We all have our stories to tell and I do not ever judge.
But this is mine, Well not all of it as I am not dead yet. But where it began for me and still impacts my life and hugely.
So if anyone is at all interested as to why I so struggle and why I am
still so traumatized. Despite years of 'therapy' and working on myself.
Trying to make it and myself 'right'.
Is because I too went through this. When I was 17. In around 1970/71.
Don't expect me to remember the exact year. It was 70 or 71 and it was 'only' about 2 months of my life. But it changed me, and forever.
And I am
lucky, or very unlucky, that I remember anything.
A side effect of this
is it wipes your memory. When I was finally woken up I could not even
remember my name, my parents, my then boyfriend Tell, or anything much
at all.
Took me years and with horrific flashbacks to get it right and to begin to tell my story
I was too young to give permission, so my parents did. They were told it was 'in my best interests'
They loved me, they just wanted me well, and I was not well.
But this almost destroyed me.
And not at the Royal London where the instigator, William Sargant was based.But for me at Park Prewett, Basingstoke. An NHS Hospital.
As while little is known anyway, what is even less known is it did not just only
happen at the Royal London under Sargant . It happened all over the
country. I have been told right up to 1976??
Abet in a smaller way with a smaller number in each unit than in Sargants sleep unit..
But it still happened to me and so many. All over the country
And many of us have so tried to speak out. Indeed I tried so hard. Only
to find, like all, my records have been 'lost' so there is no proof.
We are all aging and we are the last who can testify as to what happened to us.
And soon we will no longer be here. Which is what is hoped for.
I am NOT a conspiracy theorist. Never have been and never will be. So I
make no judgement or opinion on any links in the article to the
military or the CIA or whatever.
In fact I personally doubt this.
I think it was a psychiatric treatment theory, instigated by a very
flawed psychiatrist that sadly was allowed to get out of hand and was
taken up by others. That went so very wrong and was so abusive to those
that had it.
But I do know what happened to me. I have written
about it myself but this account of the reality of it tells it better
than I ever could
https://ectstatistics.wordpress.com/…/william-sargent-deep…/
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DST- Deep Sleep Treatment/Therapy or Narcosis Therapy
( It was known under different names depending where you had it)
1965 - 1975 - London’s Royal Waterloo Hospital .
How 'depressed' women were put to sleep for months in an NHS hospital room - leaving mental scars that remain 40 years on.
There are many horrors that Elizabeth Reed (below) recalls from her
time at London’s Royal Waterloo Hospital, but one in particular lingers
in her mind. She describes a small, windowless room at the top of the
red-brick Edwardian building, just lit by a night lamp on a nurse’s
desk.
Six beds are jammed together. The deep breathing of women in a drug-induced sleep. The fetid stench of unwashed bodies.
‘It was like being buried alive,’ she says. ‘I was lying there in the
dark, hour after hour, and couldn’t move. I wasn’t aware of my body,
just my head in this darkness. You could hear people moving around and
other people breathing and moaning.’
Recalling footage of a patient having narcosis treatment
While Elizabeth is one of only a handful of women prepared to speak
out, her story is not unique. Up to 500 women, suffering from conditions
such as postnatal depression and anorexia, passed through the Royal
Waterloo’s infamous Ward 5 before it shut 40 years ago.
Heavily
drugged and subjected to horrendous levels of electro-convulsive therapy
(ECT) and even lobotomies, the unluckiest were taken to the 'Narcosis
Room', where they were put to sleep for weeks at a time.
Almost
all teenage girls and women in their early 20s, they were treated as
little more than guinea pigs by controversial psychiatrist William
Sargant as he conducted a bizarre experiment to ‘repattern’ their brains
and cure them of depression.
If all this sounds like the stuff of
science-fiction horror, it is no coincidence a new psychological
thriller, The Sleep Room, by clinical psychologist-turned-novelist F. R.
Tallis, draws heavily on Sargant’s scandalous treatments.
But
behind the fiction, questions remain about why the women of Ward 5 were
subjected to such cruelty at an NHS hospital. Two of them, now in their
60s, spoke about their experiences to Femail this week.
Survivor: Elizabeth Reed is one of only a handful of women prepared to speak out
‘It’s so easy to dismiss us,’ says Elizabeth, a 63-year-old grandmother
and former marketing director from London. ‘It was a long time ago and
we were psychiatric patients. Many of us were left with pieces of our
memory missing.
‘We were not drooling maniacs, but if you’ve been
put in a sleep room, then your memories are not going to be clear. I
lost huge chunk of my past.’
