CIA Doctor Ewen Cameron --- The Grandfather of Modern Brainwashing

From M.o.1 -- It is said of Dr. Cameron's research that he "failed" at mind controlling people however one of the great things(for them at least) that they did discover was that the human mind can be erased. We also have to understand that this is also RELEASED information as I'm sure that with any sort of program such as this they are naturally going to tell you that it is unsuccessful. From some of the other events that have happened with controlled killers and slaves whom have escaped this sort of control.....while Dr. Cameron could have been unsuccessful in his work, it was carried on and perfected many years later. Afterall, this was going on in the 40s and 50s so think about how much our technology has improved since the 40s and 50s.....now imagine how much their techniques of control have improved since then.



Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901(1901-12-24)^[1]–8 September 1967(1967-09-08)^[1]) was a twentieth-century Scottish-American psychiatrist. Cameron was involved in Project MKULTRA, United States Central Intelligence Agency's unsuccessful research on mind control.^[2]In the 1950s he was the President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III
SPELLS--ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS

CHAPTER 8
BRAINWASHING


...Call her Lauren G. For 19 years, her mind has been blank about her experience. She remembers her husband's driving her up to the old gray stone mansion that housed the hospital, Allan Memorial Institute, and putting her in the care of its director, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. The next thing she recalls happened three weeks later:

They gave me a dressing gown. It was way too big, and I was tripping all over it. I was mad. I asked why did I have to go round in this sloppy thing. I could hardly move because I was pretty weak. I remember trying to walk along the hall, and the walls were all slanted. I was then that I said, "Holy Smokes, what a ghastly thing." I remember running out the door and going up the mountain in my long dressing gown.

The mountain, named Mont Royal, loomed high above Montreal. She stumbled and staggered as she tried to climb higher and higher. Hospital staff members had no trouble catching her and dragging her back to the Institute. In short order, they shot her full of sedatives, attached electrodes to her temples, and gave her a dose of electroshock. Soon she slept like a baby.

Gradually, over the next few weeks, Lauren G. began to function like a normal person again. She took basket-weaving therapy and played bridge with her fellow patients. The hospital released her, and she returned to her husband in another Canadian city.

Before her mental collapse in 1959, Lauren G. seemed to have everything going for her. A refined, glamorous horsewoman of 30, whom people often said looked like Elizabethe Taylor, she had auditioned for the lead in National Velvet at 13 and married the rich boy next door at 20. But she had never loved her husband and had let her domineering mother push her into his arms. He drank heavily. "I was really unhappy," she recalls. "I had a horrible marriage, and finally I had a nervous breakdown. It was a combination of my trying to lose weight, sleep loss, and my nerves."

The family doctor recommended that her husband send her to Dr. Cameron, which seemed like a logical thing to do, considering his wide fame as a psychiatrist. He had headed Allan Memorial since 1943, when the Rockefeller Foundation had donated funds to set up a psychiatric facility at McGill University. With continuing help from the Rockefellers, McGill had built a hospital known far beyond Canada's borders as innovative and exciting. Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953, and he became the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. His friends joked that they had run out of honors to give him.

Cameron's passion lay in the more "objective" forms of therapy, with which he could more easily and swiftly bring about improvements in patients than with the notoriously slow Freudian methods. An impatient man, he dreamed of finding a cure for schizophrenia. No one could tell him he was not on the right track. Cameron's supporter at the Rockefeller Foundation, Robert Morrison, recorded in his private papers that he found the psychiatrist tense and ill-at-ease, and Morrison ventured that this may account for "his lack of interest and effectiveness in psychotherapy and failure to establish warm personal relations with faculty members, both of which ere mentioned repeatedly when I visited Montreal." Another Rockefeller observer noted that Cameron "appears to suffer from deep insecurity and has a need for power which he nourishes by maintaining an extraordinary aloofness from his associates."

When Lauren G.'s husband delivered her to Cameron, the psychiatrist told him she would receive some electroshock, a standard treatment at the time. Besides that, states her husband, "Cameron was not very communicative, but I didn't think she was getting anything out of the ordinary." The husband had no way of knowing that Cameron would use an unproved experimental technique on his wife--much less that the psychiatrist intended to "depattern" her. Nor did he realize that the CIA was supporting this work with about $19,000 a year in secret funds.*

*Cameron himself may not have known that the Agency was the ultimate source of these funds which came through a conduit, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. A CIA document stated he was unwitting when the grants started in 1957, and it cannot be said whether he ever found out.

