Ewen Cameron and the Montreal experiments

Donald Ewen Cameron was among the most decorated psychiatrists of his generation. Scottish-born, he ran the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal, and served as president of the American Psychiatric Association and later of the World Psychiatric Association.

Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s he received funding, routed through a foundation called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, for work catalogued in the surviving CIA records as MKULTRA Subproject 68.

It is the part of the programme where the harm is most concretely documented, because the patients were identifiable, their families pursued it, and a government eventually paid.

What he did

Cameron believed mental illness could be treated by erasing existing patterns of thought and installing new ones. He called the first stage depatterning and the second psychic driving.

Depatterning used electroconvulsive therapy at intensities and frequencies far beyond standard practice, combined with drug-induced sleep sustained for weeks. The intended endpoint was the loss of continuous memory and of the sense of self.

Psychic driving then played recorded messages — a short phrase, repeated — through headphones or speakers for extended periods, in some cases hundreds of thousands of repetitions.

What it did to them

Permanent amnesia, in many cases covering years. Loss of skills. Incontinence. Patients who did not recognise their own families, who had to be retaught basic tasks, and who never recovered what was taken.

The second stage never worked. There is no evidence anyone was rebuilt. The erasure was achieved and the reconstruction was not, which left people with the damage and none of the intended benefit.

What followed

Cameron left McGill in 1964 and died in 1967. His work was criticised within psychiatry during his lifetime and abandoned.

Former patients and their families litigated for decades. In 1988 a group of American plaintiffs settled with the CIA. In 1992 the Canadian government established a compensation scheme, paying $100,000 each to a limited number of former patients who met its criteria — a threshold that excluded many, and litigation by excluded families has continued into the 2020s.

The Nuremberg problem

Cameron had been present at Nuremberg. He served as part of the psychiatric assessment of Rudolf Hess in 1945.

The Nuremberg Code, formulated in 1947 in direct response to Nazi medical experimentation, set out that voluntary informed consent is absolutely essential to research on human subjects.

Cameron was therefore among the small number of physicians in the world with direct professional exposure to why that code existed, and he ran the Allan Memorial work without informed consent throughout the following decade.

Why this case is different from the rest

Because it is not fragmentary. The other MKULTRA subprojects are known from grant paperwork; the destroyed records mean the human consequences are mostly unrecoverable.

Montreal has names, hospital notes, testimony, a government scheme and a settlement figure. It is the one place where the programme can be looked at through the people it happened to rather than through its accounts.