Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, 17t. The victims and their lawyers want us to remember that this story isnt over. Ben: But the Canadian and US governments could take accountability for their support of Cameron. [27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. The Canadian government also funded the project. Any documents that related to patient treatment were destroyed? [citation needed] He furthermore wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging, believing that the aged brain experienced psychosis. Old '45" Cameron Major Cameron (1663 - 1718) family tree on Geni, with over 230 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. Under that program, more than 80,000 suspected North Vietnamese sympathizers were interrogated by US forces and their allies. He theorized that attitudes and beliefs should reinforce the overall attitudes of the desired society. And, later on to guidebooks for what we now call enhanced interrogation at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And in a lot of ways, modern psychiatry has completely left behind the man who once dominated its ranks. A series of other research scandals in the 1960s resulted in stricter regulation of research practices and a more stringent code of ethics. Therefore, society should function to select out the weak and unwanted, those apt towards fearsome aggression that threatened society. 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. A stronger personality would be able to maintain itself in heavy industrial situations, he theorised, while the weaker would not be able to cope with industrial conditions. Cameron also wanted to revolutionize the way psychology and psychiatry looked at mental illness. In this manner, somatic causes could be compared. You can see other fellow humans. And then she came back from Montreal and she was never the same. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936. Sarah Anne Johnson: I imagine this is very difficult for his family. Amory: This is a hard reality for the family that Ewen Cameron left behind. 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. While guys like Freud encouraged talking through problems, Cameron thought things like electroshock therapy and drug cocktails could be used to physically change the brain and get rid of the illness in question. In his 1946 paper entitled "Frontiers of Social Psychiatry", he used the case of World War II Germany as an example where society poisoned the minds of citizens by creating a general anxiety or neurosis.[19]. North America. Pregnant with son Lloyd, Esther was kept in a drug-induced coma in the sleep room for a month, where she lost 13 pounds. Donald Cameron of Lochiel (c.1700 - October 1748), was an influential Highland Clan Chief known for his magnanimous and gallant nature. Those were right out. "Madness: The Secret Mission for Mind Control and the People Who Paid the Price" an investigative series in 5 parts unravels the shocking history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments. 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. in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1924, a D.P.M. Stephen Bennett: If I put one of you, either Ben or Amory, into prison for two, three years, you should be okay because you can have time and space. We put this to Harvey Weinstein, the psychiatrist we heard from earlier, whose father was a patient at the Allan. Take a guess. It is true. Yeah so it was sad. To prevent this, the West would have to take measures to reorganize German society. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method. 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. It was the start of a series of experiments backed by the British, the Americans, and the Canadians, and they wanted to know what prolonged sensory deprivation actually did to a person. Particularly because we put that question to him today. And these are pictures of him, these are both in the Adirondack Mountains. His work had led him to the belief that mental illness could be "cured" like, say, a broken hip might be rehabilitated. Not only was Ewen Cameron running the Allan Memorial, but he was leading psychiatric organizations, he was teaching at McGill University, and he was still seeing private patients. Cameron began to explore how industrial conditions could satisfy the population through work and what kind of person or worker is best suited to industrial conditions. Donald Ewen Cameron (19011967) was born in Scotland in 1901 and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. While more is known about the experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron than about some of the other MKUltra projects, there's still a lot of information missing. But none of us trained in psychiatry. He was a person who was always looking for a way of advancing the field. There are a few ways to reach us: This content was originally created for audio. 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. [26] His "psychic driving" experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements. Psychiatry would play a disciplinary role. Everyone who makes a monthly donation will get access to upcoming bonus content from the making of our series. Amory: Just not in the way he might have hoped. She had no idea how to boil water, much less care for a child. "He was supposed to do wonders with people with depression or mental health issues." 