Cameron defined "depatterning" as breaking up existing patterns of behavior, both the normal and the schizophrenic, by means of particularly intensive electroshocks, usually combined with prolonged, drug-induced sleep. Here was a psychiatrist willing--indeed, eager--to wipe the human mind totally clean. Back in 1951, ARTICHOKE's Morse Allen had likened the process to "creation of a vegetable." Cameron justified this tabula rasa approach because he had a theory of "differential amnesia," for which he provided no statistical evidence when he published it. He postulated that after he produced "complete amnesia" in a subject, the person would eventually recover memory of his normal but not his schizophrenic behavior. Thus, Cameron claimed he could generate "differential amnesia." Creating such a state in which a man who knew too much could be made to forget had long been a prime objective of the ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA programs.

Needless to say, Lauren G. does not recall a thing today about those weeks when Cameron depatterned her. Afterward, unlike over half of the psychiatrist's depatterning patients, Lauren G. gradually recovered full recall of her life before the treatment, but then, she remembered her mental problems, too.* Her husband says she came out of the hospital much improved. She declares the treatment had no effect one way or another on her mental condition, which she believes resulted directly from her miserable marriage. She stopped seeing Cameron after about a month of outpatient electroshock treatments, which she despised. Her relationship with her husband further deteriorated, and two years later she walked out on him. "I just got up on my own hind legs," she states. "I said the hell with it. I'm going to do what I want and take charge of my own life. I left and started over." Now divorced and remarried, she feels she has been happy ever since.

*Cameron wrote that when a patient remembered his schizophrenic symptoms, the schizophrenic behavior usually returned. If the amnesia held for these symptoms, as Cameron claimed it often did, the subject usually did not have a relapse. Even in his "cured" patients, Cameron found that Rorschach tests continued to show schizophrenic thinking despite the improvement in overt behavior. To a layman, this would seem to indicate that Cameron's approach got only at the symptoms, not the causes of mental problems. Not deterred, however, Cameron dismissed this inconsistency as a "persistent enigma."

Cameron's depatterning, of which Lauren G. had a comparatively mild version, normally started with 15 to 30 days of "sleep therapy." As the name implies, the patient slept almost the whole day and night. According to a doctor at the hospital who used to administer what he calls the "sleep cocktail," a staff member woke up the patient three times a day for medication that consisted of a combination of 100 mg. Veronal, and 10 mg. Phenergan. Another staff doctor would also awaken the patient two or sometimes three times daily for electroshock treatments.** This doctor and his assistant wheeled a portable machine into the "sleep room" and gave the subject a local anesthetic and muscle relaxant, so as not to cause damage with the convulsions that were to come. After attaching electrodes soaked in saline solution, the attendant held the patient down and the doctor turned on the current. In standard, professional electroshock, doctors gave the subject a single dose of 110 volts, lasting a fraction of a second, once a day or every other day.

**Cameron wrote in a professional journal that he gave only two electroshocks a day, but a doctor who actually administered the treatment for him says that three were common at the beginning of the therapy.

By contrast, Cameron used a form 20 to 40 times more intense, two or three times daily, with the power turned up to 150 volts. Named the "Page-Russell" method after its British originators, this technique featured an initial one-second shock, which caused a major convulsion, and then five to nine additional shocks in the middle of the primary and follow-on convulsions. Even Drs. Page and Russell limited their treatment to once a day, and they always stopped as soon as their patient showed "pronounced confusion" and became "faulty in habits." Cameron, however, welcomed this kind of impairment as a sign the treatment was taking effect and plowed ahead through his routine.

The frequent screams of patients that echoed through the hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his associates in their attempts to "depattern" their subjects completely. Other hospital patients report being petrified by the "sleep rooms," where the treatment took place, and they would usually creep down the opposite side of the hall.

