Cameron was born on December 24, 1901, in Scotland and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. They were destroyed. There's Edgar Allan Poe stories and Sherlock Holmes stories. Because his dad isnt around to do it himself. . I wasnt destroying documents. [29], Sid Taylor stated that Cameron used curare to immobilise his patients during his research. Cameron also hoped to generate families capable of using authority and techniques to take measures against mental illness, which would later be apparent in Cameron's MKULTRA and MKDELTA experiments. And there some of them were high risk ones. 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. Like, did she always have problems? And he said, Oh, gosh. She goes, No. She was the one that was gonna go and conquer the world. People Projects Discussions Surnames . 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 he put Camerons treatment program under the microscope. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Finally, while the person is in isolated confinement, in LSD altered states of consciousness, and deprived of sensory stimulation, adequate food, water, and oxygen, the subject would be bombarded by psychic driving by use of a football helmet clamped to the head with taped messages played for hours non-stop up to a half-million times, messages such as my mother hates me. (McCoy, 2007). Alison Steel won compensation for her mother's misery in 2017, says the CBC: $100,000 in exchange for ending legal action. 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. This third type needs, This page was last edited on 16 February 2023, at 19:10. He wanted to know if it was possible to wipe a person's mind and reinstall a new personality. Psychiatry would play a disciplinary role. Were they *destroyed* or did you just take the patients name out? 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. You know, all of us not only respected him, but loved him, and not just myself, but my brothers. Her family sued, first based on the treatment alone, then again, after discovering she was a part of the MKUltra program. Donald Hebb and Ewen Cameron were competitors; they did not collaborate, though Cameron incorporated Hebbs sensory isolation techniques into his own diabolical arsenal of psychiatrys instruments of torture. Camerons techniques have no therapeutic validity whatsoever; they were comparable to Nazi medical atrocities. 22 As the Watergate scandal broke in 1973, MKUltra was officially ordered to be shut down by the CIA. So we don't have. I then *went through* the papers, because I felt that it would be improper to leave in the papers any paper that identified patients. The National Post reports that in 1992, 77 of Cameron's patients were awarded an ex gratia settlement of $100,000, and that's all well and good, but claims made by more than 250 other people were rejected for various reasons. You know, my job was to look out for the cops. Here, patients were exposed to a range of RF and electromagnetic signals and monitored for changes in behaviour. 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. 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. She never did get her children back. He received an M.B., Ch.B. [34], Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to MKUltra were not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' He wanted to cure schizophrenia, and win a Nobel Prize for it. When then-CIA director Stansfield Turner testified about the program in 1977, he said (via the Smithsonian) that the bottom line was to develop "the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior." It was a heart attack and was very sudden. It petered out in the early 60s as the programs director, Sidney Gottlieb, came to a realization. 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. The lawsuits were dismissed, even though it was later shown . Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 100, Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 101, Last edited on 16 February 2023, at 19:10, "Society of Biological Psychiatry 65th Annual Meeting Program Book (p. 14)", "World Psychiatric Association Chronology", "Current Comment: Psychiatric Examination of Rudolf Hess", The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control, "Doctor Looked After the Sick, And Looked Around for the CIA", "A History of Secret CIA Mind Control Research", "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron", Stunning tale of brainwashing, the CIA and an unsuspecting Scots researcher, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Ewen_Cameron&oldid=1139756014, A passive man who "is afraid to say what he really thinks" and "will stand anything, and stands for nothing". You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. 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. Ben Brock Johnson: So what do you have in front of you here? Cameron quickly found patients didn't want to listen to the messages. And you can see this manual that's been found all around the world, from hellholes to modern democracies. In 1933, he married Jean C. Rankine, whom he had met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. Amory: They bounced around between foster homes and orphanages for years, experienced emotional and physical abuse. According to what his son, Duncan, told WBUR, it was 1967 when he decided to climb Street Mountain in the Adirondacks. He published a book called Remembering[18] and extended psychiatric links to human biology. And when you get up to the top, its completely wooded, so theres no panoramic view after all the hard climbing. Most of the patient files are gone, and according to WBUR, they weren't just misplaced, they were destroyed. He told The Scotsman: "Cameron's entire focus seemed to shift after the Nuremberg Trials. Duncan: Talking about him, it should be easy, but sometimes it's sort of emotional. 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. Cameron started to distinguish populations between "the weak" and "the strong". 