Patients were tested in the Radio Telemetry Laboratory, which was built under Cameron's direction. He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. Alison said that when her mother returned, it was no longer her mother. 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. 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. And you see this actual physical manual on how to break down the human mind. Amory: But, Camerons extreme measures didnt result in a Nobel Prize or any mental health breakthroughs, which is why Harvey finds a certain poetry in his untimely death. He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. He was there when his legal partner, Joseph Rauh, took Camerons deposition. Cameron stayed there for seven years and was made physician-in-charge of the Reception Unit of the Provincial Mental Hospital. The goal, says CBC, was to reduce the patient to what was called a "childlike state," with some people destroyed so completely that they could no longer walk, talk, or dress themselves Shoelaces? Jim Turner: The most salient point that I recall is that Camerons son told us that he'd taken his father's private records and had destroyed them. It has to do with another of his Adirondack hikes that changed the Cameron family forever. You can buy the full book for only . He promoted a philosophy where chaos could be prevented by removing the weak from society. More about the Cameron family name; Sponsored by Ancestry. . The lawsuits were dismissed, even though it was later shown . 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. Duncan: It's really a very moving editorial. [15], Before his arrival in Nuremberg, Cameron had written The Social Reorganization of Germany, in which he argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized. Velma Orlikow, for instance, was dealing with postpartum depression. 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. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became an authority in his areas of concentration. We want to hear from you! First I have to say that my father was exceedingly committed to his field. And he has a much different memory of how it all went down. 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. It is at this juncture that he became interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain to control and understand the processes of memory. Some of this work took place in the context of the Project MKUltra program for the developing of mind control and torture techniques, psychoactive poisons, and behavior modification systems. Amory: What we know of Camerons work comes from family accounts like Marian's, a few hard-won medical documents, and detailed descriptions of his techniques from his own journal articles and speeches. Amory: Author Stephen Kinzer, who wrote the book about the CIA and Mind Control, says, after Vietnam, this same literature got used elsewhere. I mean, he was that much of a scientist. There's my father and my mother. They were destroyed. 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!" 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. 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. [37], Whether or not Cameron was aware that funding for his experiments was coming from the CIA is unclear; it has been argued that he would have carried out the exact same experiments if funding had come from a source without ulterior motives. 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. 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. Cameron became the first director of the Allan Memorial Institute as well as the first chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill. And Mary Morrow? from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. You know, my job was to look out for the cops. He studied Medicine at the University of Glasgow and obtained his degree in 1924. . A series of other research scandals in the 1960s resulted in stricter regulation of research practices and a more stringent code of ethics. [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. There must have been records of experiments. They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. In some cases, the same phrases reappear all through these. What Hebb and Cameron both have in common is their contribution in establishing the scientific foundation for CIAs two-stage psychological torture method. According to The Guardian, it started with playing tapes designed to tap into the reason the patient sought help in the first place. [citation needed]. Ben: Robert Cleghorn, a former member of Camerons staff, took over after Cameron stepped down. [25], Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by "erasing" existing memories and "reprogramming" the psyche. Amory: Nearly everyone who experienced Camerons treatments first-hand has since died. Jean Steel was another one of Cameron's patients, and like the others she didn't sign up to be a part of MKUltra, depatterning, or psychic driving at all. Stephen: So they created a manual, which basically was for intelligence personnel. And, later on to guidebooks for what we now call enhanced interrogation at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Pregnant with son Lloyd, Esther was kept in a drug-induced coma in the sleep room for a month, where she lost 13 pounds. In theory, he was supposed to help her anxiety, depression, and postpartum depression. Or do you remember any of --. Cameron quickly found patients didn't want to listen to the messages. Did it work? 