Did he ever talk about that? In 1936, he moved to Massachusetts to become director of the research division at Worcester State Hospital only 1 year later. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became an authority in his areas of concentration. Two of my sons are lawyers and they say it isnt a good idea.. His brutal techniques involved a three-stage method for brainwashing in order to eliminate the will and establish control: first, mental depatterning achieved through drug-induced coma; massive neuroleptic drug cocktails induced extended sleep lasting up to eighty-six days. He had patients. You can try, The 1963 "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, "CIA's Secret Brainwashing Experiment" (1984), "Brainwashed: The Secret CIA Experiments in Canada" (2017), Jim Turner and Joseph Rauh's lawsuit debrief: "Anatomy Of A Public Interest Case Against The CIA,", Send us a direct message on Reddit. Cameron decided that Germans would be most likely to commit atrocities due to their historical, biological, racial and cultural past and their particular psychological nature. 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. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. He was there when his legal partner, Joseph Rauh, took Camerons deposition. Thus, this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease. Memories are not the most reliable form of evidence. He theorized that attitudes and beliefs should reinforce the overall attitudes of the desired society. And I think it affected a lot more people than anybody even realizes today. And you can see this manual that's been found all around the world, from hellholes to modern democracies. At least, until after Cameron left the Allan. He commuted from Lake Placid, New York to Montreal every week to work at McGill's Allan Memorial Institute and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKUltra experiments there, known as the Montreal experiments. The psychiatric community could have questioned his methods, but they remained silent. Lloyd Schrier, son of Cameron patient Esther Schrier, told the CBC, "Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say." So I think in a certain way they believed that what fiction writers could come up with, somebody could actually make real. 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. Deze informatie is onderdeel van Families Klein, Ree, de Breed en de Vries van Terschelling van Marthan Klein op Genealogie Online. Cameron followed these schools in demanding that mental disturbances are diseases and somatic in nature; all psychological illness would therefore be hardwired, a product of the body and the direct result of a patient's biological structure rather than caused by social environments. Those with anxieties or insecurities and who had trouble with the state of the world were labelled as "the weak"; in Cameron's analysis, they could not cope with life and had to be isolated from society by "the strong". 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. The FBI's FOIA Library contains many files of public interest and historical value. Now, a recent court decision has. Duncan Cameron: No. Ben: Today we grapple with Dr. Ewen Camerons legacy. And one of these risks was the treatment that he was using. Amory: The answer might be in the idea of brainwashing itself. Ben: Over and over, weve heard from victims of Dr. Ewen Camerons brutal experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute. He demanded that political systems be watched, and that German people needed to be monitored due to their "personality type", which he claimed results in the conditions that give rise to the dictatorial power of an authoritarian overlord. She said that at the time, Cameron was something of a celebrity. Jim: But again, you know, the deposition transcript, you're going to have to rely on that, like we did. [22], During the 1950s and 1960s, Cameron became involved in what has later become known as the MKUltra mind control program, which was covertly sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)[6] and which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. He didn't pull punches, saying, "We hanged Nazis for doing the sort of things Cameron did.". His focus on children included the rights to protection against outmoded, doctrinaire tactics, and the necessity for the implantation of taboos and inhibitions from their parents. Duncan: I'm Duncan Cameron. Ben: But we also asked about something else, that he was a little uncomfortable talking about: Orlikow vs. United States, the 1980s lawsuit that ended up giving $750,000 total to 8 of Camerons victims. Cameron also wanted to revolutionize the way psychology and psychiatry looked at mental illness. The second part of the technique was inspired by something called the Cerebrophone, which was essentially a "learn-while-you-sleep" recording device. They were destroyed. Ben: Perhapsthis is Dr. Cameron's most enduring legacy. Once it was down to an exact science the precise number of hours in a coma, the number and duration of electroshock treatments, the exact dosages of drugs he believed that curing mental illness could be as simple as admitting a patient, putting them through the program, and spitting out a brand new, problem-free person on the other side. After his treatments patients were unable to function; they had been reduced to a state of infancy. Amory: In the Lake Placid community where Dr. Camerons family spent the bulk of their summers, his sudden death from a heart attack while hiking was big news. 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. He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. These did nothing to calm the feud which continued through succeeding reigns to when Donald's grandson Ewen, the 13th chief, fought at the battle of Flodden where James IV was killed. Amory: Eventually though, it wasnt just Camerons successor who was calling him out. According to "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,"he left his position at Allan and his patients in 1964. Duncan: He loved hiking. Amory: You're welcome to pull it out now. Joseph Rauh (from the transcript): But as far as you know now, neither you nor your brother or sister or mother have *any* papers left that are not sort of public documents? 