Ben: But some key documentation of Camerons time at the Allan is straight up missing. 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. And he always had a little book of science fiction by the bedside. Rauh: A question that Mr. Turner wanted me to ask was what happened to the papers identifying the patients? The Canadian government also funded the project. 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. Being compared to the Nazi's most notorious doctor probably isn't the life goal of most medical professionals, so let's look at what he did to deserve this dubious title. 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. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Dr. Ewen Cameron wanted to win a Nobel Prize for his work in psychiatry. . Amory: This is from The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, is the name of the paper. It petered out in the early 60s as the programs director, Sidney Gottlieb, came to a realization. Cameron stated, "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them." 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. There is no incontinence, there is no mutism, and we are continuing this intense treatment of her until we get complete depatterning.". Toby Ziegler:In the '50s, it was the CIA mind control research program begun in response to the Chinese attempt on U.S. prisoners. in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1924, a D.P.M. Dr. Ewen Cameron wanted to win a Nobel Prize for his work in psychiatry. They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. 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. Therefore, society should function to select out the weak and unwanted, those apt towards fearsome aggression that threatened society. 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. 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." You can see other fellow humans. We hope you enjoyed reading this excerpt from this mini book on the Scottish history of the Cameron family. Heres John Marks again. Advertisement. Sounds questionable? And Camerons part of that. Abruptly and unexpectedly, Dr. Cameron suffered a life-ending heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967. Duncan: Well, I didnt destroy the documents. His response? 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!" ", "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,". 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. Amory: Duncan knows how to be very careful about what he says. Stephen Kinzer: In the end, Gottlieb was forced to conclude that there's no such thing as mind control and that everything he had done had been for naught. 22 As the Watergate scandal broke in 1973, MKUltra was officially ordered to be shut down by the CIA. Another patient was suffering from leg pains that no one had been able to diagnose. Skip Ancestry . [27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. Ben Brock Johnson: So what do you have in front of you here? There are a few ways to reach us: This content was originally created for audio. And you see this actual physical manual on how to break down the human mind. Amory: Eventually though, it wasnt just Camerons successor who was calling him out. 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. Alison Steel won compensation for her mother's misery in 2017, says the CBC: $100,000 in exchange for ending legal action. Ewen Cameron made the hike with Duncans younger brother, James. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.. Shes a member of SAAGA, or Survivors Allied Against Government Abuse. That's how quick it is because it removes your time and space. 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]. [28] His work was inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also involved with the intelligence services and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage. And he put Camerons treatment program under the microscope. 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. Amory: And, they delivered, with a full transcript of Duncans deposition from November, 1983. According to what his son, Duncan, told WBUR, it was 1967 when he decided to climb Street Mountain in the Adirondacks. The work of Dr. Ewen Cameron may have been discredited by mainstream psychiatry, but that doesn't mean it went away completely. "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. 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. Dr. Ewen Cameron was an undeniably fascinating figure, and as horrible as his experiments were, the way people continued to talk about him was even more telling. Because it would seem to me, or I was concerned as a lawyer, that it might be a breach of the patient-doctor privilege. If he had a choice he would have kept living forever. In 1933, he married Jean C. Rankine, whom he had met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. Its not a very popular mountain to climb, its steep. 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. [14] Hess later confessed that he had faked the amnesia. They had four children; a daughter and three sons. 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. 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. 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. Heres part of Duncans transcript: Duncan (from the transcript): I recall contacting the American Psychiatric Association and asking them if they would have an interest in holding his papers in their archives, and they expressed an interest in doing it. He wanted to cure schizophrenia, and win a Nobel Prize for it. Psychiatry would play a disciplinary role. Ben: Duncan Cameron was 10 years old when his dad became the Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. 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. Amory: Just not in the way he might have hoped. Amory: Duncan also has an easy, quiet smile. Joseph Rauh Jr. was one of the attorneys that represented the group who filed lawsuits in the mid-1980s. Both of her brothers were heavily into drugs by the age of 10 and dealt with serious mental illness throughout their lives. And he didn't achieve that either. Ben: After Marians mom left the Allan, she struggled for the rest of her life to regain her sense of self and mental clarity. 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. After his mother confirmed that yes, there were 12 boxes of papers that her sons both lawyers said she probably shouldn't share, Duncan revealed that he had gone through and taken out "several papers" that identified "a particular patient." Charles Tanny was a former patient of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal in 1957. Duncan: I have no recollection whether there were any papers relating to any of the--. It affected a lot of people. And here he is with me many years ago. A possessive type, filled with jealousy and demanding utmost loyalty. 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. Those with anxieties or insecurities and who had trouble with the state of the world were labelled as "the weak"; in Cameron's analysis, they could not cope with life and had to be isolated from society by "the strong". Morrow's family got involved, and it was only at their insistence that she was transferred to another hospital. What Hebb and Cameron both have in common is their contribution in establishing the scientific foundation for CIAs two-stage psychological torture method. Amory: Sarah Anne Johnson, whose grandmother Val Orlikow was a patient of Ewen Camerons, has a response to Duncan that, considering what her family has been through as a result of his fathers experimentation, is surprising. And they are still being asked to by victims and their families, 60 years later. Duncan: Oh yes, he enjoyed a good joke even if they were off color. 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. She had no idea how to boil water, much less care for a child. 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. Her family sued, first based on the treatment alone, then again, after discovering she was a part of the MKUltra program. 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." Research genealogy for Donald Ewen Cameron of Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota, USA, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. 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. (Rubenstein LS. Ben: Hebb did an interview with a film producer in the 1980s, saying, quote, Cameron was irresponsible criminally stupid. As for the ongoing lawsuits, some of the plaintiffs have actually contacted Duncan wondering if hed be willing to support their efforts. When asked about the decision to involve Cameron in MK-ULTRA, John Gittinger, the CIA officer in charge of monitoring his work said, quote, Now that was a foolish mistake. 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? 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. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. Please note . 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". ", And what about the CIA, who had approved and funded the research in the first place? Duncan: This is at the Lake Placid Club in Lake Placid, New York. Maybe the people responsible are waiting for all of us to forget. He received an M.B., Ch.B. Care of his patients went to his assistants, and here's where things get even weirder. Cameron focused primarily on biological descriptive psychiatry and applied the British and European schools and models of the practice. The legacy can be seen in the torture techniques employed in Northern Ireland and in Guantanamo Bay. Cameron further argued that "the weak" must not influence children. 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. Ben: Camerons research could never happen today at least not lawfully. 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. 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. Marian: There was a picture of my mom there and somebody commented, Ugh that's the Johanna that's her name I remember. And my sister looked at him and said, But what was she like? The idea was turning the mind into a fresh slate for the next part of the process, called "psychic driving.". 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. Amory: With the information we do have about Cameron, we know this: his so-called treatment didnt cure mental illness, and it didnt control peoples minds. AIan Cameron followed in the footsteps of his father and became a director at Panmure Gordon in 1957. 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