Cameron described this combined sleep-electroshock treatment as lasting between 15 to 30 days, with some subjects staying in up to 65 days (in which case, he reported, he awakened them for three days in the middle). Sometimes, as in the case of Lauren G., patients would try to escape when the sedatives wore thin, and the staff would have to chase after them. "It was a tremendous nursing job just to keep these people going during the treatment," recalls a doctor intimately familiar with Cameron's operation. This doctor paints a picture of dazed patients, incapable of taking care of themselves, often groping their way around the hospital and urinating on the floor.

Cameron wrote that his typical depatterning patient--usually a woman--moved through three distinct stages. In the first, the subject lost much of her memory. Yet she still knew where she was, why she was there, and who the people were who treated her. In the second phase, she lost her "space-time image," but still wanted to remember. In fact, not being able to answer questions like, "Where am I?" and "How did I get here?" caused her considerable anxiety. In the third stage, all that anxiety disappeared. Cameron described the state as "an extremely interesting constriction of the range of recollections which one ordinarily brings in to modify and enrich one's statements. Hence, what the patient talks about are only his sensations of the moment, and he talks about them almost exclusively in highly concrete terms. His remarks are entirely uninfluenced by previous recollections--nor are they governed in any way by his forward anticipations. He lives in the immediate present. All schizophrenic symptoms have disappeared. There is complete amnesia for all events in his life."

Lauren G. and 52 other subjects at Allan Memorial received this level of depatterning in 1958 and 1959. Cameron had already developed the technique when the CIA funding started. The Agency sent the psychiatrist research money to take the treatment beyond this point. Agency officials wanted to know if, once Cameron had produced the blank mind, he could then program in new patterns of behavior, as he claimed he could. As early as 1953--the year he headed the American Psychiatric Association--Cameron conceived a technique he called "psychic driving," by which he would bombard the subject with repeated verbal messages. From tape recordings based on interviews with the patient, he selected emotionally loaded "cue statements"--first negative ones to get rid of unwanted behavior and then positive to condition in desired personality traits. On the negative side, for example, the patient would hear this message as she lay in a stupor:

Madeleine, you let your mother and father treat you as a child all through your single life. You let your mother check you up sexually after every date you had with a boy. You hadn't enough determination to tell her to stop it. You never stood up for yourself against your mother or father but would run away from trouble.... They used to call you "crying Madeleine." Now that you have two children, you don't seem to be able to manage them and keep a good relationship with your husband. You are drifting apart. You don't go out together. You have not been able to keep him interested sexually.

Leonard Rubenstein, Cameron's principal assistant, whose entire salary was paid from CIA-front funds, put the message on a continuous tape loop and played it for 16 hours every day for several weeks. An electronics technician, with no medical or psychological background, Rubenstein, an electrical whiz, designed a giant tape recorder that could play 8 loops for 8 patients at the same time. Cameron had the speakers installed literally under the pillows in the "sleep rooms." "We made sure they heard it," says a doctor who worked with Cameron. With some patients, Cameron intensified the negative effect by running wires to their legs and shocking them at the end of the message.

When Cameron thought the negative "psychic driving" had gone far enough, he switched the patient over to 2 to 5 weeks of positive tapes:

You mean to get well. To do this you must let your feelings come out. It is all right to express your anger.... You want to stop your mother bossing you around. Begin to assert yourself first in little things and soon you will be able to meet her on an equal basis. You will then be free to be a wife and mother just like other women.

Cameron wrote that psychic driving provided a way to make "direct, controlled changes in personality," without having to resolve the subject's conflicts or make her relive past experiences. As far as is known, no present-day psychologist or psychiatrist accepts this view. Dr. Donald Hebb, who headed McGill's psychology department at the time Cameron was in charge of psychiatry, minces no words when asked specifically about psychic driving: "That was an awful set of ideas Cameron was working with. It called for no intellectual respect. If you actually look at what he was doing and what he wrote, it would make you laugh. If I had a graduate student who talked like that, I'd throw him out." Warming to his subject, Hebb continues: "Look, Cameron was no good as a researcher.... He was eminent because of politics." Nobody said such things at the time, however. Cameron was a very powerful man.



Source:
John Marks, THE SEARCH FOR THE "MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" THE CIA AND MIND CONTROL: (New York: First McGraw-Hill Paperback edition, 1980), 131-137.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

]