Ben: When Amory and I spoke to Duncan Cameron about his dad, he also told us about his own work, as a lawyer. It was a heart attack and was very sudden. The psychiatric community could have questioned his methods, but they remained silent. 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. Who hasnt talked about this in a long time. He came up with the idea that if he presented the world and confronted the Germans with the atrocities committed during the war, the world and the Germans would refrain from repeated acts of extreme aggression. Duncan: You see, he doesn't have a scowl. That was in December of 1959, and according to the lawsuit (via the Consumer Law Group), Cameron diagnosed Morrow as having "nervousness and tension." 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. He received an M.B., Ch.B. 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. John Marks: There must have been clinical documents. Amory: Dr. Ewen Cameron will never be able to respond to the intergenerational trauma created by his work. And, later on to guidebooks for what we now call enhanced interrogation at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cameron continued his work on memory and its relationship to aging. He never got one. 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. There's my father and my mother. And how his work lives on. Duncan: Well, that's a big subject. Cameron reported to John Gittinger, an agent in charge of overseeing parts of MKUltra. Morrow's family got involved, and it was only at their insistence that she was transferred to another hospital. And in that he took some risks, obviously. And you can get a real sense of your own, where you are in the world. 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. Therefore, society should function to select out the weak and unwanted, those apt towards fearsome aggression that threatened society. There are a few ways to reach us: This content was originally created for audio. Amory: Author Stephen Kinzer, who wrote the book about the CIA and Mind Control, says, after Vietnam, this same literature got used elsewhere. What started as short-term depression before the Allan, morphed into chronic depression, as well as diagnosed schizophrenia and bipolar disorder afterwards. And Camerons part of that. 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." [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. Jim: But again, you know, the deposition transcript, you're going to have to rely on that, like we did. Psychiatric experimentation: the lessons or history, The Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill, 1994, Vol. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.". Duncan Cameron: No. Toby Ziegler:In the '50s, it was the CIA mind control research program begun in response to the Chinese attempt on U.S. prisoners. Dr. Ewen Cameron wanted to win a Nobel Prize for his work in psychiatry. The paper stated that German culture and its people would have offspring bound to become a threat to world peace in 30 years. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Scotland in 1901. He had a Mercedes. 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. Rauh: A question that Mr. Turner wanted me to ask was what happened to the papers identifying the patients? On March 10, Cameron's notes read: "She is disoriented as to time only and is probably in her second stage of depatterning. He studied Medicine at the University of Glasgow and obtained his degree in 1924. . 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. She said: "She wasn't able to talk to me about life and regular stuff. More about the Cameron family name; Sponsored by Ancestry. 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. Amory: Duncan struggles dealing with his dads legacy because he cant speak to why his dad did what he did. The National Post reports that in 1992, 77 of Cameron's patients were awarded an ex gratia settlement of $100,000, and that's all well and good, but claims made by more than 250 other people were rejected for various reasons. According to The Washington Post, Cameron was recruited in 1957, and he was a big deal. 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. in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1924, a D.P.M. He did technically, because nothing says "wonders" has to be a good thing. 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. It affected a lot of people. Advertisement. And I think my father would have too. Theres no clear approach to the summit only overgrown pathways. The U.S. wanted to know just how such a thing could possibly happen, and Dr. Ewen Cameron had a theory: brainwashing. He did and he got it. 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. 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. Duncan: Talking about him, it should be easy, but sometimes it's sort of emotional. Cameron started to distinguish populations between "the weak" and "the strong". If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 4 yet, you can find them here, here,here,and here. Ben: OK. Fair. 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. 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!" Amory: Marians mom died three ago. Marian Cameron. I'm the oldest son of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and Jean Cameron. About 55 families of victims who underwent medical experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s are suing for millions of dollars. The only cure for mental illness, he theorized, was to eliminate its "carriers" from society altogether. Thus, this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Amory: This is from The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, is the name of the paper. Cameron Cemetery. 