EWEN CAMERON AS HARBINGER OF THE NEW PSYCHIATRY: A Review

Don Gillmor's I Swear by Apollo is a devastating indictment of one of the pioneers of the "New Psychiatry", Ewen Cameron. When I was growing up in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the Old Psychiatry still prevailed. It was called psychoanalysis and was characterized by long consultations between psychiatrist and patient to get to the root of his or her problems. Because it took so long, it was necessarily a rich person's therapy. For this reason and because of the sexism and dogmatism of the Freudian preconceptions which all too often underlay it, it was roundly criticized by many people. Yet it had its advantages, and after all, Freud was not the only founder-- there were Jungian and Adlerian approaches to psychoanalysis, to name just a couple. The chief advantage was that it emphasized the need for the psychiatrist to understand the patient, and to encourage the patient to understand himself or herself. Often these psychiatrists would prescribe a harmless medication like Miltown or another of the benzodiazepines to relieve the patient's suffering, but they did not view medication or, needless to say, electric shock as the primary mode of treating mental illness. All that was to go by the wayside, as critics of the Old Psychiatry threw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

The first attack, which became visible to the public in the early ninteeen-seventies, came from psychology, specifically the behaviorist method of B.F. Skinner. He said, "Forget about trying to understand the causes of the problems, just treat the symptoms." And this he did, by a combination of positive reinforcement (reward) and negative reinforcement (punishment). The worst results are to be seen today in the Judge Rotenberg School, founded by one of his disciples, where painful electric shocks are used to control autistic and other disturbed children. But for most people, behaviorism was not a serious threat. Like patients under the old psychiatry, if they did not like the therapy, they could just walk awayfrom it. All this was to change with the New Psychiatry. Although its roots stretch back to fascist Italy, it did not become visible to the general public until the late nineteen-seventies (to patients in mental hospitals however, ECT and forced drugging were already an oppressive feature of their lives). I still remember the issue of Time Magazine which appeared sometime in 1979, celebrating the new anti-psychotic drugs. Just when Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was being made into a film in 1975, ECT was also coming back into fashion. The premises of the New Psychiatry were the same as those of the New Psychology: don't try to understand the patient, just treat symptoms. But as the leaders of the New Psychiatry were medical doctors, their approach involved methods which could cause permanent damage to the patient's bodies. If they did not like the treatment, they could not just walk away from it. Of course changes like that from the old to the new psychiatry take decades to complete, and for a long time there were still doctors who encouraged patients to talk about their problems, while using anti-psychotic drugs or ECT in extreme cases. Unfortunately, it is becoming difficult if not impossible to find such psychiatrists today, as older ones die or retire and patient-centered therapies are replaced by ones designed to control people and force them into a pre-concieved mold.

The public unfortunately did not notice the change. The time-lag in public perception can be seen in Ron Dellum's famous statement about Senator Thomas Eagleton, who caused quite a stir when George McGovern chose him to be his running-mate in 1972 and then rejected him when it was revealed that he had undergone ECT. Dellums said quite cleverly, comparing the Senator to the incumbant vice president, that "Eagleton on the couch is better than Spiro Agnew standing up." But in fact, Eagleton had not been "on the couch", a reference to the methods of the old psychiatry. No doubt fearing that a lengthy treatment would ruin his career, he opted for the darling of the New Psychiatry, ECT, and his lack of judgement in this matter should have disqualified him to be vice president no matter how much better his politics were than Agnew's. The life of Ewen Cameron must be examined in the light of this gradual shift from a psychotherapy which examined the patient's mind and allowed for a dialogue between therapist and patient to a biological approach, often referred to as "drug and shock", which regarded the patient's feelings as irrelevant. For Cameron was a man ahead of his time-- his approach to human behavior anticipated the increasingly totalitarian methods of the Twenty-first Century, and his willingness to work with the CIA only underscores this fact.

