You’d assume a sleep room could be cosy, however the one on Ward 5 of the Royal Waterloo hospital in London, again within the Sixties, was darkish and airless, a twilight zone the place as much as six sufferers – nearly all the time younger girls – would lie comatose on gray mattresses for weeks, even months on finish. They’d are available in with schizophrenia, anorexia or, in a number of circumstances, a youthful waywardness that their mother and father hoped may very well be cured. For William Sargant, the psychiatrist in cost, the treatment lay not solely in extended narcosis however insulin shock remedy, ECT and, if want be, lobotomy. Afterwards, the sufferers had no reminiscence of what had been finished to them. The Sargant methodology was to wipe their minds clear.
Celia Imrie, later a well-known actor, was admitted to Ward 5 in 1966, when she was 14. To her it was “like being in a jail camp” and her restoration “owed nothing” to the “really horrifying” Sargant and his “barbaric therapies”. Sara (not her actual identify) was a 12 months older, simply 15, and remembers the “hideous cocktail of medicine” that stored her in a zombified state. Linda Keith, celebrated for her relationship with Jimi Hendrix and on the time, in her personal phrases, “a pleasure-seeking, music obsessed drug addict”, had about 50 periods of ECT on Ward 5: they left her “massively mentally incapacitated” and unable to learn. She additionally recollects Sargant approaching to her in his personal follow.
How persistent a sexual predator he was is unclear, however at the very least one lady registered a grievance with the Common Medical Council, and there’s nothing remotely redemptive in Jon Inventory’s lacerating account. A tall, burly “rugger man” who hushed up the psychological breakdown he had in his 20s, Sargant was cavalierly mechanistic in his strategy, dismissing remedy and Freudian “mushy retailers” in his zeal for the liquid cosh and different even harder interventions; in one in all his books he really helpful lobotomy, as a substitute of divorce, for sad wives. He cherished publicity and was sometimes a speaking head on the BBC, as soon as showing on the Third Programme with the singer PJ Proby.
He had the respect of some colleagues – together with physician and future international secretary David Owen – and rose to the highest of his occupation, with a personal follow alongside NHS work in London and on the Belmont Hospital in Sutton. His 1957 e-book Battle for the Thoughts, ghosted by Robert Graves, was a bestseller, and he may boast many eminent and well-to-do purchasers – aristocrats, prima ballerinas, abroad royals. Presents and donations poured in. Whereas working on the Priory shortly earlier than his retirement, a “attractive Arabian princess” supplied him a Rolls-Royce and despatched 5 alongside, in several colors, for him to select from.
At his finest, he was a part of a motion to destigmatise psychiatric items and banish any lingering affiliation with lunatic asylums. To extra sceptical colleagues, although, he was “Invoice the Mind Slicer”: conceited, bombastic and “soullessly one-sided”. RD Laing noticed his strategy as a “regression to barbarism”; Anthony Clare was a critic, too. The six feminine sufferers whose private testimonies type chapters in Inventory’s e-book thought him a monster. So did nurses allotted to the sleep room, whose job was to medicate the sufferers (often with chlorpromazine) 4 occasions a day, and who hated the spooky atmosphere and “darkish alchemy of medicine and electrical energy”; it was, one mentioned, “the form of factor you’d count on in Hitler’s time”. Affected person consent didn’t turn into enshrined till the Psychological Well being Act of 1983 and the ladies have been repeatedly topic to procedures to which they hadn’t agreed. The side- and after-effects have been dire (tremors, persistent fatigue, huge reminiscence loss, and so forth) however to Sargant, Inventory claims, these have been “an appropriate trade-off”. He was, Inventory provides, “possessed of a furor therapeuticus – a rage to heal – that was extra in his personal curiosity than his sufferers”.
The sleep room regime is greater than sufficient to convict Sargant of doubtful follow, however midway by way of the e-book Inventory veers off to look at his doable involvement with MI5, MI6 and the CIA’s MKUltra programme in thoughts management. Sargant realized rather a lot about brainwashing throughout the second world battle, whereas treating traumatised troopers, and his experience discovered favour with the intelligence companies. He additionally labored within the US for a time, and had shut ties with a fellow sleep-room practitioner there, Donald Ewen Cameron, who was funded by the CIA. Inventory speculates on what Sargant “may” or “would possibly” have labored on, together with LSD trials at Porton Down with MI6. However within the absence of incriminating paperwork (lots of which stay categorised) the proof is inconclusive and, in contrast with the sleep room chapters, the fabric appears tangential, nevertheless heatedly researched. To say that “he was unquestionably the form of psychiatrist whom Porton Down – and MI6 – may need turned to” doesn’t actually nail him as an opportunistic chilly battle stooge. And the sensationalist chapter heading “She advised me that Sargant killed … a affected person”, based mostly on a secondhand, uncorroborated story, feels a bit low cost.
Of the hundreds of sufferers Sargant handled, at the very least 5 appear to have died throughout narcosis. In the meantime, he exaggerated restoration charges and didn’t rely relapses. And the six girls who communicate out on this e-book are haunted by what he received as much as with out their information. On the web site of the Royal School of Physicians he’s known as “an important determine in postwar psychiatry … He gave his sufferers hope.” These girls, together with many former nurses and docs, would beg to disagree.
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