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. Ben Brock Johnson: So what do you have in front of you here? 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. Donald Cameron of Lochiel (c.1700 - October 1748), was an influential Highland Clan Chief known for his magnanimous and gallant nature. I then *went through* the papers, because I felt that it would be improper to leave in the papers any paper that identified patients. Genealogy profile for Major Donald of 4th Chief Clunes "Old '45" Cameron Major Cameron . 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. The second stage involved extreme, high voltage multiple electroshock treatments three times daily. 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. Josh Crane Twitter Producer, Podcasts & New ProgramsJosh is a producer for podcasts and new programs at WBUR. 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. [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. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. And he always had a little book of science fiction by the bedside. Did it work? And in a lot of ways, modern psychiatry has completely left behind the man who once dominated its ranks. Lloyd has continued to fight for recognition, recompense, and an apology. Amory: This is a hard reality for the family that Ewen Cameron left behind. Joseph Rauh Jr. was one of the attorneys that represented the group who filed lawsuits in the mid-1980s. They also asked him for clarification about what happened to his father's personal papers and patient records, and he replied, "Well, I didn't destroy the documents. Amory: Duncan, one of the two lawyer sons, admits hes familiar with those 12 boxes of papers, and then explains what happened to them. Tell us about your reaction to this episode or send us a story idea. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936.[8]. John Marks observes, Ewen Cameron did not need the CIA to corrupt him. 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. Duncan: Well, I think that I would feel sad about that. She wasn't able to joke and laugh She would blurt out something like: 'We must do the right thing!'" Thank you! Amory: You're welcome to pull it out now. 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? . 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. 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. His version was a continuous-loop cassette player that would deliver messages on repeat and it's even worse than it sounds. Cameron stayed there for seven years and was made physician-in-charge of the Reception Unit of the Provincial Mental Hospital. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.. 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]. And I recall going through them and *taking out* several papers that appeared to me to be identified or could be identified as dealing with a particular patient. Velma Orlikow, for instance, was dealing with postpartum depression. . If he had a choice he would have kept living forever. And he admits that the papers he removed are now destroyed. [39], Social and intrapsychic behaviour analysis, Cameron and Freud: civilization and discontents. (Rubenstein LS. 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. And I think it affected a lot more people than anybody even realizes today. She said that at the time, Cameron was something of a celebrity. Ben: But, as human experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute, and MK-ULTRAs mind control efforts, fade into history, reduced to references in tv shows and video game plot points, there are troubling examples of these techniques still in use today. 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. Amory: Theres a reason that all the photos of Ewen Cameron are from more than 50 years ago. Cameron decided that Germans would be most likely to commit atrocities due to their historical, biological, racial and cultural past and their particular psychological nature. David Cameron's grandfather Ewen Donald Cameron (1906-1958) was a City of London figure who became a director at the stock brokerage house Panmure Gordon. 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. And one of these risks was the treatment that he was using. According to The Guardian, it started with playing tapes designed to tap into the reason the patient sought help in the first place. And Mary Morrow? music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text. 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. 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. The described types would have to be eliminated from society if there was to be peace and progress. Ironically, his lasting impact would be on how to destroy the human mind, not how to repair it. in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1924, a D.P.M. Duncan: Well, I think he was always fascinated in the future. He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. 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. The mentally ill were thus labelled as not only sick, but also weak. 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. They stressed how they'd been unwilling participants, and that they'd gone to the institute for other issues. Ben: The manual was all about how to obtain information from quote resistant sources. It went on to become the basis for the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. Scottish-American psychiatrist Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron led and conducted these experiments. Don't worry, it gets worse. I think he wanted to be famous. You can buy the full book for only . Were they *destroyed* or did you just take the patients name out? Duncan: He probably did, but I dont think I could remember the specifics of it. [8] In other words, torture. Duncan: Well, I didnt destroy the documents. Amory: Were bringing you the last installment of our special series: Madness The secret mission for mind control and the people who paid the price. He received an M.B., Ch.B. There was also Donald Hebb, who ran McGills psychology department at the time Cameron was running its psychiatry department. Amory: Jim Turner was one of two prosecutors on the case. Kinzer: If Cameron had failed to find an effective means of mind control despite carrying out the most reckless experiments, in which he was willing to take any kind of a grotesque step in an effort to find that key, this must have helped feed Gottlieb's conclusion that the whole thing didn't exist. 