Officially, the Department of Health
says it no longer has records of Sargant’s work at the Royal Waterloo,
affiliated to London’s St Thomas’s Hospital. However, Elizabeth has a
copy of her referral letter from January 1973, stamped with the ominous
words: ‘Admit to Ward 5.’ Notes reveal she was given a ‘course of
narcosis’.
She had been diagnosed with ‘obsessional neurosis’ and,
by her own admission, was very ill — depression compounded by a
difficult childhood.
‘But many other women I have spoken to say they
were suffering from milder forms of depression and anxiety,’ she says.
‘The treatment was completely out of proportion.’
She was admitted
to the Royal Waterloo in spring 1973 when she was 22 and engaged to be
married. After arriving on the 22-bed Ward 5, she was sedated and
underwent ECT — sometimes every other day.
‘I can remember the sound
of the ECT machine being wheeled down the corridor and it being
switched on and off in other rooms,’ she says.
‘It was so
frightening. First of all, they injected you and you had an awful
feeling of falling backwards into yourself. After ECT, you didn’t know
who you were.’
Eventually, Elizabeth was moved into the Narcosis Room beside Ward 5 and put into a drug-induced sleep.
'I was awake, but couldn’t move or speak. It was torture, lying there for hours in the darkness'
Women there were occasionally woken to be taken to the toilet or to be
fed. ‘We were like zombies,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I couldn’t walk. I had to
be lifted. Afterwards, they put you back to sleep again.
‘The worst
time was when I started not to be asleep. I was awake, but couldn’t move
or speak. It was torture, lying there for hours in the darkness.’
Sargant, a founding member of St Thomas’s department of psychological
medicine, who advocated the use of drugs to treat mental illness,
operated his ‘sleep room’ for ten years until 1973.
Four patients are known to have died there and yet no one stepped in to stop him.
A Cambridge medical graduate, obsessed with making a name for himself,
he used high doses of tranquillisers and administered ECT up to twice a
week on Ward 5 and every other day in the Narcosis Room.
At the heart of his treatment was his belief that the brain could be ‘repatterned’ to erase bad memories.
His fame - due to TV and radio interviews and best-selling books -
ensured a steady stream of patients. He was friends with authors Aldous
Huxley and Robert Graves.
Actress Celia Imrie was 14 when she was treated by Sargant on Ward 5 and given huge doses of drugs and ECT.
In her 2011 autobiography, The Happy Hoofer, she recalls sneaking out
of bed to peer into the sleep room. She describes ‘dead-looking women
lying on the floor on grey mattresses, silent in a kind of electrically
induced twilight’.
But to this day, she is unsure if she had
treatment in the sleep room because patients were drugged on the ward
before being carried there.
Up to 500 women, suffering from
conditions such as postnatal depression and anorexia, passed through the
Royal Waterloo's infamous Ward 5 before it shut 40 years ago
Up to
500 women, suffering from conditions such as postnatal depression and
anorexia, passed through the Royal Waterloo's infamous Ward 5 before it
shut 40 years ago
‘You went in asleep and you came out asleep. So maybe I was in the Narcosis Room. I could not possibly know,’ she says.
The secrecy surrounding Dr Sargant’s work has even led to claims he was
being bankrolled by British intelligence and the CIA. He certainly had
links to the military in World War II, working at Porton Down, the
Ministry of Defence biological and chemical weapons research base.
But long before he died in 1988, Sargant destroyed all his records, which might have shed light on his sinister treatments.
'It was impossible to rebel because you were constantly drugged. It was an unreal world and I was frightened and disorientated'
According to Hilary Jameson, who arrived at the Royal Waterloo in 1970,
being admitted to Ward 5 was ‘like falling into the jaws of hell’.
As a 17-year-old A-level student in Oxford, she stopped eating after her
parents’ divorce, though she insists she was far from anorexic.
‘People were talking about this marvellous man in London who could work miracles,’ says the 61-year-old, now a psychotherapist.
‘He was stern, a tall, cold man with very dark eyes. He didn’t speak to
me. He just told my mother that if I wasn’t admitted then I’d die.’
Within half an hour of arriving, Hilary was injected with largactil - a powerful anti-psychotic drug.
‘It was impossible to rebel because you were constantly drugged,’ she
says. ‘It was an unreal world and I was frightened and disorientated.’
Forced to eat huge amounts of carbohydrates so that she put on weight,
Hilary had an ever-present threat of ‘narcosis’ hanging over her if she
did not show signs of improvement. ‘We used to see the women in the
sleep room being taken to the bathroom or to be fed and they were like
ghosts. It made you feel very worried. I couldn’t make sense of what was
going on around us.’
