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The term unspeakable torture is likely to conjure up images of a secret medieval underground dungeon echoing with the screams of prisoners strapped to a torture rack, the atrocities and experimentation performed on men, women, and children in a Nazi concentration camp, or perhaps a private Dr. Frankenstein–style lab in which a mad scientist secretly works away after midnight, performing unimaginable operations on the human body.

But scenes like this aren’t only relegated to faraway places or to the imagination of science fiction and horror writers. Terribly similar events have taken place in the heart of Montreal … and in the not-too-distant past.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary describes torture as “the infliction of severe bodily pain, especially as a punishment or a means of interrogation or intimidation; severe physical or mental suffering.” Coercion and mind control were at the centre of a controversial series of experiments that took place between 1957 and 1964 at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill’s Royal Victoria Hospital, partially funded by the CIA. They were inspired by a phenomenon observed in American soldiers who had been captured during the Korean War and whose behaviour was significantly and frighteningly altered.

Ravenscrag

These experimental atrocities couldn’t have occurred in a more fitting building: an eerie, imposing, and intimidating Italian Renaissance–style mansion that clung to the foothills of Mount Royal. The building simply looks intimidating, and its original name was decidedly creepy and Poe-esque: Ravenscrag.

Built between 1860 and 1863 by Scottish-Canadian financier and shipping magnate Sir Hugh Allan on the fourteen acres he purchased at what was then considered the outskirts of the city, the mansion consisted of five floors and seventy-two rooms. The looming building was considered to be larger and more costly than any other building in Canada at the time, including the formidable Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Ontario, constructed by Sir Allan Napier McNab thirty years earlier.

Like McNab, Allan, who died in 1882 as one of the wealthiest men in Canada, intended his property to be an impressive display of his prosperity and importance. During his tenure there, Allan could sometimes be seen looking down from the mansion’s seventy-five-foot tower at the three-hundred-foot front yard, past the gate, and over Old Montreal.

Ravenscrag. The mansion was originally built in the early 1860s by the wealthy industrialist Hugh Allan. Following his death the building was bequeathed to McGill University and became the home of the Allan Memorial Institute.

In 1940, Sir Hugh Allan’s son, Sir Montague Allan, donated the mansion to the Royal Victoria Hospital. The Allan Memorial Institute opened in July of 1944 and launched what was considered a very modern Department of Psychiatry as part of McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, with an initial offering of fifty-two patient beds.

MK-ULTRA

At the end of the Korean War, something was alarming the U.S. government. Some of the American soldiers who had been taken as prisoners of war returned home with decidedly different views, values, and thoughts, described as anti-American and Communist. U.S. government agencies, such as the CIA, believed this was evidence that foreign militaries had mastered methods of brainwashing and mind control as a powerful new weapon.

Fears that countries deemed hostile to the United States had the ability to use chemical and biological agents against Americans and their allies led to the development of a defence program designed to discover similar techniques. The plan was to develop these techniques so that American intelligence agents could learn to detect them and be able to counteract.

Among other efforts, such as Project CHATTER (a Navy project involving a “truth drug”), Project BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE (a program designed to promote memory enhancement and the establishment of defensive means for preventing hostile mind control), and MKNAOMI (a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements and stockpile severely incapacitating and even lethal materials), MK-ULTRA was developed.

MK-ULTRA, approved by the director of Central Intelligence on April 13, 1953, was the principal CIA program concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological agents capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behaviour.

MK-ULTRA documents were destroyed in 1973 under the orders of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of Technical Services Division. But various hearings, pieces of testimony, and recorded eyewitness accounts survived and can be put together to create a disturbing and unforgettable tale. In an almost 180-page document of a United States Senate joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee of Human Resources that took place on August 3, 1977, the chairman of the Health Subcommittee, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, stated:

Some two years ago, the Senate Health Subcommittee heard chilling testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD on “unwitting subjects in social situations.”

The hearing revealed that there were 149 MK-ULTRA subprojects, many of which appeared to have some connection with research into “behavioural modification, drug acquisition and testing or administering drugs surreptitiously” and that the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (also known as the Human Ecology Foundation) was established to undertake research in the general area of the behavioural sciences. This foundation provided funding to “a lot of innocent people” who had no knowledge of the fact that this money was coming to them from the CIA. According to a March 11, 1980, report by The Fifth Estate, the CIA spent twenty-five years and twenty-five million dollars on secret brainwashing and mind control research under codenames like MK-ULTRA. It was through this funding that the CIA became interested in the work being done by Dr. Ewen Cameron, a professor from Albany.

Between the years of 1957 and 1961, about sixty-two thousand dollars was provided by the CIA to Dr. Cameron. But, according to a 2012 feature article in the McGill Daily, it all began at a clandestine meeting at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel on Sherbrooke Street on July 1, 1951, to launch a joint American-British-Canadian CIA-funded series of studies on sensory deprivation.

