A shocking tale of abused women in a leading British hospital

Telegraph

29-03-2025

Jon Stock's The Sleep Room is just what its subtitle suggests: a shocking account of a very British medical scandal. It's also a damning portrait of a man who, in the name of psychiatric progress, left a trail of broken lives in his wake. William Sargant (1907–1988), long considered a pioneer of radical psychiatric treatments – praised in the British Medical Journal when he died as an 'iconoclast', as well as a brilliant teacher and mentor – emerges in this book as little more than a sadist and a zealot, an unrepentant champion of therapies so brutal and so indifferent to patient suffering that their long-term consequences still haunt those who survived them.
Sargant was, for better or worse, an instrumental figure in shaping what might be called 'physicalist' psychiatry in Britain: the opposite of, say, RD Laing, the 'talkers', and the psychotherapists. In The Sleep Room, Stock meticulously details Sargant's methods and ideas and the effects of his various experimental treatments. His use of deep sleep therapy, for example – 'continuous narcosis' – led to hundreds of female patients at the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women, later incorporated into St Thomas's Hospital, being drugged into an induced coma for months at a time in the so-called Sleep Room. As if this weren't enough, many of them were then subjected to repeated electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) while sedated, and threatened with lobotomies if these therapies failed.
The Sleep Room is a work of history: it's also a work of testimony. Stock intersperses his account with first-person accounts from Sargant's former patients, the actress Celia Imrie among them, who recalls, years after her treatment, 'I also fear that there is something remaining of Sargant in my psyche. He continues to cast a long shadow over me, sixty years later. […] As for Sargant, my recovery owed nothing to him or to his barbaric treatments. It was my own sheer determination that got me better, steeled by a desire to escape from a truly horrifying man.' These horror stories serve as a stark counterpoint to Sargant's glorious career, in which, as Stock recounts, the doctor was lauded by the medical establishment as a brilliant maverick.
Stock traces Sargant's trajectory from his early years at the Maudsley Hospital to his infamous tenure, from 1948 onwards, at St Thomas's. Among the first to introduce lobotomies to the UK, he also experimented with insulin shock therapy, which involved plunging patients into insulin-induced comas in an attempt to reset their mental state. His treatments were often based on little more than faith, bolstered by a messianic conviction in his own methods. The guiding principle of his work was, as he put it, 'practical rather than philosophical approaches' to psychiatry, though the practicality of his methods was questionable, to say the least: his prescriptions of heady cocktails of antipsychotics, sedatives and antidepressants had unpredictable and often devastating lifelong consequences.
Sargant's enthusiasm for extreme interventions did not emerge in isolation. His work was in various ways connected with Cold War psychiatric research and intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic: he worked as a consultant for MI5 and Stock draws upon various sources to suggest further connections with the CIA's experiments with mind-control.
One of the most chilling aspects of Sargant's work is not just who he treated, but why. While his private practice catered to the elite – 'principal dancers from the Royal Ballet as well as politicians, spies, artists, aristocrats, actors, Middle Eastern royalty' – the patients in Ward Five of the Royal Waterloo Hospital were often young women sent there under duress. 'Middle-class parents sent their wayward daughters to the Sleep Room for moral correction,' Stock writes. The implication is clear: Sargant's Sleep Room functioned not just as a site of medical treatment, but as a kind of disciplinary institution, a place where inconvenient women could be subdued under the guise of psychiatric care.
Stock grants that some of Sargant's work may have had some value: 'He helped to end the era of overcrowded Victorian asylums, bringing psychiatry into the medical mainstream.' But the question that haunts The Sleep Room is how Sargant was able to experiment and operate for so long without significant challenge. The answer, Stock suggests, lies in a combination of the doctor's charisma, an institutional complicity, and a post-war faith in psychiatric progress that outpaced ethical considerations. He may have been, as his contemporary detractors called him, 'Bill the Brain Slicer', or 'Sargant the Shock' – but he also loved publicity, commanded authority and moved easily among the rich and the famous. He would probably have enjoyed The Sleep Room, which grants him his fame once again, through an utterly shocking yet all-too-familiar story of medical overreach.