A “Suitable Case”
Today Anne White, 61, can look back at a fulfilling career. Among other positions, she worked as an examiner for the Medical Council of Canada and assistant clinical professor of medicine in the Department of Psychiatry at McMaster University Medical School in Ontario. Her area of expertise includes neurology and behavioral medicine. Her long list of awards and research grants are testimony to her work.
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“I was placed in a small room by
myself. I was left to my own devices while I went through
a week of barbiturate withdrawal. The nurses hardly bothered with me.
I was the one who had dared to challenge the system.”
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She told me: “After each birth I felt tired all the time even after getting sleep; weepy; worthless as a mother; guilty that I wasn’t doing a good job. Everything was an effort, including looking after the baby. I lost all pleasure in things I normally loved. I couldn’t concentrate to read; I couldn’t listen to and enjoy music. I was intermittently suicidal and nearly always thinking everyone would be better off without me; that I was a drag on my family. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.
“As soon as I was pregnant with the second child this situation resolved and, during the pregnancy, I felt good. I had my first two children 13 months apart, then there was a gap of two years before the next one was born. I spent six weeks in [the] hospital with my last pregnancy with high blood pressure. The baby ended up in an incubator for a week. Again I became depressed.”
At the time she was living in Zambia, a nation with limited medical facilities. Her husband (they are now divorced) was a family doctor. After consulting with another doctor, it was decided that Anne should return with the children to her parents in England and be admitted to St. Thomas’s.
She had no idea what to expect. But she had been assured that the hospital was at the cutting edge of medicine. She would be taken care of. She would get better. With that expectation, she became Sargant’s very trusting patient.
He decided that the young mother was a suitable case for the Sleep Room.
This year’s remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” reminds America: deny it at your own risk Where does one begin the process of programming an individual to commit acts they neither assent to nor consciously carry out? For William Sargant, that process began with the questionnaires—laboriously long and programmed “to fatigue him further, rather than exact any new information of value. “When his memory begins to fail him, the difficulty in keeping to the same story makes him more anxious than ever. Finally, unless some accident brings the examination to a premature end, his brain will be too disorganized to respond normally, it can become transmarginally inhibited, vulnerable to suggestions, paradoxical and ultra-paradoxical phase may supervene and the fortress finally surrenders unconditionally.”
“If the stress or the physical debilitation or both are carried one stage further... patterns of thought and behavior... become disrupted. New patterns can then be substituted, or suppressed patterns allowed to reassert themselves; or the subject may begin to think or act in ways that precisely contradict his former ones.”
And thus the door opens, welcoming the Manchurian Candidate.
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