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. Her family sued, first based on the treatment alone, then again, after discovering she was a part of the MKUltra program. Most of the patient files are gone, and according to WBUR, they weren't just misplaced, they were destroyed. Cameron began to base some of his notions on race, as is seen in his theories regarding the German people. Traces of some survived, including documentation on Sub-project 42 also known as Operation Midnight Climax and sub-project 68. He had a Mercedes. "[36], Cameron is the subject of Stephen Bennett's film Eminent Monsters (2020), which was funded by BBC Scotland and Creative Scotland. Thank you! [citation needed] He furthermore wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging, believing that the aged brain experienced psychosis. Ben: But the Canadian and US governments could take accountability for their support of Cameron. Amory: Theres a reason that all the photos of Ewen Cameron are from more than 50 years ago. The Canadian government also funded the project. Amory: This is a hard reality for the family that Ewen Cameron left behind. The manual got updated in 1980, but the techniques that have come about including things like waterboarding and restraint in a "coffin-like wooden box" still harken back to that original research. Amory: Dr. Ewen Cameron will never be able to respond to the intergenerational trauma created by his work. The behaviour of a mental patient could resemble the behaviour of a patient with, for example, syphilis, and then a somatic cause could be deduced for a psychological illness. And he always had a little book of science fiction by the bedside. Research genealogy for donald ewen Cameron of Melbourne, Victoria, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. And then she came back from Montreal and she was never the same. That's how quick it is because it removes your time and space. Duncan: I have no recollection whether there were any papers relating to any of the--. 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. Donald Hebb and Ewen Cameron were competitors; they did not collaborate, though Cameron incorporated Hebbs sensory isolation techniques into his own diabolical arsenal of psychiatrys instruments of torture. There must have been names of patients. [33] The son of one of Cameron's patients noted in a memoir that other than Ed Broadbent and Svend Robinson, no Canadian MP brought up the issue in the House of Parliament. Ewen passed away on month day 1915, at age 84 at death place. Cameron titled this procedure "intrapsychic" (a term derived from the psycho-somatic relationship of hospital patients). Birthdate: June 04, 1906. Rauh: So any documents that would show the treatment of the plaintiffs in this case were destroyed? So why havent they? But none of us trained in psychiatry. For Cameron, the traits were contagions and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. Sarah Anne Johnson: I imagine this is very difficult for his family. She never did get her children back. We encourage you to research and examine these records . Because it would seem to me, or I was concerned as a lawyer, that it might be a breach of the patient-doctor privilege. 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? Ben: So its fitting that, today, most of what people hear about the CIAs search for mind control also seems to come from fantasy and popular fiction. As time has worn on, its become the families of those victims who shoulder the burden. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method. [23][24] He is unrelated to another CIA psychiatrist, Alan S. Cameron, who helped pioneer psychological profiling of world leaders during the 1970s and was not associated with the behavioral modification research program. 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. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. 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. It affected a lot of people. Photo by Courtesy of Julie Tanny For the first four years of Julie Tanny's. Ewen Cameron made the hike with Duncans younger brother, James. This must be very difficult, very complicated for them. If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 4 yet, you can find them here, here,here,and here. Jean Steel was another one of Cameron's patients, and like the others she didn't sign up to be a part of MKUltra, depatterning, or psychic driving at all. Its not a very popular mountain to climb, its steep. And he didn't achieve that either. Kinzer: Later on, it became the basis for manuals that the CIA provided in the 1980s to police forces in Latin America that were known to practice torture. You can see other fellow humans. Amory: They bounced around between foster homes and orphanages for years, experienced emotional and physical abuse. Husband of Marielene Schlumberger. Amory: Marians mom died three ago. Amory: He said he did not destroy documents, that he didn't know about that. To see some of the things that have happened are very upsetting. [27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. And he was always very fascinated by what the future held for us all. He came up with the idea that if he presented the world and confronted the Germans with the atrocities committed during the war, the world and the Germans would refrain from repeated acts of extreme aggression. It petered out in the early 60s as the programs director, Sidney Gottlieb, came to a realization. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 100, Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 101, Last edited on 16 February 2023, at 19:10, "Society of Biological Psychiatry 65th Annual Meeting Program Book (p. 14)", "World Psychiatric Association Chronology", "Current Comment: Psychiatric Examination of Rudolf Hess", The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control, "Doctor Looked After the Sick, And Looked Around for the CIA", "A History of Secret CIA Mind Control Research", "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron", Stunning tale of brainwashing, the CIA and an unsuspecting Scots researcher, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Ewen_Cameron&oldid=1139756014, A passive man who "is afraid to say what he really thinks" and "will stand anything, and stands for nothing". And I think it affected a lot more people than anybody even realizes today. [25], Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by "erasing" existing memories and "reprogramming" the psyche. And that kind of explains why, when they were ordered to stop their depatterning and psychic driving of patients, they just sort of didn't. And in that he took some risks, obviously. That, says McGill University, was the work of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who performed experiments so horrifying he's been called "Scotland's Mengele." Cameron never got his Nobel Prize in fact, he died not long after leaving Allan Memorial Institute. It is a rare thing that a psychiatrist of his worldwide reputation and capacity should be a resource available to a small mountain community. 