In 1933, he married Jean C. Rankine, whom he had met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. Or answer questions about his motivations, whether or not he knew he was part of the CIAs mind control efforts. 3.99 And I feel for them for that. 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." There must have been records of experiments. Not, at least, until well into 1965, months after they were told to end the experiments. 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. Dr. Ewen Cameron wanted to win a Nobel Prize for his work in psychiatry. His occupation was occupation. More about the Cameron family name; Sponsored by Ancestry. As the CBC notes, it's sourced pretty heavily from Cameron's work, and talks about things like "deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, pain, hypnosis and narcosis," and the source of their research? Any documents that related to patient treatment were destroyed? Duncan: It's really a very moving editorial. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. The CBC says the CIA recruited Dr. Ewen Cameron a few years into MKUltra, using the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology to approach Cameron and tell him that he really, really needed to apply for one of their grants. 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. 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. The sick were, for Cameron, the viral infection to its stability and health. He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Ben: The study also said that these treatments, the de-patterning and psychic driving programs including LSD injections, induced comas, sensory deprivation and electroshock had a detrimental impact on patients memories, which, in retrospect, might have been part of the point. He moved to Upstate New York where he studied aging and memory at two hospitals in Albany. She wasn't able to joke and laugh She would blurt out something like: 'We must do the right thing!'" 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. We put this to Harvey Weinstein, the psychiatrist we heard from earlier, whose father was a patient at the Allan. John Marks observes, Ewen Cameron did not need the CIA to corrupt him. Amory: In the early 60s, MK-ULTRA director Sidney Gottlieb took the so-called treatments Cameron used on his patients at the Allan and brought them back to the CIA. And he was a fast driver. Cameron wanted to build an inventive psychiatric institution to determine rapid ways for societal control while demanding a psychological economy that did not center itself around guilt and guilt complexes. [citation needed] Characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes emerging from the brain. Cameron used his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and parent in society. Ironically, his lasting impact would be on how to destroy the human mind, not how to repair it. The lawsuits were dismissed, even though it was later shown . They stressed how they'd been unwilling participants, and that they'd gone to the institute for other issues. And in that sense, I think his ambition overrode his skills and his ability to do the research. It petered out in the early 60s as the programs director, Sidney Gottlieb, came to a realization. Police, hospitals, government, and schools would need to use the correct psychiatric authority to stop mental contagions from spreading. Everyone who makes a monthly donation will get access to upcoming bonus content from the making of our series. 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. 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. Region. Even as he wrote about Cameron's "warmth [which was] never allowed to appear as intimacy," he wrote about a pretty big blind spot: Cameron had apparently hired a few assistants with "psychopathic personalities.". Like in Nicaragua, where he was The New York Times Bureau Chief. Sarah Anne Johnson: I imagine this is very difficult for his family. And in a lot of ways, modern psychiatry has completely left behind the man who once dominated its ranks. Amory: The answer might be in the idea of brainwashing itself. Amory: What was your father like as a dad? The legacy can be seen in the torture techniques employed in Northern Ireland and in Guantanamo Bay. They had 11 children: Allan Francis Cameron, John Donald Cameron and 9 other children. Duncan: Oh yes, he enjoyed a good joke even if they were off color. She had no idea how to boil water, much less care for a child. According to what his son, Duncan, told WBUR, it was 1967 when he decided to climb Street Mountain in the Adirondacks. His successor at Allan, Robert Cleghorn, would later write (via "Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,""Cameron's controversial practices [are] now thoroughly discredited." Dr. Ewen Cameron wanted to win a Nobel Prize for his work in psychiatry. 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. Our username is. We hope you enjoyed reading this excerpt from this mini book on the Scottish history of the Cameron family. To see some of the things that have happened are very upsetting. [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. Yeah so it was sad. He studied Medicine at the University of Glasgow and obtained his degree in 1924. . Amory: And, they delivered, with a full transcript of Duncans deposition from November, 1983. It is true. Lloyd Schrier, son of Cameron patient Esther Schrier, told the CBC, "Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say." 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. Marian Cameron. Esther Schrier who was a nurse at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital tragically lost her first child at just three weeks of age. Hij is overleden in het jaar 2010 in Near Toulon, France. And he has a much different memory of how it all went down. Cameron began to base some of his notions on race, as is seen in his theories regarding the German people. He had patients. Duncan: They got close to the top and James looked around and my father had passed away. People Projects Discussions Surnames . Duncan: Well, I think that I would feel sad about that. Duncan: Thats my recollection, that any documents that related to patients were destroyed. Shes a member of SAAGA, or Survivors Allied Against Government Abuse. 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. Ewen married Agnes Cameron (born Bell) in 1867, at age 35 at marriage place. Research genealogy for Donald Ewen Cameron of lambeth, as well as other members of the Cameron family, on Ancestry. The FBI's FOIA Library contains many files of public interest and historical value. We shouldn't have done it, I'm sorry we did it.. Don't worry, it gets worse. 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. There is no such thing as closure. Although society had established sanctions against the spread of infectious diseases, Cameron wanted to extend the concept of contagion to chronic anxiety. [13], In 1945, Cameron, Nolan D. C. Lewis and Dr Paul L. Schroeder, colonel and psychiatrist, University College of Illinois, were invited to the Nuremberg trials for a psychiatric evaluation of Rudolf Hess. The idea was turning the mind into a fresh slate for the next part of the process, called "psychic driving.". Amory: The study, which was published a few months before Cameron died, found that Camerons methods exposed his patients to unnecessary risk, and that there was no clinical proof his methods were any more effective than standard forms of treatment. Were they *destroyed* or did you just take the patients name out? In some cases, applicants couldn't prove the conditions they currently lived with were a direct result of what they went through at Allan, and in others, they were treated outside of the time frame. Though he does seem to imply that it was done by him or someone in the 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. