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BEHAVIOR MANIPULATION
INV. NO.: USA-01028504
DATE: STARTED IN 1985
STATUS: ONGOING AND DEVELOPING
COUNTRY: UNITED STATES
SUBJECT: BEHAVIOR MANIPULATION BY MEANS OF COERCIVE PSYCHIATRIC TECHNIQUES, INCLUDING ELECTRIC SHOCK AND DRUGS
Madeleine was rolled into the operating room on a gurney and prepared for surgery, her head shaven. A local anaesthetic was applied to a portion of her scalp. The surgeon cut away a flap of skin and drilled a hole through her skull. Wielding a spatula-type instrument, he made several sweeping incisions through her brain, slicing all the way to the back of her skull. While the surgeon worked, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron stood over the young woman, plying her with questions until he was assured the surgeon had achieved the desired result. When Madeleine stared vacuously and could only grunt in response, the “surgery” ended. Madeleine lived the rest of her life an automaton in the confines of an insane asylum.
Madeleine Smith, a 28-year-old Canadian newscaster, was just one casualty of the ghoulish experiments conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s under Ewen Cameron at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.
The experiments were part of the infamous “MK ULTRA” program conducted under the aegis of the U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1950s and 1960s, exposed in media and in hearings before the U.S. Congress in the 1970s. Cameron brutalized and maimed patients with drugs, shocks and lobotomies as he sought a means to “depattern” and program the human mind. Canadian survivors still able to seek reparation eventually obtained a $750,000 shared settlement from the U.S. government in 1988.
Virtually all accounts of this dark chapter of the 20th century have named Cameron, who died in 1967, as the main culprit responsible for the vicious treatment. But evidence has existed all along that the experiments were never isolated to Cameron, whether funded by intelligence agencies or not, and that the mindset that sanctioned them pervaded North American psychiatry—even decades after they occurred.
“It wasn’t a criminal experiment using people as guinea pigs,” Heinz Lehmann, a colleague of Cameron’s, said in a 1984 Montreal Gazette account of his contemporary’s efforts. Lehmann, a New York state mental health official from 1981 until his death in 1999—including deputy commissioner in the research division of the state Office of Mental Health—had taught at McGill. He became the Allan Memorial Institute’s clinical director in 1958, a position he held until 1971. “It was a heroic, very aggressive treatment based on a certain theory which proved to be wrong.”
The treatment Cameron’s patients received was no secret to Lehmann. “I knew ... and I didn’t approve,” he said. “But not for moral reasons. I didn’t believe in his theory.”
Lehmann, instead, had his own theories—and performed his own experiments, at times with fatal consequences.
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