The Mind-Bending MK Ultra Experiments of Dr Ewen Cameron

In 1959, a woman who looked like Elizabeth Taylor stumbled out of the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, disoriented and wearing only a hospital gown. She clawed her way up Mount Royal, trying to escape, but the nurses caught her. Back inside, the institute's director, Dr. Ewen Cameron, sedated her and gave her electroshock therapy again and again until she could no longer remember why she had been there in the first place. She was one of many patients unwittingly subjected to Cameron's brainwashing experiments, funded in part by the CIA as Sub-Project 68 of MKUltra.

The Director and His Theories

The Allen Memorial Institute opened in 1943 as a model of progressive psychiatric care, backed by the Rockefeller family. Patients were supposed to come and go freely, and treatments would follow the latest science. But within a decade, the institute's founding director, Dr. Ewen Cameron, was running secret experiments that ruined lives. Cameron was no fringe figure—he served as president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the Quebec Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. He was also one of ten international psychiatrists called to evaluate Rudolf Hess at Nuremberg.