We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. Montreal's CTV says that by the time she died in 2011, she had spent the last 20 years of her life as an "infant," unable to allow anyone near her head without a terrible reaction. Her niece later said, "She had electric shock equipment put on her head so many times that it [remained] in her subconscious." 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: Ben and I are in an apartment in Washington D.C. thats bursting with morning light and books, and were flipping through some of our hosts old family photos. Very different. Birthdate: June 04, 1906. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, money from John Wilson McConnell of the Montreal Star, and a gift of Sir Hugh Allan's mansion on Mount Royal, the Allan Memorial Institute for psychiatry was founded. He was a person who was always looking for a way of advancing the field. Toby Ziegler:In the '50s, it was the CIA mind control research program begun in response to the Chinese attempt on U.S. prisoners. And that seemed to us to be a highly questionable action for someone to take. And in a sense, that's what he wanted to do professionally. Ben: Sure. Ben: But there is reason to believe that these documents arent just missing. Duncan: Well, I think that I would feel sad about that. North America. Cameron further argued that "the weak" must not influence children. And Mary Morrow? Particularly because we put that question to him today. There are a few ways to reach us: This content was originally created for audio. But we do have his son, Duncan Cameron. His goal was to standardize his treatment, and once he did it for schizophrenia, he believed he would open a "gateway through which we might pass into a new field of psychotherapeutic methods." Ben: Over and over, weve heard from victims of Dr. Ewen Camerons brutal experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute. He did technically, because nothing says "wonders" has to be a good thing. The personality types are as follows: Cameron believed that a society in which psychiatry built and developed the institutions of government, schools, prisons and hospitals would be one in which science triumphed over the "sick" members of society. Duncan: Well, I didnt destroy the documents. [38], Cameron died of a heart attack while hiking with his son in the Adirondack Mountains on September 8, 1967. The first was for 18 days and the second for 29 days, all while hearing endless recorded messages and being subjected to a series of electroshock therapy sessions. Skip Ancestry . Thank you! "He was supposed to do wonders with people with depression or mental health issues." 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. 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. Cameron was born on December 24, 1901, in Scotland and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. Canada. His support of Charles Edward Stuart was instrumental in the Jacobite Rising of 1745 Lochiel and the Jacobite cause [citation needed] He furthermore wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging, believing that the aged brain experienced psychosis. The second part of the technique was inspired by something called the Cerebrophone, which was essentially a "learn-while-you-sleep" recording device. 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. Deze informatie is onderdeel van Families Klein, Ree, de Breed en de Vries van Terschelling van Marthan Klein op Genealogie Online. Josh Crane Twitter Producer, Podcasts & New ProgramsJosh is a producer for podcasts and new programs at WBUR. 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. These became the basis of a new social and behavioural science that he would later institute through his presidencies of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. Kinzer: This idea of some evil scientists taking control of someone else's mind is a wonderfully appealing trope, and it's been used repeatedly in very popular movies and books and stories. Cameron started to distinguish populations between "the weak" and "the strong". "[36], Cameron is the subject of Stephen Bennett's film Eminent Monsters (2020), which was funded by BBC Scotland and Creative Scotland. We love making Endless Thread, and we want to be able to keep making it far into the future. And he has a much different memory of how it all went down. Duncan Cameron: This is a picture of the whole family. Ewen married Agnes Cameron (born Bell) in 1867, at age 35 at marriage place. AIan Cameron followed in the footsteps of his father and became a director at Panmure Gordon in 1957. 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. Heres John Marks again. 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. memorial page for Donald Ewen Cameron (1852-5 Feb 1892), Find a Grave Memorial ID 170055188, citing Cameron Cemetery, Indian River . He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the CIA. He argued that people with mental illnesses could spread and transmit their diseases. [8] [citation needed] Characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes emerging from the brain. 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. 