Inside the Sleep Room
by Gordon Thomas
UNWITTING SUBJECT REGAINS CONTROL: Anne White believes that the best defense against unethical psychiatric practices is public disclosure and awareness, and that the time has come for the governments involved in such programs to reveal all they know about still-secret research. Her story is ultimately a story of terror: of the familiar—a respected hospital—becoming a place of horror. |
On a bleak winter’s day in February 1970, Anne Margaret White, mother of three small children, was admitted to one of the world’s most renowned teaching hospitals, St. Thomas’s, in London, England. She was suffering from post-partum depression, which affects a number of women after giving birth.
Three months later, Anne emerged from the hospital so physically and mentally changed her own father thought she was “a zombie.” Her transformation came at the hands of a psychiatrist as respected as the hospital in which he worked.
His name was William Walters Sargant, who had long been regarded as a ground-breaking mental-health practitioner. His clarion call could be heard through the hospital corridors: “An ounce of phenobarbitone*, or some rather more modern tranquilizer, may be worth more than a hundred-weight of persuasive talk.”
When Anne White became his patient, Sargant had already been at the forefront of mind-control for a quarter of a century. He was the British end of the most sinister program ever approved by the United States government: MK ULTRA, an intelligence agency effort designed to control all human behavior.
One of a series of research programs that sought to control and manipulate human behavior, MK ULTRA included wide-ranging experiments with LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, electric shock and various means of producing mental, emotional and physiological changes.
By 1970, the program had officially been disbanded. One of its key members, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, was dead. His Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada, where hundreds of patients had undergone hypnosis, psychosurgery, electroshock and the whole gamut of behavioral control, had become synonymous with brutality. The U.S. government apologized and promised it would not and could not ever happen again. Seemingly, that accountability to the democratic system had triumphed.
It had not. Anne White was about to find that out; hundreds of patients before her had also discovered the terrible truth. MK ULTRA continued to thrive in the hands of William Sargant. And others like him.
He continued to use the massive doses of electroshock and drugs as part of his behavioral modification regime.
He was, in 1970, also working closely with Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California in Los Angeles and director of its Neuropsychiatric Institute.
Shortly before Anne White had been admitted to his care, Sargant had made another visit to West. Together they had driven out to a former Nike missile site in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Means to Control
Sargant later remembered, “It was accessible but remote. Securely fenced, it was ideal for Jolly’s purpose—a Center for the Prevention of Violence.”
West had proposed that he and Sargant would work together, using Sargant’s previous research into “the pharmacology of violence-producing and violence-inhibiting drugs.”
It would be another step in their search to see if it was possible to create a real-life Manchurian Candidate: an assassin whose mind could be controlled.
In 1962, a Hollywood film based on Richard Condon’s novel had shown an American soldier captured in the Korean War being brainwashed by the Chinese in Manchuria, and sent back to America—where he waits, unknowingly, as an on-command killer. His ultimate target: a presidential candidate.
The concept had consumed Western intelligence agencies during the MK ULTRA era. For West and Sargant it remained a near-obsession.
Using his highly placed connections to the American drug industry, Sargant’s arsenal of mind-altering drugs was unequalled in Britain. He was the first to treat—depending on the definition of “treatment"—patients with Thorazine, Stelazine and Mellaril; anti-depressants like Elavil and Tofranil; anti-manics like lithium carbonate. He gave them in combinations.
He scoured the psychiatric journals for news of new drugs. His files included an advertisement from the Archives of General Psychiatry. It showed a dark-skinned, thick-lipped young man, fists clenched. Above the figure are the words “Assaultive and Belligerent?” Beneath, the message: “Cooperation often begins with Haldol (haloperidol). It acts to control assaultive, aggressive behavior.”
For Sargant and West, drugs were the chemistry of liberation. With drugs virtually anyone could be brought within the orbit of “mental health” as they defined it.
Sargant worked closely with Eli Lilly and Company, Hoffman-La Roche and Geigy. Other drug houses who regarded him with favor were Merck, Sharp and Dohme, Parke-Davis and Company, Smith Kline & French Laboratories, and Searle Laboratories.
From them came the drugs which did not free Sargant’s patients from their demons, anxieties and psychoses, but freed him to find more time to treat more patients. The drugs were no more than a means to control.
His patients were often consigned to one of the asylums that still dotted the countryside of post-war England.