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. For Cameron, the traits were contagions and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. The psychiatric community could have questioned his methods, but they remained silent. Think of all the books and the movies that are about mind control. She was not staying in this little town. Amory: Jim Turner was one of two prosecutors on the case. Joseph Rauh Jr. was one of the attorneys that represented the group who filed lawsuits in the mid-1980s. Dr. Ewen Cameron wanted to win a Nobel Prize for his work in psychiatry. His successor at Allan, Robert Cleghorn, would later write (via "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,""Cameron's controversial practices [are] now thoroughly discredited." Cameron began to base some of his notions on race, as is seen in his theories regarding the German people. The manual got updated in 1980, but the techniques that have come about including things like waterboarding and restraint in a "coffin-like wooden box" still harken back to that original research. Ben: Duncan says his father was so busy that he didnt see much of him during their time in Montreal. He didn't pull punches, saying, "We hanged Nazis for doing the sort of things Cameron did.". She was admitted to McGill's Allan Memorial Institute in 1957, needing help dealing with depression and the loss of her child. Indian River. Click here for the donation page. We encourage you to research and examine these records to . Rauh: A question that Mr. Turner wanted me to ask was what happened to the papers identifying the patients? Because his dad isnt around to do it himself. In this, he hoped to establish a suitable method to reinstate a form of justice in Germany that could prevent its society from recreating the attitudes that led it from the Great War to World War II. He reported that "the subject's very identity had begun to disintegrate," and that's when someone should, ya know, stop. 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. She never did get her children back. 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. She said that at the time, Cameron was something of a celebrity. Everyone who makes a monthly donation will get access to upcoming bonus content from the making of our series. And in a sense, that's what he wanted to do professionally. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936. Hebb who did pay the students for their participation basically put them in a room for 24 hours, in a set-up that deprived them of all sensory input. In 1963, the CIA published the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, and that's exactly what it sounds like guidelines on how to get people to talk. (laughter). Amory: Dr. Ewen Cameron will never be able to respond to the intergenerational trauma created by his work. Genealogy profile for Major Donald of 4th Chief Clunes "Old '45" Cameron Major Cameron . In 2020, director Stephen Bennett released "Eminent Monsters," a film that examined the link between Cameron's work and the torture techniques used by organizations around the world, including the CIA. She wasn't able to joke and laugh She would blurt out something like: 'We must do the right thing!'" I'm sure part of him very much wanted to be the person who cures mental illness. And he was a fast driver. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all senior partners in the company. A possessive type, filled with jealousy and demanding utmost loyalty. Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. In his analysis, German culture was made up of people who had the need for status, worshipped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and had a deeply ingrained fear of other countries. Any documents that related to patient treatment were destroyed? 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. . He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. 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., Amory: The CIA also turned its back on Cameron. Both of her brothers were heavily into drugs by the age of 10 and dealt with serious mental illness throughout their lives. 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? But none of us trained in psychiatry. 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. In 1938 he received his diploma in psychiatry and became professor of neurology, psychiatry at University at . [citation needed] He furthermore wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging, believing that the aged brain experienced psychosis. Ben: Would you have anything that you would want to say to Dr. Cameron or his family? 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. Ewen Cameron experimented on people right up until he left the Allan in 1964. Marian Cameron. And I feel for them for that. The only cure for mental illness, he theorized, was to eliminate its "carriers" from society altogether. He wanted to know if it was possible to wipe a person's mind and reinstall a new personality. 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. That could be heightened with various drugs, eventually was replaced by positive messages, and the so-called "psychic driving" would continue. The line between fantasy and reality blurred. The sick were, for Cameron, the viral infection to its stability and health. And these are pictures of him, these are both in the Adirondack Mountains. Cameron would analyze what conditions produced the stronger worker, what would be the necessary conditions to replicate this personality and to reward the stronger while disciplining the weaker. 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.". Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allen, a small town in Scotland, on December 24, 1901. There must have been names of patients. Duncan: Not really, I certainly don't know anything about the treatments he was using, I didnt know anything about that. [citation needed] Characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes emerging from the brain. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. His brutal techniques involved a three-stage method for brainwashing in order to eliminate the will and establish control: first, mental depatterning achieved through drug-induced coma; massive neuroleptic drug cocktails induced extended sleep lasting up to eighty-six days. Sounds questionable? Research genealogy for Donald Ewen Cameron of lambeth, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. For example, something like rock music could be created by mentally ill people and would produce mentally ill people through infection, which in turn would be transmitted to the genes. 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. And, until theres true accountability for what happened and what is still happening, it never will be. Ben: Street Mountain is a strange choice for a bucket list. Duncan: They got close to the top and James looked around and my father had passed away. Ben: When Amory and I spoke to Duncan Cameron about his dad, he also told us about his own work, as a lawyer. Today, we're talking to one of the only people who will stand up for Dr. Cameron. 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