Esther Schrier who was a nurse at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital tragically lost her first child at just three weeks of age. Two of my sons are lawyers and they say it isnt a good idea.. It's not clear how many patients Dr. Ewen Cameron's treatments destroyed, but some families have come forward with stories of what was done to their loved ones. Ironically, his lasting impact would be on how to destroy the human mind, not how to repair it. 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 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. 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." 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. And they are still being asked to by victims and their families, 60 years later. Think of all the books and the movies that are about mind control. Police, hospitals, government, and schools would need to use the correct psychiatric authority to stop mental contagions from spreading. Donald Ewen Cameron was the key figure in the Montreal experiments. Hes in his mid-80s now. And I feel for them for that. . You can buy the full book for only . Ben: Over and over, weve heard from victims of Dr. Ewen Camerons brutal experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute. Ben: Duncan says his father was so busy that he didnt see much of him during their time in Montreal. They stressed how they'd been unwilling participants, and that they'd gone to the institute for other issues. We encourage you to research and examine these records . 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. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? Ben: As for the CIAs MK-ULTRA program itself, it never had an official end date. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became an authority in his areas of concentration. 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. Their diagnosis was amnesia and hysteria, per a short commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 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. Though he did visit the Allan Memorial on occasion. According to "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,"he left his position at Allan and his patients in 1964. 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. About 55 families of victims who underwent medical experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s are suing for millions of dollars. He did technically, because nothing says "wonders" has to be a good thing. Duncan: It's really a very moving editorial. Cameron began to abandon the Freudian unconscious in favour of a social constructivist's view of mental illness. 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. A series of other research scandals in the 1960s resulted in stricter regulation of research practices and a more stringent code of ethics. AIan Cameron followed in the footsteps of his father and became a director at Panmure Gordon in 1957. Amory: Duncan knows how to be very careful about what he says. [citation needed] Characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes emerging from the brain. Heads up that some elements (i.e. He reported that "the subject's very identity had begun to disintegrate," and that's when someone should, ya know, stop. 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. Alison believes those random phrases her mother would sometimes say were from the recordings that she'd been forced to listen to for hours. And Camerons part of that. He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. The described types would have to be eliminated from society if there was to be peace and progress. Ben: Which brings us back to a question that no one can answer why did Dr. Cameron do what he did? The victims and their lawyers want us to remember that this story isnt over. In other words, they really must have seen that there was something wrong and crazy. The second part of the technique was inspired by something called the Cerebrophone, which was essentially a "learn-while-you-sleep" recording device. Rauh: A question that Mr. Turner wanted me to ask was what happened to the papers identifying the patients? Other similar psychiatric diagnoses of Germany were published during this time. He studied Medicine at the University of Glasgow and obtained his degree in 1924. . Psychiatric experimentation: the lessons or history, The Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill, 1994, Vol. He received an M.B., Ch.B. 5, p. 2227) As a result of the lawsuit, the CIA agreed to pay $750,000, the maximum allowed under U.S. law, to settle a case without conceding liability. 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. She was admitted to McGill's Allan Memorial Institute in 1957, needing help dealing with depression and the loss of her child. Ben: In photos, the Cameron family seems happy, a candid shot of Ewen Cameron that looks to be from a garden party shows the psychiatrist in a skinny tie and jacket, horn-rimmed glasses and short cropped white hair. So we reached out to one of the most comprehensive archives in the world: The Library of Congress. The personality types are as follows: Cameron believed that a society in which psychiatry built and developed the institutions of government, schools, prisons and hospitals would be one in which science triumphed over the "sick" members of society. The Canadian government also funded the project. He was a person who was always looking for a way of advancing the field. 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. Lloyd Schrier, son of Cameron patient Esther Schrier, told the CBC, "Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say." Cameron used his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and parent in society. Research genealogy for Donald Ewen Cameron of Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota, USA, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. And they found his work next to worthless. Amory: And I think you may have given a deposition for that. These did nothing to calm the feud which continued through succeeding reigns to when Donald's grandson Ewen, the 13th chief, fought at the battle of Flodden where James IV was killed. 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. She wasn't able to joke and laugh She would blurt out something like: 'We must do the right thing!'" It is true. 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!" 