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. . He began to develop the discipline of social psychiatry which concentrated on the roles of interpersonal interaction, family, community and culture in the emergence and amelioration of emotional disturbance. Like Freud, Cameron maintained that the family was the nucleus of social behavior and anxieties later in life were spawned during childhood. In some cases, applicants couldn't prove the conditions they currently lived with were a direct result of what they went through at Allan, and in others, they were treated outside of the time frame. Duncan: He probably did, but I dont think I could remember the specifics of it. Duncan Cameron: This is a picture of the whole family. During those years, Cameron began to expand on his thoughts about the interrelationships of mind and body, developing a reputation as a psychiatrist who could bridge the gap between the organic, structural neurologists, and the psychiatrists whose knowledge of anatomy was limited to maps of the mind as opposed to maps of the brain. Ben: Would you have anything that you would want to say to Dr. Cameron or his family? The lawsuits were dismissed, even though it was later shown . I'm sure part of him very much wanted to be the person who cures mental illness. She said: "She wasn't able to talk to me about life and regular stuff. Ewen married Agnes Cameron (born Bell) in 1867, at age 35 at marriage place. Duncan: We all very much wished, as we always had, that my father was alive because he would have had to deal with that issue and would have dealt with it quite effectively. Alison Steel says her mother was never the same after undergoing. They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea; they are afraid to live, and scared to die." Death: June 18, 1958 (52) Immediate Family: Son of Sir Ewen Allan Cameron and Rachel Margaret Cameron. [38], Cameron died of a heart attack while hiking with his son in the Adirondack Mountains on September 8, 1967. ", And what about the CIA, who had approved and funded the research in the first place? And in that sense, I think his ambition overrode his skills and his ability to do the research. I'm the oldest son of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and Jean Cameron. ", "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,". Because it would seem to me, or I was concerned as a lawyer, that it might be a breach of the patient-doctor privilege. John Marks: There must have been clinical documents. Duncan: You see, he doesn't have a scowl. It is a rare thing that a psychiatrist of his worldwide reputation and capacity should be a resource available to a small mountain community. 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. 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. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron did experiments so horrifying he's been called "Scotland's Mengele." Here's why MKUltra's top brainwashing scientist was a nightmare. The line between fantasy and reality blurred. 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. In 1933, he married Jean C. Rankine, whom he had met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. According to "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,"there was more to his work at the Allan Memorial Institute than just exploring the CIA's questions about brainwashing. On March 10, Cameron's notes read: "She is disoriented as to time only and is probably in her second stage of depatterning. 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. Cleghorn immediately ended Camerons program. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. Cregg: What do you know about mind-control experiments? Cameron believed that mental illness was literally contagious that if one came into contact with someone with mental illness, one would begin to produce the symptoms of a mental disease. In 1951 a few years before the U.S. government and the CIA approved MKUltra there was a top secret meeting held at Montreal's Ritz-Carlton. He wanted to know if it was possible to wipe a person's mind and reinstall a new personality. You know, my job was to look out for the cops. 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. [33] The son of one of Cameron's patients noted in a memoir that other than Ed Broadbent and Svend Robinson, no Canadian MP brought up the issue in the House of Parliament. Amory: Duncan struggles dealing with his dads legacy because he cant speak to why his dad did what he did. Cameron's concerns extended to his policies determining who should have children and advance to positions of authority. Ben: But we also asked about something else, that he was a little uncomfortable talking about: Orlikow vs. United States, the 1980s lawsuit that ended up giving $750,000 total to 8 of Camerons victims. And you can get a real sense of your own, where you are in the world. He had patients. He has an open, amused look on his face. He first solved the problem by wiring the speakers into football helmets and locking them onto patients' heads, but that ended up being not ideal. 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. "[H]e was born in. This must be very difficult, very complicated for them. Cameron viewed German society throughout history as continually giving rise to fearsome aggression. 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? 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. He moved to Upstate New York where he studied aging and memory at two hospitals in Albany. Ewen passed away on month day 1915, at age 84 at death place. She very slowly recovered mostly and died in 2017. Even as he wrote about Cameron's "warmth [which was] never allowed to appear as intimacy," he wrote about a pretty big blind spot: Cameron had apparently hired a few assistants with "psychopathic personalities.". Though he did visit the Allan Memorial on occasion. It has to do with another of his Adirondack hikes that changed the Cameron family forever. His focus on children included the rights to protection against outmoded, doctrinaire tactics, and the necessity for the implantation of taboos and inhibitions from their parents. He continued his training in the United States under Meyer at the Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland from 1926 to 1928 with a Henderson Research Scholarship. 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. Marian Read: So for me, the importance of all of this is to get it out of the shadows of pulp fiction, you know Amory: This is Marian Read. Ewen Cameron experimented on people right up until he left the Allan in 1964. The Guardian talked to Alison Steel, Jean's daughter and one of the many family members trying to shine a light on what was done to their loved ones without their consent. 