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. Patients were tested in the Radio Telemetry Laboratory, which was built under Cameron's direction. Cameron's work stopped when she gave birth, and Lloyd remembered a broken mother. I mean, he was fascinated with the future in his own field of psychiatry, medicine and government. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. Ben: The study also said that these treatments, the de-patterning and psychic driving programs including LSD injections, induced comas, sensory deprivation and electroshock had a detrimental impact on patients memories, which, in retrospect, might have been part of the point. Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. Ben: But, as human experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute, and MK-ULTRAs mind control efforts, fade into history, reduced to references in tv shows and video game plot points, there are troubling examples of these techniques still in use today. A possessive type, filled with jealousy and demanding utmost loyalty. Hebb submitted his findings to the CIA, and it ended up being just the beginning. Skip Ancestry main menu Main Menu. Amory: The answer might be in the idea of brainwashing itself. Thank you! 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. His response? They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. One of the weirdest chapters in U.S. history was approved on April 13, 1953, and any time anyone says anything about "the good ol' days," when things were just better, simpler, and kinder, well, point to MKUltra and say, "Check out this madness!" He also organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the province, establishing 10 functioning clinics; this model was used as the blueprint for similar efforts in Montreal and a forerunner of 1960s community health models. Esther Schrier who was a nurse at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital tragically lost her first child at just three weeks of age. Ben: But there is reason to believe that these documents arent just missing. 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. There are movies like Gaslight and Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Today, we're talking to one of the only people who will stand up for Dr. Cameron. 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.". And he was always very fascinated by what the future held for us all. He warned that government institutions should take measures against such potential liabilities. 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. Any documents that related to patient treatment were destroyed? We love making Endless Thread, and we want to be able to keep making it far into the future. His goal was to standardize his treatment, and once he did it for schizophrenia, he believed he would open a "gateway through which we might pass into a new field of psychotherapeutic methods." 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. Did he ever talk about that? Ben: Today we grapple with Dr. Ewen Camerons legacy. Memories are not the most reliable form of evidence. Rauh: So any documents that would show the treatment of the plaintiffs in this case were destroyed? About 55 families of victims who underwent medical experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s are suing for millions of dollars. Duncan: I started work at the State Department just a day or so before Kennedy was assassinated. They had four children; a daughter and three sons. Amory: Hey, Dad, let's get out of here!, Duncan: I can remember doing that several times. Cameron titled this procedure "intrapsychic" (a term derived from the psycho-somatic relationship of hospital patients). Ben: Street Mountain is a strange choice for a bucket list. The extent of Goldberg's treatment - or mistreatment - while in the care of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, would remain an encumbering family secret for years. "He was this miracle psychiatrist," she said. His version was a continuous-loop cassette player that would deliver messages on repeat and it's even worse than it sounds. Ben: Would you have anything that you would want to say to Dr. Cameron or his family? Ben: Duncan Cameron was 10 years old when his dad became the Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. 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. Lloyd Schrier, son of Cameron patient Esther Schrier, told the CBC, "Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say." 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. Yeah so it was sad. Once it was down to an exact science the precise number of hours in a coma, the number and duration of electroshock treatments, the exact dosages of drugs he believed that curing mental illness could be as simple as admitting a patient, putting them through the program, and spitting out a brand new, problem-free person on the other side. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.". Our username is. 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. 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. Cameron reported to John Gittinger, an agent in charge of overseeing parts of MKUltra. 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. ", Why MKUltra's Top Brainwashing Scientist Was A Real-Life Nightmare, "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron. Although Cameron rejected the Freudian notion of the unconscious, he shared the Freudian idea that personal psychology is linked to the nervous nature. 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. John Marks: The Allan Memorial Institute under Cleghorn commissioned a study of his work, which is absolutely or almost absolutely unprecedented in the psychiatric field. Here in the hospital Cameron could observe how the psychiatric patient resembled patients with other diseases that were not psychiatric in nature. 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