Illuminati News: Ewen Cameron and The Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute: A Study in Research and Treatment Ethics

Ewen Cameron and The Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute: A Study in Research and Treatment Ethics
by Michael Charron, Simon Fraser University
(Posted here by Wes Penre: Apr 05, 2006)

"Psychic driving is a potent procedure - it invariably produces responses in the patient, and often intense responses" (Cameron, 1956, p. 508)

With these words, Dr. Ewen Cameron began the summary to Psychic Driving, the paper that introduced his treatment of the same name to the world. Cameron’s remark was a drastic understatement; for the psychiatric patients at the Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute, whom he treated with psychic driving and its adjuncts, had their lives were changed forever. This paper will provide background about went on at the Allan Memorial Institute in the 1950s and 1960s, as Dr. Cameron performed brainwashing experiments that were funded by the American CIA. I will examine Cameron’s use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) along with psychic driving, in a historical context, in an attempt to understand why he went to the extremes that he did. Finally, I will look at attitudes toward mental patients - lest they be forgotten among all this - and how these attitudes have changed in the last 30 to 40 years. In doing so, I will examine the thin line between research and experimentation.

As an aside, on the surface it may not appear that this topic relates to the history of psychology in Canada. Dr. Cameron was a psychiatrist, and the Allan Memorial was a psychiatric institution. Cameron, himself, was not even a Canadian; he was born in Scotland and later immigrated to the United States. Despite working for 28 years in Canada, he never became Canadian and even maintained his residence south of the border in Lake Placid, New York (Collins, 1988). However, this topic bears on the discussion of the history of psychology in Canada because it looks at how modes of treatment have changed, how attitudes toward patients have changed, and, most importantly, because it was Canadians who were affected by what went on at the Allan Memorial.

Psychic Driving, Ewen Cameron, and the Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute

Dr. Ewen Cameron was a very well known psychiatrist who worked for 21 years at the Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute in Montreal, Quebec. He was highly esteemed among his colleagues and his peers; Gillmor (1987) suggests that Cameron was, when he died in 1967, "one of the most respected psychiatrists in the world" (p.1). At different times, he was head of the Quebec, Canadian, and American Psychiatric Associations, and he was a co-founder and the first president of the World Psychiatric Association (Gillmor, 1987). He became the head of the Allan Memorial upon its opening in 1944, and made it famous for his stance that "no doors in the Allan would be locked . . . [for] even if one ward was locked, society would judge the institution by that ward" (Gillmor, 1987, p. 1). He believed that "madness" - his own term - was something that needed to be treated rather than feared, and that patients could not be locked up if they were to realize that they still belonged to society (Collins, 1988). Cameron, then, was very humane in his treatment of patients - at least early on - and, as we shall see later, very progressive in his views regarding the mentally ill, both when compared to other members of society and other health professionals.

Cameron was an ambitious man. As Collins (1988) points out, he saw what was going on with the soldiers who were returning from the Second World War, and he wanted to be able to ease the stress and anxiety from which they were suffering. A loftier goal of Cameron’s was to conquer the process of aging. In time, he set up different research programs at the Allan Memorial. Of special interest to Cameron was the idea of sleep teaching. He had been in correspondence with Max Sherover, an American who had conquered his patients nail-biting habits by continuously playing a tape recording to them while they slept (Collins, 1988). Cameron began to experiment with the idea himself. He would, during a normal therapy session, record what he thought was a key statement that one of his patients had made (Gillmor, 1987). Later, Cameron would replay the statement repeatedly to the patient, in an attempt to break down the patient’s defense mechanisms and reach deeper material. Over time, Cameron developed this technique into a therapy that he called psychic driving. He introduced his form of therapy in a paper published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in January, 1956. As he explained it, psychic driving allowed for "the penetration of defenses, the elicitation of hitherto inaccessible material, and setting up of a dynamic implant" (Cameron, 1956, p. 503) or recurring thought that influenced the patient’s behaviour even after playback of the key statement had been stopped for some time. Cameron also reported that at times, the patient resisted listening to the repetition of the statement; this was handled by administering sodium amytal, a disinhibitant or "truth drug" (Collins, 1988), or by exposing the patient to the repetition during a period of prolonged sleep (Cameron, 1956). In his article, Cameron also admits to using stimulant drugs and LSD - without the patients’ consent - to disorganize the patient and thus allow the driving technique full access to the patient’s psyche. Collins (1988) explains that Cameron, keeping with the climate of the day, referred to his treatment as brainwashing; this term was en vogue in the 1950s, with the Cold War and Korean War fresh in everyone’s minds.

The term "brainwashing" caught the eye of members of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During the Korean War, 70% of the 7,190 American prisoners of war "either made confessions or signed petitions calling for an end to the American presence in Asia" (Gillmor,