Dr. Donald Hebb, McGill’s director of psychology, received a ten thousand dollar grant as part of this funding, in an attempt to determine the relationship between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of a person’s cognitive ability. In one study, Hebb played tapes of recorded voices expressing either pro-religious or anti-scientific sentiments to students who were isolated and deprived of most of their senses for an entire day. The students, who had previously taken stances against sentiments being expressed, came out of the experience more receptive to those same thoughts and viewpoints. The long periods of sensory deprivation appeared to make the subjects far more susceptible to perspectives that radically differed from the their previous stance.

Dr. Hebb’s research helped to fuel the CIA’s ongoing interest in the effects of interrogation and psychological torture. Work that, years later, Dr. Ewen Cameron would continue to conduct at McGill.

Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron

Considered an authoritative figure in psychiatric research, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Scotland on December 24, 1901. He was educated at Glasgow University and the University of London before working and studying in Glasgow, Switzerland, Manitoba, and Maryland. In 1936 he moved to Massachusetts to become the director of the research division at Worchester State Hospital, where he published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry. This book, and his research, revealed his underlying belief that psychiatry should follow a strict clinical and scientific method, with rigorous scientific principles that studied the relationship between the mind and the body, or the organic and the neurological.

MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

The term Manchurian Candidate is sometimes used when referring to such military techniques as mentioned in this chapter, and is derived from the 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon. Condon’s novel, a political thriller, describes the fate of an American soldier (Sergeant Raymond Shaw) who is captured and brainwashed during the Korean War in 1952 in Manchuria. On his return to the United States, it is revealed that he has become an unwitting sleeper agent, puppet, and assassin for a Communist conspiracy. The novel was adapted into a film in 1962 directed by John Frankenheimer, starring Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, and Janet Leigh. It was remade in 2004, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Liev Scheiber, Denzel Washington, and Meryl Streep.

Dr. Cameron was working as a professor of neurology and psych-iatry in New York at Albany Medical College in 1943 when he was invited to Montreal by Dr. Wilder Penfield, Montreal’s first neurosurgeon and the first director of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. As the first director of the Allan Memorial Institute and the first chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill, Cameron began recruiting psychologists, biologists, and psychoanalysts from around the world, adopting an open door policy and a “day treatment” or “outpatient” concept, which were new to North America at the time.

In 1945, Dr. Cameron was invited to the Nuremberg Trials for a psych-iatric evaluation of Rudolf Hess, deputy führer of the Nazi Party. It is ironic that he was involved in the judging of the atrocities of the Nazi leadership and not all that long before his own career was tainted by torments he caused others. Cameron published papers in which he decried Second World War–era Germany as an example of general anxiety and nervous tension helping to poison the minds of society. He believed that mental conditions were socially contagious and that such illnesses could be reconditioned out of a person through neurological, physiological, and biological means. This led to his experimentation with psychotic and paralytic drugs combined with electroshock therapy, in order to erase existing memories and reduce the mind to a core psyche that could then be reconstructed or reprogrammed.

Cameron was an internationally honoured and respected psych-iatrist, but he wasn’t liked. He was described by former colleague Dr. Elliot Emmanuel in a 1980 Fifth Estate interview as authoritarian, ruthless, power hungry, nervous, tense, angry, and “not very nice.” Emmanuel explained that the quantity, the intensity, and the frequency with which the electroshock therapy was given by Cameron was unethical. “There was no informed consent.”

Cameron suggested using chemical agents to break down ongoing patterns of behaviour, subjecting patients to terrifying LSD trips that lasted for hours. He also provided a treatment called depatterning, which involved massive rounds of electroshock. Treatments, at twenty times the intensity of those used today, were administered to patients who were kept sleeping for days. Some of the patients lost their memories, and others forgot even their earliest functions, such as basic toilet training. Depatterning also involved subjecting participants to electroshocks multiple times a day rather than two or three times over the span of a week. The goal was to reduce the patient to an animal or vegetative state. An additional experiment involved putting patients to sleep for as long as a month at a time and having repeated patterned messages play for up to fifteen hours a day while the patients were unconscious, in an attempt to brainwash the patients “back to health.”

The concept behind these experimental therapeutic treatments was to completely obliterate negative memories and patterns of behaviour and infuse new positivity or an alternative to the old, undesirable behaviour. Cameron called this technique psychic driving. However, the treatments left so many patients with severe amnesia that the Allan Memorial Institute stopped the treatments after Cameron left in 1964.

Depatterning

An article written in an April 1962 issue of the journal Comprehensive Psychiatry titled “The Depatterning Treatment of Schizophrenia,” by Dr. Cameron and two colleagues, opens with the proposition that this successful method of treatment was “imperative” because of the ongoing revolution in psychiatric hospitalization.

It goes on to state that depatterning consisted of “the administration of two to four electroshocks daily to the point where the patient developed an organic brain syndrome with acute confusion, disorientation, and interference with his learned habits of eating and bladder and bowel control.” It also states that, while in this condition, the schizophrenic symptoms also disappeared.

The treatment procedure outlined the extended continuous sleep regimen, which involved the use of three barbiturates and included three temporary waking periods for meals and toilet use. Approximately three days into the sleep process a twice-daily electroshock treatment of six rapidly delivered shocks began and ran for five days, after which the six shock treatments were reduced from twice to once daily.