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. Here in the hospital Cameron could observe how the psychiatric patient resembled patients with other diseases that were not psychiatric in nature. Amory: But even on their long drives from Montreal to upstate New York, Duncan says his dad never really talked about work. [39], Social and intrapsychic behaviour analysis, Cameron and Freud: civilization and discontents. [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. Amory: We definitely will. The extent of Goldberg's treatment - or mistreatment - while in the care of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, would remain an encumbering family secret for years. That could be heightened with various drugs, eventually was replaced by positive messages, and the so-called "psychic driving" would continue. Patients would be subjected to messages repeated hundreds of thousands of times, as they were kept in their coma for up to a month. in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1924, a D.P.M. For years, the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron or, more accurately, the families of those patients have been trying to get compensation for the unthinkable experiments their loved ones were subjected to. He clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research long before the Agency front started to fund him. And they found his work next to worthless. Harvey: Here he is trying to reach the peak, trying to climb the mountain, reach this goal. "Madness: The Secret Mission for Mind Control and the People Who Paid the Price" an investigative series in 5 parts unravels the shocking history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments. Research genealogy for Donald Ewen Cameron of lambeth, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. Amory: In spite of Camerons ambition and prestige, he never helped find a cure for mental illness, he never won a Nobel Prize for psychiatry. He began his career as resident surgeon at Glasgow Infirmary, but in 1929 moved . Many spent this period of time in what he called the "sleep room," where they were drugged into a medically-induced coma that they were brought out of only to be given three meals a day and the occasional trip to the bathroom. [17] Cameron argued that it was necessary for behavioral scientists to act as the social planners of society, and that the United Nations could provide a conduit for implementing his ideas for applying psychiatric elements to global governance and politics. Amory: This is a hard reality for the family that Ewen Cameron left behind. Cameron viewed German society throughout history as continually giving rise to fearsome aggression. She was a former captain of the Scottish field hockey team, a competitive tennis player,[11] and lecturer in mathematics at the University of Glasgow. Think of all the books and the movies that are about mind control. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allen, a small town in Scotland, on December 24, 1901. In theory, he was supposed to help her anxiety, depression, and postpartum depression. You know, all of us not only respected him, but loved him, and not just myself, but my brothers. 3.99 If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 4 yet, you can find them here, here,here,and here. Ben: Duncan Cameron was 10 years old when his dad became the Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Old '45" Cameron Major Cameron (1663 - 1718) family tree on Geni, with over 230 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. Amory: Nearly everyone who experienced Camerons treatments first-hand has since died. Lloyd has continued to fight for recognition, recompense, and an apology. Cameron stayed there for seven years and was made physician-in-charge of the Reception Unit of the Provincial Mental Hospital. 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. 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." 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. I mean, he was that much of a scientist. Because it would seem to me, or I was concerned as a lawyer, that it might be a breach of the patient-doctor privilege. Ewen married Agnes Cameron (born Bell) in 1867, at age 35 at marriage place. Or do you remember any of --. (Beyond Nuremburg, ABA Journal March 1997; News accounts of five legal cases at: The Law and Mind Control Mind Control Through Five Cases). Duncan Cameron is Ewen Cameron's son, and when he speaks of his father, he talks about a man who loved to hike, read science fiction, and who had an obituary that read, in part: "Those who are privileged to know him, even briefly, will not soon forget the warmth and kindliness of this understanding man." 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. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.". [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. Ewen Cameron experimented on people right up until he left the Allan in 1964. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. . Being compared to the Nazi's most notorious doctor probably isn't the life goal of most medical professionals, so let's look at what he did to deserve this dubious title. Its in the Netflix show, Stranger Things: Amory: Or the hit video game Call of Duty: Ben: They're talking about it on The West Wing:C.J. Research genealogy for donald ewen Cameron of Melbourne, Victoria, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. Duncan: Thats my recollection, that any documents that related to patients were destroyed. 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. We hope you enjoyed reading this excerpt from this mini book on the Scottish history of the Cameron family. John Marks observes, Ewen Cameron did not need the CIA to corrupt him. Ewen Cameron was fulfilling one of the items on his life bucket list: to climb Street Mountain. Duncan: You see, he doesn't have a scowl. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. 