Cameron is important because of his impressive stature within the pyschiatric profession. He was respectively president of the Quebec, Canadian and American Psychiatric Associations, and in 1961, he co-founded and became the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. He did most of his experimental work as head of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada. One thing which stands out dramatically about him was his impatience and pragmatism: "He possessed an evangelical zeal to eradicate mental illness within his own lifetime." He wanted a treatment which "would get patients well, and get them well fast." (pp. 1-2, 40-41) It is significant that Cameron scorned psychoanalysis. "Analysis was too slow for Cameron," a collegue remarked. "He was always in a hurry." (p. 15) It is significant that although he did most of his work in the French-speaking province of Quebec, he never even attempted to learn French. This seem to reflect his attitude that what the patient had to tell him had little significance (p. 10). Yearning for prestige, Cameron lamented that the Old Psychiatry used methods which of necessity were not subject to scientific experiment and proof, and thus enjoyed little prestige among the medical profession as a whole. Cameron was determined to give psychiatry (and himself) prestige and scientific grounding. It is not irrelevant that he loved all new electronic gadgets (p. 18). His first sustained area of research was into the question of whether psychoanalysis, which rested upon the interaction between two human beings, could be automated (p. 46). The result was the concept of "psychic driving" and the ruination of patients' lives. His repeated playing of unpleasant statements became a form of mental torture to his patients, many of whom he immobilized by means of curare.

Cameron was inspired by Donald Hebb, who also became a researcher for the CIA, to design isolation cubicles. These did not represent mere "solitary confinement" as it was used as a punishment in prison, but total sensory deprivation. Hebb had found that isolation cubicles drove people to a state of severe anxiety, disorganized thinking, hallucinations, and ultimately psychosis. This combined with its cruelty, should have led Cameron to reject the method. Instead, he embraced it. Why? In his impatience, he had no notion of "healing", no capacity to recognize that his patients might possess a hidden ability to heal themselves, which it is the therapist's job to elicit. He did not see that the destruction of the old personality might just eliminate the healing agent along with the problem to be healed. In his quest for immediate results, he showed a shocking lack of concern for human life. Once when a man diagnosed as schizophrenic had tried to kill himself by means of carbon monoxide and had been revived, Cameron noticed that his psychotic symptoms had disappeared. He immediately told an assistant to bring him some carbon monoxide to see if its further use on the man would produce more improvement, and it was only by lying about the price that the assistant prevented an experiment which might well have taken the patient's life. (pp. 42-43)

Long before he began to accept funding from the CIA, Cameron was searching, as was that agency, for an American form of "brainwashing", in his case to be used as therapy (although Cameron did most of his work in Canada, he was and remained an American citizen since his emigration from Scotland). The result, beginning in 1951, was his notorious use of ECT, or electroconvulsive treatment. Reading of Cameron's research of this procedure, one wonders how anyone can keep up the pretense that ECT does not cause loss of memory, for to Cameron and his colleagues, destroying the person's memory and thus his identity was precisely the point. And it worked: sixty per cent of his experimental subjects had persistent retrograde amnesia ranging from six months to ten years (pp. 55-6) Dr. Lloyd Hinsey, a former Allan psychiatrist, said that if Cameron were alive, he would be able to answer most of the charges against him, but "the most difficult thing for him to defend would be the use of electroshock. He would have difficulty illustrating any good effects from it." (p. 127) Cameron experimented with voltages and frequencies of electricity far beyond that which any previous doctor had used, so strong that occaionally the patient's vertebrae collapsed in the enusing convulsion. Through it he reduced people to an infantile state so that they forgot everything they had learned in a lifetime. Cameron's colleagues were critical: "One of the problems was, when he's got the slate clean, what did he replace it with? His own ideas? Well some of us felt his ideas weren't too hot." (p. 57) One psychologist who criticized CAmeron's approach hit the nail precisely on the head. "I'd rather have a guy with crazy ideas and alive, than a vegetable who goes to the corner to get his milk and then comes home without tripping or saying anything nasty to anyone. It's a question of what you consider quality of life." (p. 58)

The CIA approached Cameron as part of its Operations BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, which were as fundamentally opposed to the legitimate goals of an intelligence agency as Cameron's work was to the legitimate goals of psychotherapy. For instance, it had done research with North Korean prisoners in an effort to induce amnesia in them, which would seem to be the worst possible enemy of the interrogator. Clearly it was not aiming at the acquisition of intelligence nor a method to combat Communist methods of brainwashing, but the creation of "Manchurian candidates" itself. What Gillmor does not say and may not have known was that the CIA had already decided that the best way to do this was through a combination of ECT and hypnosis (Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture, pp. 22-23, 43-48; Colin Ross, The CIA Doctors, pp. 48-53) For hypnosis they would have to go elsewhere, but in CAmeron they had a doctor who could be counted upon to exceed all ethical limits in his use of electroshock. In 1957 they approached him through a cover organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (pp. 86-87). Cameron chose as his experimental subjects the most helpless of individuals, exemplified by a Montreal woman who broke into tears when a colleague of Cameron's was testing her. She had come to the Institute seeking help after having a nervous breakdown because she could not cope on the outside world, and didn't want to participate in the experiments, but had been more or less forced to when Cameron gave her the choice of doing so or being thrown out on the street. As Gillmor says, quite accurately, "Informed consent was often a luxury for the mentally ill patient. They were in no position, practically or emotionally, to refuse." (p. 92) Even Donald Hebb, a CIA researcher himself, was shocked at Cameron's methods, stating baldly, "Cameron's experiments were conducted without the patient's consent." (p. 94) Colin Ross would later publish a devastating interview with one of his victims, Linda MacDonald, in his 2006 book The CIA Doctors.

