the protracted ten years
of litigation that we had.
MACINTYRE: The movie underscores the impact of
Ottawa's refusal to give the lawyers details of the
CIA apology. The lawyers eventually upped the ante on
the fifth estate.
MOVIE CLIP: Tonight on the fifth estate, starting
revelations about the activities of the CIA in Canada.
MACINTYRE: With a publicity wave gathering momentum
and the strength of the victims' case becoming more
apparent, the CIA caved in the day before the trial
was to begin. They settled out of court for $750,000 -
at the time it was the largest settlement the CIA had
ever awarded, and it provides a dramatic finale for
the movie.
MOVIE CLIP: ...Because we made them pay. They couldn't
beat us. We won You write that down, mister.
MACINTYRE: Producer Bernard Zuckerman says, besides
the financial terms, this was a major moral victory.
ZUCKERMAN: Here you've got nine little Canadian
victims taking on probably the most powerful
institution in America, the CIA, and these little
Canadians, they win, they get the CIA to settle and
give them money and, in effect, an apology saying,
What we did is wrong.
MACINTYRE: The movie ends with the CIA settlement, but
the story didn't end there. Troubling questions would
persist, especially about the government of Canada.
So why was Ottawa so ambiguous when it came to helping
some Canadian citizens get compensation from
Washington for what they endured in a program that was
inspired mostly by American cold-war fears? Well, the
answer was simple: the government of Canada was even
more deeply involved in the Allan Memorial experiments
than the Americans. Dr. Cameron's experiments were
funded to the tune of half a million dollars by the
federal department of Health and Welfare during the
fifties, and the funding didn't stop then. They kicked
in over $51,000 after the CIA project ended in 1961,
which was when a young, stressed-out mother named
Linda MacDonald became part of the Allan Memorial
story. When she discovered that her own government had
been funding brainwashing experiments on her, she made
a dramatic decision:
(to Ms. MacDonald) You decided to take on the
government of Canada.
MACDONALD: Oh, sure. Well, hey, considering what I'd
already been through, that was a snap. You know, what
else? Why not?
MACINTYRE: It must have become obvious to you fairly
quickly that you were ramming your head into a brick
wall.
MACDONALD: Yes, yes. I'm stubborn, too. It got to the
point where every time, whether it was John Crosbie or
Ray Hnatyshyn or then the Honourable Kim Campbell, it
got to be, You guys, we're going to stay alive. And I
said that to Brian Mulroney too - if you think I'm
going away, you've got another thing coming. I'm not
going to go away.
MACINTYRE: Linda MacDonald would hound the federal
government for four years before finally, in 1992,
Ottawa grudgingly agreed to compensate her and some of
Dr. Cameron's other victims, $ 100,000 each, in
exchange for signing away the right to sue the
government or the hospital. But it was an ambiguous
victory. Ottawa refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing
at the Allan, a conclusion backed up by a legal review
of what happened there. The report, by a prominent
Progressive-Conservative lawyer relied partly on
expert advice from Dr. Frederick Grunberg, one of
Quebec's leading psychiatrists, who made two
controversial assertions: that patients hadn't
suffered irreparable harm and that they had consented
to the treatment.
DR. FREDERICK GRUNBERG (psychiatrist): Well, what I
meant is that the patient who were admitted at the
Allan Memorial Institute were patients who went in
voluntarily, so the sort of consent they gave [for]
what went on was a sort of general consent to the
hospital, the sort of consent that was given for
surgery, for any other procedure.
MACDONALD: Consent had nothing to do with it. Dr.
Cameron did not describe the treatment, he did not
clarify, he did not give any way, shape or form, any
kind of a hint at what was going to happen. That's not
consent. And I don't even know whether he talked to
me, because I'll never remember anyway.
MACINTYRE: Dr. Grunberg shares a widely held view in
his profession about the legacy of Dr. Ewen Cameron.
GRUNBERG: I think he was a misguided man. He worked on
a sort of a poor theoretical basis, and I think he was
imprudent, considering. But I am convinced, and I'm
still convinced, that he really wanted a therapeutic
breakthrough, he had this motivation that he was going
to break this terrible condition.
MACINTYRE: You seem to be saying the things that
Cameron did were awful, but he meant well, so we'll
forgive him, and the victims, or the patients, will
have to live with the consequences.
GRUNBERG: It's not a question of forgiving. As I say,
the thing is, we put what he was doing in the
perspective of his time, and a lot of awful things
were going on.
MACINTYRE: A lot of people are saying, considering the
accepted practice and the science available at the
time, this was an appropriate thing to do to you.
LOGIE: It wasn't treatment, if that's what you're
suggesting. It wasn't treatment for anything, not a
toenail or anything. It was out and out guinea pigs
for brainwashing experiments. That's what it was.
MACINTYRE: It's been more than 33 years since the
Allan put an end to the practices initiated by its
most notorious doctor. It has recovered its
world-class reputation as a leader in the treatment of
mental illness. Dr. Peter Roper was dismissed from the
Allan two years after Dr. Cameron left. One of the
reasons: he insisted on following Dr. Cameron's
technique.
MACINTYRE: You argued strenuously to continue the
de-patterning of your patients.
ROPER: Well, I felt that I had a duty to my patients
to give them the best possible treatment, and if there
were some that were not responding to any other form
of treatment, the only thing left was de-patterning
for them. Then I felt that should be done.
MACINTYRE: You sound almost nostalgic for the fifties
and sixties.
ROPER: Oh, no, it's not nostalgia. It's the question,
I think, that bothers a lot of doctors: that it's
rather sad if they're prevented from having that
treatment because of administrative, political or
other reasons which have nothing to do with good
medical practice.
MACINTYRE: For Linda MacDonald, good medical practice
in 1963 turned an emotional crisis into a horror that
would haunt a lifetime.
MACDONALD: Oh, this feels strange.
MACINTYRE: This spring she returned to the Ottawa high
school where she graduated in 1957.
ANNE ARGUE-HIGHLAND (former classmate of Linda
MacDonald): Hi, Linda, I'm Anne Argue-Highland. How
are you?
MACDONALD: Well...hi....
ARGUE-HIGHLAND: I was in the Lyre's Club. I don't know
if you remember....
MACDONALD: I don't. I don't remember at all.
ARGUE-HIGHLAND: No, I guess not.
MACDONALD (looking at year book): And all of these
people, we knew all of these people?
MACINTYRE: She has no memory of this place or those
times, or even of who she was back then.
MACDONALD: Oh, there I am. Lookit. Look at me. Did
they call me Lindy?
UNIDENTIFIED: Yeah.
MACDONALD: I am who I am today. My family tells me
that I am very much like the Linda that they knew when
I was growing up: gregarious, always talking,
laughing, singing, happy, positive person. I have no
memory of that person. All I'm grateful for is that
Cameron might have been able to wipe a memory, but he
couldn't wipe the spirit.
MACINTYRE: The fifth estate will return in a moment
....
=====
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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http://sf.indymedia.org/display.php?id=100562#100565
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