He wanted to cure schizophrenia, and win a Nobel Prize for it. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association (19521953), Canadian Psychiatric Association (19581959),[2] American Psychopathological Association (1963),[3] Society of Biological Psychiatry (1965)[4] and the World Psychiatric Association (19611966). For Cameron, the traits were contagions and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. In the final installment ofMadness," we sit down with Duncan, and we explore the shocking ways his father's methods are still being used today. Amory: He doesnt explicitly say that he was the one who did the destroying. He was there when his legal partner, Joseph Rauh, took Camerons deposition. [1] In papers published during this time he linked RNA to memory. Duncan: We all very much wished, as we always had, that my father was alive because he would have had to deal with that issue and would have dealt with it quite effectively. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cameron continued his work on memory and its relationship to aging. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became an authority in his areas of concentration. And Camerons part of that. Peterborough County. Cameron began to base some of his notions on race, as is seen in his theories regarding the German people. Ben: The study also said that these treatments, the de-patterning and psychic driving programs including LSD injections, induced comas, sensory deprivation and electroshock had a detrimental impact on patients memories, which, in retrospect, might have been part of the point. A Canadian government dismissed the CIAs role as a side issue or red herring; Ottawas Justice Department denied legal responsibility, offering each victim a nugatory $20,000 nuisance payment. Heres documentarian Stephen Bennett, whose film Eminent Monsters looks at the real echoes of Camerons work in government interrogation programs today. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text. After his treatments patients were unable to function; they had been reduced to a state of infancy. While guys like Freud encouraged talking through problems, Cameron thought things like electroshock therapy and drug cocktails could be used to physically change the brain and get rid of the illness in question. Duncan: Well, I think that I would feel sad about that. As soon as his family found out about his death, they burned all the files that this man kept in his possession. It was a heart attack and was very sudden. Duncan: I think the furthest I got was to his office. It is true. 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. Ben: In photos, the Cameron family seems happy, a candid shot of Ewen Cameron that looks to be from a garden party shows the psychiatrist in a skinny tie and jacket, horn-rimmed glasses and short cropped white hair. As time has worn on, its become the families of those victims who shoulder the burden. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936. Duncan: Oh yes, he enjoyed a good joke even if they were off color. The CBC says the CIA recruited Dr. Ewen Cameron a few years into MKUltra, using the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology to approach Cameron and tell him that he really, really needed to apply for one of their grants. Duncan: They got close to the top and James looked around and my father had passed away. Police, hospitals, government, and schools would need to use the correct psychiatric authority to stop mental contagions from spreading. He had various people record the tapes sometimes including the patient's loved ones and it was, on the whole, incredibly traumatizing. Hebb who did pay the students for their participation basically put them in a room for 24 hours, in a set-up that deprived them of all sensory input. Now, a recent court decision has. There must have been names of patients. Cameron began his training in psychiatry at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in 1925. Ben: Duncan says his father was so busy that he didnt see much of him during their time in Montreal. In 1926, he served as assistant medical officer there[9] and was introduced to psychiatrist Sir David Henderson, a student of Swiss-born US psychiatrist Adolf Meyer. [37], Whether or not Cameron was aware that funding for his experiments was coming from the CIA is unclear; it has been argued that he would have carried out the exact same experiments if funding had come from a source without ulterior motives. She was left with permanent impairments: She was unable to recognize faces, had impaired spatial recognition, and lost a good portion of her memory. Ben: Her dad couldnt afford childcare, so soon after Marians mother went into the Allan, social services took Marian and her two younger brothers away because there was no parent to take care of them. A stronger personality would be able to maintain itself in heavy industrial situations, he theorised, while the weaker would not be able to cope with industrial conditions. [25], Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by "erasing" existing memories and "reprogramming" the psyche. That could be heightened with various drugs, eventually was replaced by positive messages, and the so-called "psychic driving" would continue. And in a lot of ways, modern psychiatry has completely left behind the man who once dominated its ranks. She never did get her children back. [citation needed] He furthermore wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging, believing that the aged brain experienced psychosis. Harvey: It is frustrating, and if you talk about a story with no end, I think the important thing to remember is that it isn't just the patients who went through this, it was their families. [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. He continued his training in the United States under Meyer at the Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland from 1926 to 1928 with a Henderson Research Scholarship. He didn't pull punches, saying, "We hanged Nazis for doing the sort of things Cameron did.". 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. What started as short-term depression before the Allan, morphed into chronic depression, as well as diagnosed schizophrenia and bipolar disorder afterwards. Thus, this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease. Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. While more is known about the experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron than about some of the other MKUltra projects, there's still a lot of information missing. He was a person who was always looking for a way of advancing the field. Cameron began to develop broader theories of society, new concepts of human relations to replace concepts he deemed dangerous and outdated. Cameron began to explore how industrial conditions could satisfy the population through work and what kind of person or worker is best suited to industrial conditions. We encourage you to research and examine these records to . 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. 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. The program is widely believed to have been partly funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency as part of their top-secret MKULTRA program. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. The U.S. wanted to know just how such a thing could possibly happen, and Dr. Ewen Cameron had a theory: brainwashing. She said she received 12 boxes of her husbands papers after he died, but that, quote, If I had these papers, I wouldnt necessarily let you see them. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. Then we brought them down I think it was probably during one of my infrequent jaunts up there I brought them down in my car, and I then took them over and deposited them at the American Psychiatric Association. Cameron reported to John Gittinger, an agent in charge of overseeing parts of MKUltra. Heres John Marks again. Take a guess. Ben: Did he have any favorite sayings or idiosyncrasies or things like that that you remember or that made an impression on you when you were younger? And you can get a real sense of your own, where you are in the world. He received an M.B., Ch.B. That was the case for people like Phyllis Goldberg. It is at this juncture that he became interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain to control and understand the processes of memory. He warned that government institutions should take measures against such potential liabilities. He has an open, amused look on his face. Donald Hebb and Ewen Cameron were competitors; they did not collaborate, though Cameron incorporated Hebb's sensory isolation techniques into his own diabolical arsenal of psychiatry's instruments of torture. Joseph Rauh (from the transcript): But as far as you know now, neither you nor your brother or sister or mother have *any* papers left that are not sort of public documents? 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? [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.' Duncan: It's really a very moving editorial. Ben: Which brings us back to a question that no one can answer why did Dr. Cameron do what he did? She very slowly recovered mostly and died in 2017. Morrow's family got involved, and it was only at their insistence that she was transferred to another hospital. Psychiatric experimentation: the lessons or history, The Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill, 1994, Vol. Ben: But the Canadian and US governments could take accountability for their support of Cameron. Amory: Marian was 5 years old when her mom was admitted to the Allan for what she thinks was postpartum depression. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. And the funeral was yet another opportunity for Marian and her siblings to learn more about the mother who had been absent for so much of their childhoods. And people talk about the transmission of trauma through generations. In some cases, applicants couldn't prove the conditions they currently lived with were a direct result of what they went through at Allan, and in others, they were treated outside of the time frame. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all senior partners in the company. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allen, a small town in Scotland, on December 24, 1901. Ben: Street Mountain is a strange choice for a bucket list. Ben: Today we grapple with Dr. Ewen Camerons legacy. He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. 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