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. Psychiatry would play a disciplinary role. He had a Mercedes. Cameron started to distinguish populations between "the weak" and "the strong". After one test he noted: "Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favourable results were obtained." He did technically, because nothing says "wonders" has to be a good thing. And in a sense, that's what he wanted to do professionally. He promoted a philosophy where chaos could be prevented by removing the weak from society. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? And he admits that the papers he removed are now destroyed. Its not a very popular mountain to climb, its steep. With the results of the Manhattan project, Cameron feared that without proper re-organization of society, atomic weapons could fall into the hands of new, fearsome aggressors. I'm the oldest son of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and Jean Cameron. Amory: This is from The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, is the name of the paper. Not only was Ewen Cameron running the Allan Memorial, but he was leading psychiatric organizations, he was teaching at McGill University, and he was still seeing private patients. Cameron began to base some of his notions on race, as is seen in his theories regarding the German people. Cameron began his training in psychiatry at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in 1925. And he didn't achieve that either. 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. 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. Cameron's work stopped when she gave birth, and Lloyd remembered a broken mother. . Like, did she always have problems? And he said, Oh, gosh. She goes, No. She was the one that was gonna go and conquer the world. As for the ongoing lawsuits, some of the plaintiffs have actually contacted Duncan wondering if hed be willing to support their efforts. Duncan Cameron: This is a picture of the whole family. But he has fond childhood memories of summers spent in New Yorks Adirondack Mountains, where his dads competitive nature led him again and again to the line of the horizon. 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. [16], Cameron next published Nuremberg and Its Significance. In 1938 he moved to Albany, New York, where he received his diplomate in psychiatry and thus was certified in psychiatry. And I feel for them for that. They stressed how they'd been unwilling participants, and that they'd gone to the institute for other issues. A series of other research scandals in the 1960s resulted in stricter regulation of research practices and a more stringent code of ethics. [14] Hess later confessed that he had faked the amnesia. She went from apartment to apartment, mental hospital to mental hospital. Ben: But do you even though you had nothing to do with it do you have any feelings of sadness about those folks and what they've gone through? His response? 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. (Rubenstein LS. Amory: Jim Turner was one of two prosecutors on the case. 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." And so even all these years later, it's part of my life. And there some of them were high risk ones. Memorials. Stephen Bennett: If I put one of you, either Ben or Amory, into prison for two, three years, you should be okay because you can have time and space. There are movies like Gaslight and Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936.[8]. 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. Ironically, his lasting impact would be on how to destroy the human mind, not how to repair it. He had various people record the tapes sometimes including the patient's loved ones and it was, on the whole, incredibly traumatizing. [citation needed]. And I think you have, as much as love that you had for him you also had respect for him. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cameron continued his work on memory and its relationship to aging. The second stage involved extreme, high voltage multiple electroshock treatments three times daily. Ian Donald Cameron is geboren in het jaar 1932 in Blairmore House, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, zoon van Ewen Donald CAMERON en Enid Agnes Maud LEVITA. 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. [27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. . The human significance of his dark legacy was brought to public attention when nine of his Canadian victims filed lawsuits in 1980s twenty-one years after Camerons death. Cameron's work was funded under MKUltra's subproject 68. "Now, that was a foolish mistake. 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. 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. First I have to say that my father was exceedingly committed to his field. 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. Indian River. His support of Charles Edward Stuart was instrumental in the Jacobite Rising of 1745 Lochiel and the Jacobite cause [citation needed][21]. Like in Nicaragua, where he was The New York Times Bureau Chief. 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 reported that "the subject's very identity had begun to disintegrate," and that's when someone should, ya know, stop. The idea was to first "depattern" the person in question. 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. Though he did visit the Allan Memorial on occasion. 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. About 55 families of victims who underwent medical experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s are suing for millions of dollars. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all senior partners in the company. Amory: Just not in the way he might have hoped. And how his work lives on. I wasnt destroying documents. Heres documentarian Stephen Bennett, whose film Eminent Monsters looks at the real echoes of Camerons work in government interrogation programs today. [31][2] In her book, In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada,[32] author Anne Collins explored the history of Cameron and Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute. Click here for the donation page. [7], Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allan, Scotland, the oldest son of a Presbyterian minister. Donald Hebb the psychiatrist who started the whole mess with his sensory deprivation experiments had even less kind things to say: "Cameron was irresponsible criminally stupid. [citation needed]. 