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. Her niece later said, "She had electric shock equipment put on her head so many times that it [remained] in her subconscious." Some would bang their heads against the walls relentlessly, trying to get the helmets off and that's when he realized he could just put them back into a medically-induced coma and play the tapes for as long as he wanted. Case of Gail Kastner: The shock treatment turned the then 19 year old honours student into a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle and urinated on the floor. At that point her affluent family abandoned her and she lived in poverty. And here I am looking much younger than I am now. According to "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,"he left his position at Allan and his patients in 1964. Kinzer: If Cameron had failed to find an effective means of mind control despite carrying out the most reckless experiments, in which he was willing to take any kind of a grotesque step in an effort to find that key, this must have helped feed Gottlieb's conclusion that the whole thing didn't exist. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. The idea was turning the mind into a fresh slate for the next part of the process, called "psychic driving.". Ex-husband of Enid Agnes Maud Watson. [citation needed]. 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. Duncan: Well, that's a big subject. By that time, information on Cameron's sleep room projects was coming out, and there were all kinds of people who were very quick to distance themselves from it. You talked a little bit about this but what was the impact on the family when some of this news started to come out about the CIA and some of the treatment and stuff like that? And in a sense, that's what he wanted to do professionally. I'm sure part of him very much wanted to be the person who cures mental illness. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association , Canadian Psychiatric Association ,[2] American Psychopathological Association . 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." They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the CIA. 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. I wasnt destroying documents. Did it work? All Germans on trial would be assessed according to the likeliness for committing the crime. 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. The Guardian talked to Alison Steel, Jean's daughter and one of the many family members trying to shine a light on what was done to their loved ones without their consent. Ben: The manual was all about how to obtain information from quote resistant sources. It went on to become the basis for the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. Cameron was born on December 24, 1901, in Scotland and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924. 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. Cameron's work stopped when she gave birth, and Lloyd remembered a broken mother. It's safe to say that the exact opposite happened. Cameron wrote that mental illness was transmitted generationally; thus, the re-occurrence of mental illness could be stopped by remodeling and expanding existing concepts of marriage suitability, as well as the quarantine of mentally ill individuals from the general population. In 1929 he moved to Canada where he worked in the Brandon Mental Hospital in Manitoba as the physician in charge. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allen, a small town in Scotland, on December 24, 1901. 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. Therefore, society should function to select out the weak and unwanted, those apt towards fearsome aggression that threatened society. [15], Before his arrival in Nuremberg, Cameron had written The Social Reorganization of Germany, in which he argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized. In 1943, Cameron was invited to McGill University in Montreal by neurosurgeon Dr Wilder Penfield. There's Edgar Allan Poe stories and Sherlock Holmes stories. 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. If you want that too, we would deeply appreciate your contribution to our work in any amount. The paper stated that German culture and its people would have offspring bound to become a threat to world peace in 30 years. He told The Scotsman: "Cameron's entire focus seemed to shift after the Nuremberg Trials. . I'm sure that they loved him very much and knew him in a very different way. John Marks: The Allan Memorial Institute under Cleghorn commissioned a study of his work, which is absolutely or almost absolutely unprecedented in the psychiatric 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. He did technically, because nothing says "wonders" has to be a good thing. She very slowly recovered mostly and died in 2017. Our username is. There are movies like Gaslight and Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Or do you remember any of --. Death: June 18, 1958 (52) Immediate Family: Son of Sir Ewen Allan Cameron and Rachel Margaret Cameron. 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. Ewen married Agnes Cameron (born Bell) in 1867, at age 35 at marriage place. You know, my job was to look out for the cops. Duncan: Thats my recollection, that any documents that related to patients were destroyed. And you can get a real sense of your own, where you are in the world. Thus, this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease. David Cameron's grandfather Ewen Donald Cameron (1906-1958) was a City of London figure who became a director at the stock brokerage house Panmure Gordon. Allan Cameron. They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea; they are afraid to live, and scared to die." So what led the CIA to get onto this fantasy? 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. She was gonna go out there and do something. So we reached out to one of the most comprehensive archives in the world: The Library of Congress. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Scotland in 1901. Amory: But even on their long drives from Montreal to upstate New York, Duncan says his dad never really talked about work. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? Amory: Just not in the way he might have hoped. The sick were, for Cameron, the viral infection to its stability and health. Duncan: Oh yes, he enjoyed a good joke even if they were off color. Amory: He doesnt explicitly say that he was the one who did the destroying. And it was a great shock to everybody because he was 65 and in many ways, you know, going full throttle and at the top of his career. The title is The Understanding Man. Lake Placid in particular, and the northern Adirondacks in general, have lost suddenly, tragically, but in a sense, beautifully, probably their most distinguished citizen. And so even all these years later, it's part of my life. Cameron further argued that "the weak" must not influence children. Duncan: I think the furthest I got was to his office. That was in December of 1959, and according to the lawsuit (via the Consumer Law Group), Cameron diagnosed Morrow as having "nervousness and tension." We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.. Amory: Duncan struggles dealing with his dads legacy because he cant speak to why his dad did what he did. The legacy can be seen in the torture techniques employed in Northern Ireland and in Guantanamo Bay. Duncan: No, he had some peculiar hobb-- he loved science fiction. [16], Cameron next published Nuremberg and Its Significance. Or answer questions about his motivations, whether or not he knew he was part of the CIAs mind control efforts. 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