Hilary was forced to undergo ECT and displayed
to medical students by Sargant as he taught them ‘how to deal with
anorexic girls’.
Actress Celia Imrie was 14 when she was treated by Sargant on Ward 5 and given huge doses of drugs and ECT
Actress Celia Imrie was 14 when she was treated by Sargant on Ward 5 and given huge doses of drugs and ECT
‘He came across as highly respectable and authoritative,’ says Hilary.
‘But most patients in Ward 5 were just young girls who had problems with
their families. It was barbaric.’
A leading psychiatric expert,
Professor Malcolm Lader of King’s College, London, recalls how, as a
junior doctor, Sargant showed him his sleep room several times in 1966.
‘To be frank, I was horrified by what I saw,’ he says.
‘The women were really cramped together. It was dark. It was like twilight. There was a terrible smell of unwashed bodies.
‘It was a fraught procedure to be sedated for that amount of time. Most
importantly, there was no evidence that narcosis had any effect.
‘He was doling out drugs in large doses that were way above the
recommended maximum dose. I resolved never to send anyone there.’
Professor Lader also sheds light on why no one stopped Sargant.
‘He was an over-powering, imperious figure. He spoke to me as if I must
approve and I’m afraid I was too junior and too cowardly to say I
thought the whole thing needed properly investigating.
‘They
wouldn’t get away with it now because the law has changed. You have to
show there is some logic and rationale to what you are doing.
‘But back then, he would not brook any opposition. He built up an empire filled with his acolytes.’
There were also rumours, says Professor Lader, that Sargant was
untouchable because he was supported by British intelligence or the CIA.
He was a frequent traveller to the U.S. and wrote in his autobiography
of being entertained at the White House during one of his trips.
‘He was interested in brainwashing and so was the CIA. He may have been protected by his contacts.’
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ward 5 and Sargant’s sleep room
closed when he retired in 1973 — the same year the CIA officially ended
its top-secret mind-control experiments, codenamed Project MKUltra.
Whatever the truth, the young women from troubled families made perfect
patients for Sargant’s experiments. F. R Tallis, who researched Sargant
for his novel, says: ‘He cherry-picked them. They were easy targets —
alienated from their families and unable to challenge his authority.’
'There was no way back to my old life. I am angry about what I feel I missed out on. I've lost chunks of my memory'
Stephanie Simons, a 78-year-old Sussex artist, visited Sargant’s
private rooms in London’s Harley Street in 1967 suffering from
depression. She sheds a more sinister light on the bias towards women,
recalling how he asked her to strip to the waist so he could examine her
before administering anti-depressants.
‘He didn’t ask me to get
dressed again,’ she says. ‘He told me to sit in a chair, naked to the
waist, and talked to me for nearly an hour like that.
‘He was stern and professional, so I didn’t dare say anything.’
Today, Sargant’s reputation as a serious psychiatrist is in tatters, but there is still interest in his mind-control books.
Experiences: Behind the fiction, questions remain about why the women
of Ward 5 were subjected to such cruelty at an NHS hospital
A copy of his brainwashing title Battle Of The Mind is said to have been found at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.
As for the Royal Waterloo, it closed as a hospital in 1976 and is now
owned by an American university. Sargant’s sleep room is a student
bedsit.
But for the women who fell into his hands, his legacy lives on. ‘He damaged us,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He destroyed our potential.’
After being discharged from Ward 5, she was unable to cope with her
career in marketing and took jobs as a supermarket shelf-stacker and a
cleaning lady.
‘It changed me. I lost interest in things,’ she says.
‘There was no way back to my old life. I am angry about what I feel I
missed out on. I’ve lost chunks of my memory. And I can’t lay down new
memories.’
Hilary adds: ‘It dulled me an awful lot. It knocked the
spirit out of me. Taking so many drugs had a bad effect - by the time I
was 26 I had ovarian cysts.’
In Australia and Canada, where
Sargant’s methods were disastrously emulated, dozens of narcosis
patients died. Those who survived were eventually compensated.
Survivors of the Royal Waterloo Hospital have been told by lawyers that
the lack of paperwork and the amount of time that has passed makes it
unlikely they will ever be similarly compensated.
But above all,
women like Elizabeth and Hilary want to be acknowledged. They want to
know how Sargant can have been allowed to get away with such monstrous
behaviour.
‘People talk about the sleep room as if it was something from another world,’ says Elizabeth.
‘But we’re still alive. We’re still here. We’re still suffering from what he and his colleagues did to us.’
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