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. [citation needed]; if the greater population of Germany saw the atrocities of World War II, they would surely submit to a re-organized system of justice. I mean his father was a very prominent psychiatrist, so destroying rather than preserving personal papers of someone of that prominence is a very unusual thing, especially for a family member to have done. Finally, while the person is in isolated confinement, in LSD altered states of consciousness, and deprived of sensory stimulation, adequate food, water, and oxygen, the subject would be bombarded by psychic driving by use of a football helmet clamped to the head with taped messages played for hours non-stop up to a half-million times, messages such as my mother hates me. (McCoy, 2007). And Camerons part of that. His death occurred while climbing a mountain. Those were right out. Alison believes those random phrases her mother would sometimes say were from the recordings that she'd been forced to listen to for hours. [clarification needed] Those Germans affected by the events that led to World War II were of utmost concern. We encourage you to research and examine these records to . Though he does seem to imply that it was done by him or someone in the family. Cleghorn immediately went and took a long, hard look at what Cameron had actually been doing in his little corner of the university, and he was pretty shocked. He was a person who was always looking for a way of advancing the field. We encourage you to research and examine these records . When asked about the decision to involve Cameron in MK-ULTRA, John Gittinger, the CIA officer in charge of monitoring his work said, quote, Now that was a foolish mistake. He wanted to know if it was possible to wipe a person's mind and reinstall a new personality. She said: "She wasn't able to talk to me about life and regular stuff. (laughter). That right there is getting into some shady territory, but the promise of a $10,000 grant the equivalent of just over $100,000 today had to be pretty tempting. 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. [30][bettersourceneeded], In 1980, the Canadian investigative news program The Fifth Estate interviewed two former patients of Cameron's who were among several of his ex patients who were at that time suing the CIA for the long term effects of Cameron's treatment. Amory: Duncan has a very different picture of his father, a whole bunch of them actually. And you see this actual physical manual on how to break down the human mind. Care of his patients went to his assistants, and here's where things get even weirder. 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. Duncan: Oh yes, he enjoyed a good joke even if they were off color. Anyone with any appreciation of the complexity of the human mind would not expect that you could erase an adult mind and then add things back with this stupid psychic driving. At the heart of MKUltra, says The Guardian, was the broadcasting of videos of American POWs from the Korean War condemning their own country and lauding the benefits of Communism. The lawsuits were dismissed, even though it was later shown . Sign up and be the first to find out the latest news and articles about what's going on in the medical field. As time has worn on, its become the families of those victims who shoulder the burden. She wasn't able to joke and laugh She would blurt out something like: 'We must do the right thing!'" Or answer questions about his motivations, whether or not he knew he was part of the CIAs mind control efforts. But the government agency backing his experiments at the Allan did find a way to make use of his methods. He received an M.B., Ch.B. 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. Amory: Dr. Ewen Cameron will never be able to respond to the intergenerational trauma created by his work. They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. Like Freud, Cameron maintained that the family was the nucleus of social behavior and anxieties later in life were spawned during childhood. When it came time to evaluate Nazi leaders ahead of the Nuremberg Trials, he was one of a group of internationally renowned mental health professionals who were sent to decide just what was going on in the heads of some of the worst war criminals the world had ever seen. Research genealogy for Donald Ewen Cameron of Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota, USA, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. 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. And then she came back from Montreal and she was never the same. 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. Heres John Marks again. 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". [26] His "psychic driving" experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements. I mean, he was fascinated with the future in his own field of psychiatry, medicine and government. And, later on to guidebooks for what we now call enhanced interrogation at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Hij is overleden in het jaar 2010 in Near Toulon, France. As soon as his family found out about his death, they burned all the files that this man kept in his possession. Ben: But some key documentation of Camerons time at the Allan is straight up missing. In 1928, Cameron left Baltimore for the Burghlzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, where he studied under Hans W. Maier, the successor of Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking. He began his career as resident surgeon at Glasgow Infirmary, but in 1929 moved to Canada to work in the Brandon Mental Hospital. Typically, I would show up there and, if it was a Friday, ask if I could have a lift down to Lake Placid.