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. But he has fond childhood memories of summers spent in New Yorks Adirondack Mountains, where his dads competitive nature led him again and again to the line of the horizon. Cameron reported to John Gittinger, an agent in charge of overseeing parts of MKUltra. Amory: Author Stephen Kinzer, who wrote the book about the CIA and Mind Control, says, after Vietnam, this same literature got used elsewhere. Ben: After Marians mom left the Allan, she struggled for the rest of her life to regain her sense of self and mental clarity. The legacy can be seen in the torture techniques employed in Northern Ireland and in Guantanamo Bay. Ben: So its fitting that, today, most of what people hear about the CIAs search for mind control also seems to come from fantasy and popular fiction. Ben: When Amory and I spoke to Duncan Cameron about his dad, he also told us about his own work, as a lawyer. Skip Ancestry . He published a book called Remembering[18] and extended psychiatric links to human biology. Heres journalist John Marks. Research genealogy for donald ewen Cameron of Melbourne, Victoria, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. [30][bettersourceneeded], In 1980, the Canadian investigative news program The Fifth Estate interviewed two former patients of Cameron's who were among several of his ex patients who were at that time suing the CIA for the long term effects of Cameron's treatment. He was always interested in the future. [citation needed][21]. 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. 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. Duncan: He loved hiking. The line between fantasy and reality blurred. 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. 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. Cameron's work was funded under MKUltra's subproject 68. Duncan: I'm Duncan Cameron. 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. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all senior partners in the company. So you can see that the work of Ewen Cameron, filtered through Gottlieb, definitely informs the interrogation techniques, if we want to call them that, that the United States has been using on its prisoners in Guantanamo and in black sites around the world. We put this to Harvey Weinstein, the psychiatrist we heard from earlier, whose father was a patient at the Allan. Marian Cameron. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936. What started as short-term depression before the Allan, morphed into chronic depression, as well as diagnosed schizophrenia and bipolar disorder afterwards. Amory: Theres a reason that all the photos of Ewen Cameron are from more than 50 years ago. Duncan: Talking about him, it should be easy, but sometimes it's sort of emotional. Ewen passed away on month day 1915, at age 84 at death place. Amory: Dr. Ewen Cameron will never be able to respond to the intergenerational trauma created by his work. 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. So we dont have access to Cameron's thoughts on his own legacy. She was left with permanent impairments: She was unable to recognize faces, had impaired spatial recognition, and lost a good portion of her memory. And these are pictures of him, these are both in the Adirondack Mountains. [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. As the CBC notes, it's sourced pretty heavily from Cameron's work, and talks about things like "deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, pain, hypnosis and narcosis," and the source of their research? And they haven't been super successful. Marian believes all of this was a result of her mother going into the Allan. Cameron was born on December 24, 1901, in Scotland and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. And here I am looking much younger than I am now. Ben: Street Mountain is a strange choice for a bucket list. Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. Cameron focused primarily on biological descriptive psychiatry and applied the British and European schools and models of the practice. 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. As soon as his family found out about his death, they burned all the files that this man kept in his possession. McGill's then-director of psychology, Dr. Donald Hebb, took the money and set up experiments using his ready-and-waiting pool of test subjects: students. "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. It was a heart attack and was very sudden. Duncan Cameron: No. Genealogy profile for Major Donald of 4th Chief Clunes "Old '45" Cameron Major Cameron . Did he ever talk about that? Cameron began his training in psychiatry at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in 1925. 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 this manner, somatic causes could be compared. Part of Camerons plan for his patients was to wipe their minds clean, to make them forget their past, so they could move forward. (Rubenstein LS. 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. If you want that too, we would deeply appreciate your contribution to our work in any amount. The FBI's FOIA Library contains many files of public interest and historical value. Ewen Cameron experimented on people right up until he left the Allan in 1964. This must be very difficult, very complicated for them. He clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research long before the Agency front started to fund him. Cleghorn immediately went and took a long, hard look at what Cameron had actually been doing in his little corner of the university, and he was pretty shocked. He saw no reason why psychiatry should be any different. 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. 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. If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 4 yet, you can find them here, here,here,and here. He wanted to know if it was possible to wipe a person's mind and reinstall a new personality. They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. (McCoy, 2007) Indeed, Hebb and Camerons contribution as pioneers who designed the psychological paradigm for torture used by the CIA was acknowledged by The McGill Daily, in 2012. These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression; many were permanently debilitated after these treatments. Care of his patients went to his assistants, and here's where things get even weirder. In fact, he might have enjoyed those more. 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. And in a sense, that's what he wanted to do professionally. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Scotland in 1901. 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