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. And people talk about the transmission of trauma through generations. He began his career as resident surgeon at Glasgow Infirmary, but in 1929 moved to Canada to work in the Brandon Mental Hospital. Today, we're talking to one of the only people who will stand up for Dr. Cameron. He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. Instead of being considered for the fellowship, the neurologist was admitted to his Allan Memorial Institute, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and given such a heavy dose of barbiturates that it triggered an allergic reaction and she suffered from a prolonged loss of oxygen to the brain. 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. Ben: Street Mountain is a strange choice for a bucket list. Duncan: And I've said Im unable to do that. But none of us trained in psychiatry. 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. North America. Alison Steel won compensation for her mother's misery in 2017, says the CBC: $100,000 in exchange for ending legal action. Or do you remember any of --. Indian River. People Projects Discussions Surnames . He had patients. Dr. Morrow, says The Washington Post, had applied for a fellowship in psychiatry with Cameron. ", Why MKUltra's Top Brainwashing Scientist Was A Real-Life Nightmare, "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron. 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. Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. Though he did visit the Allan Memorial on occasion. And, until theres true accountability for what happened and what is still happening, it never will be. [34], Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to MKUltra were not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' [13], In 1945, Cameron, Nolan D. C. Lewis and Dr Paul L. Schroeder, colonel and psychiatrist, University College of Illinois, were invited to the Nuremberg trials for a psychiatric evaluation of Rudolf Hess. 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. Memorials. It is true. Ewen passed away on month day 1915, at age 84 at death place. Harvey Weinstein: Complicated question, we all have motivations for the things that we do. He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the CIA. A possessive type, filled with jealousy and demanding utmost loyalty. Ewen Cameron was fulfilling one of the items on his life bucket list: to climb Street Mountain. Typically, I would show up there and, if it was a Friday, ask if I could have a lift down to Lake Placid. In some cases, the same phrases reappear all through these. Ewen Donald Cameron. He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the CIA. Traces of some survived, including documentation on Sub-project 42 also known as Operation Midnight Climax and sub-project 68. . Cameron's work stopped when she gave birth, and Lloyd remembered a broken mother. Ben: Jims right. Under that program, more than 80,000 suspected North Vietnamese sympathizers were interrogated by US forces and their allies. The described types were the enemies of society and life. In compliance with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements, some of these records are no longer in the physical possession of the FBI, eliminating the FBI's capability to re-review and/or re-process this material. In his analysis, culture and society played a crucial role in the ability for one to function according to the demands necessary for human survival. Duncan: Yes. Cameron began his training in psychiatry at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in 1925. Duncan: Oh yes, he enjoyed a good joke even if they were off color. He warned that government institutions should take measures against such potential liabilities. And I feel for them for that. I'm sure part of him very much wanted to be the person who cures mental illness. 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. [6] Decades after his own death, the psychic driving technique he developed continued to see extensive use in the torture of prisoners around the world. [14] Hess later confessed that he had faked the amnesia. For Cameron, the traits were contagions and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. According to Cameron's psychiatric analysis of the German people, they were not suitable to have children or hold positions of authority because of a genetic tendency to organize society in a way that fostered fearsome aggression and would lead to war rather than peace; he would repeatedly use the German as the archetypal character structure on which to ground the most psychologically deviant humans. Rauh: So any documents that would show the treatment of the plaintiffs in this case were destroyed? And he was always very fascinated by what the future held for us all. Ben: But Duncan is still, in some ways, trying to defend his dads honor. Ben: Sure. Cameron became the first director of the Allan Memorial Institute as well as the first chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill.

Philippians 3:11 14 Commentary, Articles D