ECT: the Perfect Tool for Human Mind Control

     Psychiatrist Donald Cameron believed that mental illness was a contagious “disease” and that psychiatrists should be put in control of schools, governments, prisons, and hospitals in order to stamp out the viral infection of healthy people by those dangerous, infectious, mentally ill elements in our population. Cameron experimented with brutal methods to try to “correct” schizophrenia by erasing the existing memories of these contagious social misfits and reprogramming their psyches.

     Naturally, he therefore became a desirable asset to the CIA for their MKUltra mind control experiments. U.S. Representative Anna Luna called these MKUltra experiments “crimes against humanity” in her opening statement last week as the chairwoman for the new House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.

     From 1957 to 1964 Cameron was paid $69,000 by the CIA to carry out his “Montreal Experiments” at McGill University. He used LSD and paralyzing agents such as curare on unwitting subjects as well as massive, continuous electroshocks to “wipe” clean his subjects’ minds. His “psychic driving” procedures put subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks while he played taped loops to them of insignificant noise or, more often, of simple statements. In other words, he forcefully brainwashed people without their consent or knowledge.
 
     ECT was a major tool in his psychic driving arsenal and he shocked his victims with voltage thirty to forty times the normal electrical current of ECT for periods as long as two to five years. In a 1962 research paper he published, he reported using three barbiturates, Veronal, Seconal, and Nembutal as well as chlorpromazine to keep his subjects asleep for up to three weeks except for being woken up three times daily for meals and to use the toilet. Per the report of his 1961 experiments, his unwitting subjects were given follow-up ECT sessions for 22 months to as long as 68 months.

     Cameron knew that ECT was not a therapeutic tool. He recognized it instead as a weapon to be used to eradicate a person’s memories and personal psyche so that they could then be reprogrammed in any direction desired from the blank slate that their minds had become. His work was the perfect tool for the CIA to be able to change a person’s loyalties and implant ideas of justified assassination or violence.

     At that time psychiatrist Jolly West, also an MKUltra “researcher,” was running a covert clinic in San Francisco reprogramming subjects with similar mind control mechanisms. Charles Manson was the star graduate from that program.

     Cameron may not have been familiar with West’s experiments, but he was inspired by British psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also associated with post WWII intelligence services. Sargant was promoting the use of psychosurgery, insulin shock therapy, deep sleep treatment, and especially electroconvulsive therapy for his mind control experiments.

     “All sorts of treatment can be given while the patient is kept sleeping,” Sargant wrote, “including a variety of drugs and ECT [which] together generally induce considerable memory loss for the period under narcosis. We may be seeing here a new exciting beginning in psychiatry.”

     Cameron was apparently equally enthusiastic in developing this new era of psychiatry with extensive ECT abuse. His “new” psychiatry became the perfect tool for the CIA’s shameful MKUltra human experimentation from 1953 to 1973.