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association (19521953), Canadian Psychiatric Association (19581959),[2] American Psychopathological Association (1963),[3] Society of Biological Psychiatry (1965)[4] and the World Psychiatric Association (19611966). Alison believes those random phrases her mother would sometimes say were from the recordings that she'd been forced to listen to for hours. Traces of some survived, including documentation on Sub-project 42 also known as Operation Midnight Climax and sub-project 68. And he was searching for ways of doing something about them. Amory: We definitely will. Ben: Duncan says his father was so busy that he didnt see much of him during their time in Montreal. And you can see this manual that's been found all around the world, from hellholes to modern democracies. 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. She very slowly recovered mostly and died in 2017. Those were right out. 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. Though he did visit the Allan Memorial on occasion. He wanted to cure schizophrenia, and win a Nobel Prize for it. Ewen Cameron made the hike with Duncans younger brother, James. Duncan: This is at the Lake Placid Club in Lake Placid, New York. Or do you remember any of --. 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. Cameron Cemetery. Then we brought them down I think it was probably during one of my infrequent jaunts up there I brought them down in my car, and I then took them over and deposited them at the American Psychiatric Association. The last generation of Holocaust survivors and their children express their concerns about current events A Five-Part, FDA Advisory Panel & CDC Director are Complicit in Sacrificing Childrens Lives to Protect Pfizer from Liability, Copyright 2023 Alliance for Human Research Protection, 1950s1960s: Dr. Ewen Cameron Destroyed Minds at Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal, Law and Mind Control Mind Control Through Five Cases, Vera Sharavs documentary Never Again is Now Global now available. 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? 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. While more is known about the experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron than about some of the other MKUltra projects, there's still a lot of information missing. 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. I mean, he was that much of a scientist. [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. [citation needed]. Patients were tested in the Radio Telemetry Laboratory, which was built under Cameron's direction. But we do have his son, Duncan Cameron. And here I am looking much younger than I am now. It is at this juncture that he became interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain to control and understand the processes of memory. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became an authority in his areas of concentration. It's hardwired into the brain. He reported that "the subject's very identity had begun to disintegrate," and that's when someone should, ya know, stop. Ben: But the Canadian and US governments could take accountability for their support of Cameron. [27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. ", So, they went back to a 1983 court transcript, where Duncan was called to the stand to testify about what happened to his father's documents. Stephen Kinzer: In the end, Gottlieb was forced to conclude that there's no such thing as mind control and that everything he had done had been for naught. Pregnant with son Lloyd, Esther was kept in a drug-induced coma in the sleep room for a month, where she lost 13 pounds. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. He didn't pull punches, saying, "We hanged Nazis for doing the sort of things Cameron did.". He tried a variety of things, including multiple electroshock therapy sessions a day and massive doses of drugs including LSD. Cameron also wanted to revolutionize the way psychology and psychiatry looked at mental illness. Duncan: He probably did, but I dont think I could remember the specifics of it. And, later on to guidebooks for what we now call enhanced interrogation at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. 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. The idea was to first "depattern" the person in question. [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. And there some of them were high risk ones. Alison Steel says her mother was never the same after undergoing. Amory: And I think you may have given a deposition for that. Duncan: I have no recollection whether there were any papers relating to any of the--. The program is widely believed to have been partly funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency as part of their top-secret MKULTRA program. Like Freud, Cameron maintained that the family was the nucleus of social behavior and anxieties later in life were spawned during childhood. But the government agency backing his experiments at the Allan did find a way to make use of his methods. 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. [10] There he met A. T. Mathers, Manitoba's principal psychiatrist, who convinced Cameron in 1929 to move to Brandon, the second largest city of Manitoba, Canada. Donald Hebb and Ewen Cameron were competitors; they did not collaborate, though Cameron incorporated Hebb's sensory isolation techniques into his own diabolical arsenal of psychiatry's instruments of torture. He had various people record the tapes sometimes including the patient's loved ones and it was, on the whole, incredibly traumatizing. In this, he hoped to establish a suitable method to reinstate a form of justice in Germany that could prevent its society from recreating the attitudes that led it from the Great War to World War II. The work of Dr. Ewen Cameron may have been discredited by mainstream psychiatry, but that doesn't mean it went away completely. Ben: The main takeaway here is Duncan admitting that he did remove documents pertaining to specific patients, before giving his dads papers to the archives. He theorized that attitudes and beliefs should reinforce the overall attitudes of the desired society. Amory: Hey, Dad, let's get out of here!, Duncan: I can remember doing that several times. 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. Ben: Street Mountain is a strange choice for a bucket list. Amory: Sarahs grandmother, Val, sued the CIA forty years ago for supporting Dr. Camerons work at the Allan. Amory: This is from The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, is the name of the paper. They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea; they are afraid to live, and scared to die." Who hasnt talked about this in a long time. 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. He has an open, amused look on his face. Duncan: You see, he doesn't have a scowl. I'm the oldest son of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and Jean Cameron. 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. Her niece later said, "She had electric shock equipment put on her head so many times that it [remained] in her subconscious." 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