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. Care of his patients went to his assistants, and here's where things get even weirder. Police, hospitals, government, and schools would need to use the correct psychiatric authority to stop mental contagions from spreading. They stressed how they'd been unwilling participants, and that they'd gone to the institute for other issues. It describes various personalities that he believed were of marked danger to all members of society. You know, my job was to look out for the cops. Duncan Cameron: No. People Projects Discussions Surnames . These negative statements were sometimes taken from the therapy sessions Cameron conducted when patients first arrived, says Rebecca Lemov, author of "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron." And he always had a little book of science fiction by the bedside. It's hardwired into the brain. 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. Marian Read: So for me, the importance of all of this is to get it out of the shadows of pulp fiction, you know Amory: This is Marian Read. ", Why MKUltra's Top Brainwashing Scientist Was A Real-Life Nightmare, "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron. After his treatments patients were unable to function; they had been reduced to a state of infancy. 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. She said: "She wasn't able to talk to me about life and regular stuff. Amory: But even on their long drives from Montreal to upstate New York, Duncan says his dad never really talked about work. It was the start of a series of experiments backed by the British, the Americans, and the Canadians, and they wanted to know what prolonged sensory deprivation actually did to a person. He promoted a philosophy where chaos could be prevented by removing the weak from society. And here he is with me many years ago. Were they *destroyed* or did you just take the patients name out? He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Memories are not the most reliable form of evidence. 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. 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. In 1936, he also published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry which introduced his belief that psychiatry should approach the study of human behavior in a rigorous, scientific fashion rooted in biology. Ben: Im Ben Brock Johnson, and youre listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. Amory: Duncan has a very different picture of his father, a whole bunch of them actually. Marian believes all of this was a result of her mother going into the Allan. 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. Its not a very popular mountain to climb, its steep. Ben: Perhapsthis is Dr. Cameron's most enduring legacy. 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. As time has worn on, its become the families of those victims who shoulder the burden. Indian River. in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1924, a D.P.M. She went from apartment to apartment, mental hospital to mental hospital. It affected a lot of people. She had no idea how to boil water, much less care for a child. He first solved the problem by wiring the speakers into football helmets and locking them onto patients' heads, but that ended up being not ideal. And when you get up to the top, its completely wooded, so theres no panoramic view after all the hard climbing. 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. In 1938 he moved to Albany, New York, where he received his diplomate in psychiatry and thus was certified in psychiatry. Duncan: I'm Duncan Cameron. Experts must develop methods of forcefully changing attitudes and beliefs to prevent the authoritarian overlord. The only cure for mental illness, he theorized, was to eliminate its "carriers" from society altogether. Ben: Duncan Cameron was 10 years old when his dad became the Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Amory: Duncan, one of the two lawyer sons, admits hes familiar with those 12 boxes of papers, and then explains what happened to them. Marian Cameron. If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 4 yet, you can find them here, here,here,and here. 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. His response? Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. And we would take off. He clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research long before the Agency front started to fund him. Amory: Sarah Anne Johnson, whose grandmother Val Orlikow was a patient of Ewen Camerons, has a response to Duncan that, considering what her family has been through as a result of his fathers experimentation, is surprising. And people talk about the transmission of trauma through generations. Dr. Morrow, says The Washington Post, had applied for a fellowship in psychiatry with Cameron. father. He never got one. Ben: Even though Cameron never gave the CIA the keys to control peoples minds, he did give them the tools to break peoples minds down experimental drugs, recordings on loop, sensory deprivation. He has an open, amused look on his face. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. Cameron quickly found patients didn't want to listen to the messages. Ben: Robert Cleghorn, a former member of Camerons staff, took over after Cameron stepped down. 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. He also organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the province, establishing 10 functioning clinics; this model was used as the blueprint for similar efforts in Montreal and a forerunner of 1960s community health models. 