A 1956 article in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Illnesses, which, as Dr. Peter Breggin points out, could not be published today given the positive climate of opinion regarding ECT, examines the attitudes of doctors who use the procedure and finds a pattern of "hatred and violence toward their patients." (Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 212-213). This suggests that "shock doctors" themselves may have a psychological problem, and Ewen Cameron is a case in point. An observer for the Rockfeller Foundation who visited Allan Memorial reported that Cameron appeared "to suffer from deep insecurity and has a need for power which he nourishes by maintaining an extraordinary aloofness from his associates." (p. 86). One of his colleagues said that Cameron "was a megalomaniac who was completely out of control. I really feel that in all my contacts with the man, that his main guiding influence was this ego drive-- to push CAmeron. I always felt that science, psychiatry, his patients, everything-- came second to Cameron's own needs." (p. 104) His lust for power showed itself most negatively in his attitude toward his patients. As one of his colleagues said, "He wanted to make his patients his own." (p. 44) One cannot help but think of Calfornia's one-time champion of ECT, Gary Aden, who gave up his medical license after allegations by six female patients that he had sexually abused them in a sadistic manner. Two of the patients in fact alleged that he had branded them with a hot iron bearing his initials, thus making them quite literally "his own". (Breggin, p. 213, Rex Dalton, "Psychiatrist's former patient tells of abuse," and "Pychotherapists could face prison if law enacted," respectively January 1, 1989 and May 14, 1989 in the San Diego Union).

Cameron's own advice on how the mentally ill should be treated sounds like symbolic rape. In a 1947 speech to the Canadian Dietetic Association, he said, "Let's talk about a type which has not been found out by society, to which however society still gives spproval and prestige. This type is the 'nice girl'... She is the sort of girl who is so nice that she can never do anything that her mother would not want her to do... She is the sort of person that mothers describe as 'such a sweet girl' and whom these mother's sons back away from with disrespectful unanimity. If her mother does succeed in getting her married, she is just as sexually frigid as you would expect." Cameron suggested that "We go boldly up to the 'nice girl', and despite her outraged cries, push her around a bit, pull off some of those wrappings of nicety and propriety, and quite dispassionately look her over and see what she is like." (pp. 33-34) It is not surprising to learn that an embarrassed intern at Allan was ordered by Cameron to calm an agitated woman by placing an icicle in her vagina. (p. 59) However, on occasion Cameron could have a dangerous charm. A former social worker recalls one occasion when a female patient was screaming and no one could get her to stop, nor calm her down enough to give her an injection. Cameron "walked up to her and sat on her bed, talking quietly to her the whole time. She quit screaming and he slipped an injection to her so subtly that most of us didn't see it." The episode is the more frightening when one considers what might have been in that injection. The biggest problem with Gillmor's book is that he believes that drug therapy has rendered CAmeron's methods obsolete-- indeed, he has an entire, laudatory chapter on the introduction of the drug Chlorpromazine, which he calls Largactil but which is better known as Thorazine. Thorazine is a neuroleptic, and neuroleptics are almost as dangerous as ECT. Psychiatrists today use the two methods interchangeably. To the New Psychiatry, drugs simply present another means of controlling patients without understanding them.

In conclusion, one must note the frightening potential which Cameron's methods and those of the New Psychiatry generally have for use by totalitarian governments. As there are now tens of thousands of "New Psychiatrists" in North America, even if a citizen is not so unfortunate to be labeled an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he may still be liable to being labeled "mentally ill" by a psychiatrist and committed to a mental hospital which is as cruel as a CIA prison. There he can be legally "killed" by having his identity and personality erased through drugs and ECT, so that we will never know of his sufferings, any more than we know what goes on in the secret prisons. Indeed, it is likely that the totalitarian power which is coming into being in the U.S. will use psychiatrists as their henchmen as much as intelligence officers and the military. Thus every effort must be made to combat and expose them for the charlatans they are.