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. He died three years later. Cameron wrote that mental illness was transmitted generationally; thus, the re-occurrence of mental illness could be stopped by remodeling and expanding existing concepts of marriage suitability, as well as the quarantine of mentally ill individuals from the general population. According to "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,"he left his position at Allan and his patients in 1964. You know, all of us not only respected him, but loved him, and not just myself, but my brothers. [5], Cameron was involved in administering electroconvulsive therapy and experimental drugs, including poisons such as curare and hallucinogens such as lysergic acid diethylamide, to patients and prisoners without their knowledge or informed consent. It was reported that none of the patients sent to the Radio Telemetry Lab showed any signs of improvement. [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. Duncan Cameron is Ewen Cameron's son, and when he speaks of his father, he talks about a man who loved to hike, read science fiction, and who had an obituary that read, in part: "Those who are privileged to know him, even briefly, will not soon forget the warmth and kindliness of this understanding man." Duncan: Well, I didnt destroy the documents. 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. After one test he noted: "Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favourable results were obtained." [22], During the 1950s and 1960s, Cameron became involved in what has later become known as the MKUltra mind control program, which was covertly sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)[6] and which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. Ewen Cameron was fulfilling one of the items on his life bucket list: to climb Street Mountain. Duncan: It's really a very moving editorial. Duncan Cameron: No. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. Family 9 - Donald CAMERON 34, wife Agnes 30, children John 18, Margaret 13, Ann 12, Donald 10, Christian 8, Alexander 6, Dugald 2, Duncan 1/2 (see Donald Cameron) Family 10 - Duncan CAMERON 30 unmarried, sister Mrs McLENNAN 28 and Catherine McLENNAN 5 [16], Cameron next published Nuremberg and Its Significance. . Ben: He looks like hes having a good time. Amory: Nearly everyone who experienced Camerons treatments first-hand has since died. Most of the patient files are gone, and according to WBUR, they weren't just misplaced, they were destroyed. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? Ben: Today we grapple with Dr. Ewen Camerons legacy. What started as short-term depression before the Allan, morphed into chronic depression, as well as diagnosed schizophrenia and bipolar disorder afterwards. And he didn't achieve that either. It affected a lot of people. Alison said that when her mother returned, it was no longer her mother. Psychiatric experimentation: the lessons or history, The Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill, 1994, Vol. 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? Heres journalist John Marks. [citation needed]. 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. Jean spent three months under Cameron's care, and spent two periods in a drug-induced coma. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.". Their diagnosis was amnesia and hysteria, per a short commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became an authority in his areas of concentration. For instance, he was careful to say he didnt know anything about his dads treatment regimen at the Allan, which may very well be true. Rauh: So any documents that would show the treatment of the plaintiffs in this case were destroyed? These became the basis of a new social and behavioural science that he would later institute through his presidencies of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. 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. Research genealogy for donald ewen Cameron of Melbourne, Victoria, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. There are movies like Gaslight and Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And he has a much different memory of how it all went down. 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. Cameron's work was funded under MKUltra's subproject 68. Heres documentarian Stephen Bennett, whose film Eminent Monsters looks at the real echoes of Camerons work in government interrogation programs today. Her life was sad. Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. So I think in a certain way they believed that what fiction writers could come up with, somebody could actually make real. Duncan: Well, that's a big subject. If you want that too, we would deeply appreciate your contribution to our work in any amount. Amory: Dr. Ewen Cameron will never be able to respond to the intergenerational trauma created by his work. 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. The last generation of Holocaust survivors and their children express their concerns about current events A Five-Part, FDA Advisory Panel & CDC Director are Complicit in Sacrificing Childrens Lives to Protect Pfizer from Liability, Copyright 2023 Alliance for Human Research Protection, 1950s1960s: Dr. Ewen Cameron Destroyed Minds at Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal, Law and Mind Control Mind Control Through Five Cases, Vera Sharavs documentary Never Again is Now Global now available. Marian believes all of this was a result of her mother going into the Allan. By literally wiping the minds of his subjects clean by depatterning and then trying to program in new behavior, Cameron carried the process known as brainwashing to its logical extreme., The dehumanizing nature of his methods were published in premier medical journals without any complaints from other psychiatrists; Cameron read papers about depatterning with electroshock before meetings of his fellow psychiatrists; and they rewarded him, electing him president of the American, Canadian, and World Psychiatric Associations. Duncan: This is at the Lake Placid Club in Lake Placid, New York.
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