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. Cameron stated, "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them." Ontario. Region. Unfortunately, a lot of what went on within them has been lost: In 1973, the majority of the documents associated with MKUltra were destroyed in a massive (and not-at-all-suspicious) purge. . [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.' He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. [clarification needed] Those Germans affected by the events that led to World War II were of utmost concern. After he left, his position as chair of the department of psychiatry was handed to Robert Cleghorn. Heres part of Duncans transcript: Duncan (from the transcript): I recall contacting the American Psychiatric Association and asking them if they would have an interest in holding his papers in their archives, and they expressed an interest in doing it. Ben: After Marians mom left the Allan, she struggled for the rest of her life to regain her sense of self and mental clarity. Duncan: This is at the Lake Placid Club in Lake Placid, New York. 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. Duncan: And I've said Im unable to do that. During those years, Cameron began to expand on his thoughts about the interrelationships of mind and body, developing a reputation as a psychiatrist who could bridge the gap between the organic, structural neurologists, and the psychiatrists whose knowledge of anatomy was limited to maps of the mind as opposed to maps of the brain. [16], Cameron next published Nuremberg and Its Significance. Not, at least, until well into 1965, months after they were told to end the experiments. Those who are privileged to know him, even briefly, will not soon forget the warmth and kindliness of this understanding man.. 22 As the Watergate scandal broke in 1973, MKUltra was officially ordered to be shut down by the CIA. Peterborough County. There was also Donald Hebb, who ran McGills psychology department at the time Cameron was running its psychiatry department. Marian: It's become so embedded in our narrative, in our pop culture, without people really understanding that it happened It was real. When then-CIA director Stansfield Turner testified about the program in 1977, he said (via the Smithsonian) that the bottom line was to develop "the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior." (McCoy, 2007) Indeed, Hebb and Camerons contribution as pioneers who designed the psychological paradigm for torture used by the CIA was acknowledged by The McGill Daily, in 2012. Our username is. Patients would be subjected to messages repeated hundreds of thousands of times, as they were kept in their coma for up to a month. And I think it affected a lot more people than anybody even realizes today. Camerons techniques have no therapeutic validity whatsoever; they were comparable to Nazi medical atrocities. Stephen: So they created a manual, which basically was for intelligence personnel. Ben: The main takeaway here is Duncan admitting that he did remove documents pertaining to specific patients, before giving his dads papers to the archives. There must have been records of experiments. I mean, he was that much of a scientist. He warned that government institutions should take measures against such potential liabilities. After his mother confirmed that yes, there were 12 boxes of papers that her sons both lawyers said she probably shouldn't share, Duncan revealed that he had gone through and taken out "several papers" that identified "a particular patient." In fact, he might have enjoyed those more. 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. On the weekends, you'd think he would go out and mow the lawn or bask in the sun or go play golf or tennis, but none of 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. If we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs in other fields which have greatly contributed to the instability of our period by their propensity for holding up progress, In Cameron's book Life is For Living, published in 1948, he expressed a concern for the German race in general. Ben: Duncan says his father was so busy that he didnt see much of him during their time in Montreal. In 1951 a few years before the U.S. government and the CIA approved MKUltra there was a top secret meeting held at Montreal's Ritz-Carlton. 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. It is a rare thing that a psychiatrist of his worldwide reputation and capacity should be a resource available to a small mountain community. In 1938 he received his diploma in psychiatry and became professor of neurology, psychiatry at University at . There must have been names of patients. He began his career as resident surgeon at Glasgow Infirmary, but in 1929 moved to Canada to work in the Brandon Mental Hospital. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. The idea that people needed to sit down and talk about their problems was the old way of doing things, and Cameron was living in an era where things were getting more and more automated. . Click here for the donation page. Did it work? I'm the oldest son of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and Jean Cameron. She was left with permanent impairments: She was unable to recognize faces, had impaired spatial recognition, and lost a good portion of her memory. He studied Medicine at the University of Glasgow and obtained his degree in 1924. . He wanted to cure schizophrenia, and win a Nobel Prize for it. Heres documentarian Stephen Bennett, whose film Eminent Monsters looks at the real echoes of Camerons work in government interrogation programs today. Any documents that related to patient treatment were destroyed? He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron did experiments so horrifying he's been called "Scotland's Mengele." Here's why MKUltra's top brainwashing scientist was a nightmare. Beliefs to prevent the authoritarian overlord Brandon mental hospital comparable to Nazi medical.. 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