Serial Killer of the Psyche: ECT Psychiatrist William Sargant

     Accomplished British author Jon Stock has recently published a new non-fiction book, The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him. The psychiatrist in question, Dr. William Sargant, was Britain’s most prominent proponent, before and after WWII, of using electroconvulsive therapy, insulin coma therapy, and lobotomies to forcefully nullify the life force of hundreds, if not thousands of patients, mostly women, in order to “cure” them.

     In his obituary in 1988 he was praised by the British Royal College of Physicians as “the most important figure in post-war psychiatry” and as “the outstanding clinician and teacher of his generation.”

     Right.

     In 1938 Sargant had been offered a fellowship at Harvard Medical School, where the Rockefeller Foundation was then making psychiatry the chief recipient of its funding within the medical profession. From there he went to Washington DC and met lobotomy advocate Walter Freeman, who promoted the brutal procedure to Sargant along with his  recommendation to use it in conjunction with ECT. Sargant returned to England and began a fifty year career of ice pick lobotomies and savage ECT overkill to rid the “mentally ill” of their problems.

     Between 1950 and 1953 Sargant used insulin comas, aversion therapy, seizures induced by Metrazol, narcosis, and ECT on his patients, mostly young women. If they did not respond to this brutality, they were sent out for lobotomies. If the lobotomy did not work to erase their “problem,” they were given another one. Sargant soon became the major source of referrals for lobotomies in Britain. 462 of his patients received more than one of his ice- pick-to-the-brain procedures.

     In the 1950s Sargant became close friends with American-based psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron whose “depatterning” therapy involved the use of massive amounts of ECT designed to reduce a patient to a state of complete mental confusion and physical collapse. Cameron’s experiments were funded by the CIA and were a core part of the spy agency’s infamous MKULtra mind control experiments. Before he died Sargant, was able to destroy most of his correspondence and collaboration with Cameron, just as he had destroyed so many of the patient records of those under his “care.”

     Stock’s history of Sargant as an institutionally legitimized serial killer includes the author’s interviews with many of Sargant’s female victims. They are horrifying.

     One was the then 19 year old girlfriend of Rolling Stone Keith Richard whose parents forced her into the “care” of Sargant because of too much sex, drugs and rock and roll by their daughter. She has no memory of entering Sargant’s Ward Five – the Sleep Room of the book’s title – and she was not brought out of her enforced, drug induced coma for six weeks except to be fed, washed, and given ECT.

     “I had been rendered completely helpless,” she said. “There were so many patients being treated with ECT, it was like a conveyor belt. I must have had almost fifty ECTs in total.”

     Sargant admitted that there were at least five deaths in Ward Five. There were probably more, given his habit of erasing patient records.

     Sargant was an early advocate of the “chemical imbalance” idea. He believed all mental illnesses were fundamentally biological disorders and should be treated accordingly…with physical force. The greater the mental infirmity, the greater the force needed to expunge the “illness.”

     One reviewer of Stock’s book, Andrew Scull, wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books that Sargant was “one of the great moral monsters of 20th-century psychiatry.”

     The fact that Sargant rose to such fame and respect within the psychiatric community during his career is testament to the true dangers you can face if you wind up in the office of any practitioner of what is modern psychiatry.