What Happened in This Doctor's ‘Sleep Room' Might Give You Nightmares
Tales of predatory men performing reprehensible acts on unconscious women are as old as human history (see 'Sleeping Beauty,' the 14th-century version) and as recent as yesterday's news (see the Frenchman who invited dozens of strangers to rape his drugged wife). But in the case of the British psychiatrist William Sargant (1907-88), his ministrations to slumbering female patients were for the most part perfectly legal, undertaken in the name of medical science with the aim of curing severe distress.
As Jon Stock recounts in 'The Sleep Room,' his disturbing chronicle of Sargant's career, between 1964 and 1972, the psychiatrist, by then an eminence in his field, subjected hundreds of patients — the vast majority of them women — to what he called 'continuous narcosis,' in a twilit, bed-lined garret on the top floor of London's Royal Waterloo Hospital, his 'sleep room.'
For up to four months at a time, girls as young as 14 were kept knocked out on cocktails of antipsychotics, sedatives and antidepressants while administered risky experimental therapies — typically one or the other of Sargant's favorites: electroshock (ECT) and insulin coma (in which huge doses of insulin induced a hypoglycemic stupor). 'Under sleep,' he explained in a textbook for fellow practitioners, 'one can now give many kinds of physical treatment, necessary, but often not easily tolerated.' (Conveniently for him, patient consent wasn't British law until 1983, long after he'd retired.)
'Physical' is the key word here. Deploring psychiatry's lack of effective therapies for serious mental illness, Sargant had no patience with the ruling Freudian 'sofa merchants' and 'talkers,' who trafficked in poetic intangibles like the unconscious and sublimation. Instead, he saw the mind, 'conceived merely as the brain,' as no different from any other organ and requiring the same concrete interventions as a burst appendix or broken arm. The theory behind this approach was nearly as crude as the treatments themselves: A dramatic jolt to the system would disrupt negative patterns of thought and behavior and produce what Stock calls 'a factory reset.'
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