With respect to the treatment’s efficiency, the paper states that, though it involved a significant expenditure of time and effort on behalf of the administering team, it resulted in a considerable increase in efficiency. “With regard to the detrimental side effects,” the article continues, “the most serious is of course the period of complete amnesia. We are working upon methods to reduce this and it is proper to say that while it is a source of trouble and annoyance to the patient during the first six months or so following discharge, a scaffolding of subsequent memories consisting in what he had been told of events which happened during the amnestic period gradually takes form.”

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

A dystopian novel by British writer Anthony Burgess and published in 1962, A Clockwork Orange depicts the violent exploits of teenage Alex, his incarceration for murder, and the experimental “Ludovico Technique” that is performed on him. The experiment consists of behaviour-modification aversion-therapy treatment, which involves the injection of a nausea-inducing drug while he listens to classic music and watches graphically violent scenes. The intent of the conditioning is that he will become severely ill at the mere thought of violence. A side effect of the experiment is that hearing previously enjoyed music, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, also results in overwhelming nausea. In an essay about the novel titled “Clockwork Oranges,” Burgess explained the title as appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of sweetness and colour.

Long Term Suffering of Involuntary Patients

Patients expecting to receive the best psychiatric care that money could buy came from all over Canada to be treated by Dr. Cameron. But very few of the patients arriving were informed that the treatments being conducted on them were highly experimental. Several of Dr. Cameron’s involuntary experimental subjects started to come forward in the 1980s, willing to openly discuss the various forms of bizarre and extreme therapy they received while under his care. In their testimonies, they shared the common experiences of devastating physical and mental pain, memory loss, and relentless feelings of intense anxiety and extreme isolation.

A 1992 article in the New York Times described a Canadian government compensation of up to eighty thousand dollars for the eighty or so Canadians who had undergone the psychic driving treatment in the ’50s and ’60s. In the article, Linda McDonald (one of those eighty victims), describes walking into the hospital as a healthy and coherent person with a husband on one arm and a guitar in the other. After spending almost ninety days in a sleep room and being subjected to more than one hundred shock treatments and heavy doses of barbiturates and other drugs, she emerged without the ability to play the guitar, read, or write. She suffered severe memory loss of the first twenty-six years of her life, could not remember either her husband or her five children, and had to relearn basic functions such as toilet training.

The same article quotes a retired member of Parliament, David Orlikow, discussing his then-deceased wife, Velma, who was also a victim of this barbaric treatment regimen. He said she emerged from the experiments emotionally unstable and, despite being an intelligent person, she had lost the ability to read. He also explained that there were days she would sit around doing nothing or suddenly fall into “unexplainable rages.”

In a YouTube video titled “MK-ULTRA survivor speaks,” Lynne Moss-Sharman, an activist and supporter of trauma victims, shared her memories of surviving the experiments as a child. She would be strapped down to a table and electricity would be applied to various parts of her body. “A simple form of torture that they used on myself and on a lot of other children was the dislocation of your limbs,” Moss-Sharman says. “So they dislocated both your arms and your legs. That was probably the simplest, easiest and cheapest way to re-enforce the notion that you were absolutely helpless and that you could do nothing physically to defend or protect yourself from what they could do to you.”

An episode of The Fifth Estate included an interview with Bob Logie, who had been admitted to Allan Memorial at the age of eighteen for treatment of psychosomatic leg pain. Post-treatment, he described feeling as if his mind had been completely invaded, and that he might know what a guinea pig feels like. Logie said he couldn’t hold down a job for very long and the anxiety continued to build. “I just felt that I couldn’t cope, I couldn’t adjust after the LSD,” he said.

The CIA compiled research done at McGill and at other universities in the United States and Britain into the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook, which essentially could be seen as a torture manual. The text of this book is widely available via a quick internet search. One can imagine that the various torture techniques used by the U.S. military on detainees in locations like Guantanamo Bay might be derived from this text. This book is merely one way that the dark legacy of these experimental treatments conducted by Dr. Cameron continues to live on. Transcultural Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of cultural psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology, was originally funded in the early 1960s by the CIA money. The journal, which continues to be published independently from the original funding source, is considered the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association, Transcultural Psychiatry Section, and has proven to be a much-respected source of research, insight, and know-ledge. So perhaps not everything associated with the torture treatments in Montreal was painted with brushes of pure evil.

Due to new rules regarding ethics in scientific and psychological research, the type of horrid and life-altering experiments that Dr. Cameron conducted in Montreal are no longer possible. For example, in 1976 President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order on Intelligence Activities, the first of its kind, which prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.” These orders were followed by both President Carter and President Reagan with additional direction that such prohibition be applied to any form of human experimentation.

It provides some level of comfort to know that we have learned from these previous horrific experiences and that positive change has occurred to prevent it from happening again. But that doesn’t change the dark legacy of what took place on the McGill campus in Montreal that still haunts both the victims and the country today.