Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie

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