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Irish Times
5 days ago
- Health
- Irish Times
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock: Could an Irish version of this frightening scandal in British psychiatry yet emerge?
The Sleep Room. A Very British Medical Scandal Author : Jon Stock ISBN-13 : 978-0349128894 Publisher : Bridge Street Press Guideline Price : £25 Day and night no longer held any meaning for the inhabitants of the Sleep Room at The Royal Waterloo Hospital in London in the 1960s. They were all women, most being treated without their consent and spending weeks at a time in a state of deep sleep induced by a cocktail of antipsychotic and antidepressant medication, sedatives and electroconvulsive therapy. They were roused every six hours by nurses and taken to the bathroom, had their vital signs checked, were administered enemas, drugs and ECT, and returned to their beds. These women had one thing in common: they were all under the care of the eminent psychiatrist Dr William Sargent. Sargent was one of the most influential psychiatrists in postwar British society. He was appointed Physician in Charge of the Department of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas', one of the world's most prestigious teaching hospitals. He occupied other positions of considerable influence and impact. Sargent was lauded by many of his peers and he was a frequent contributor to the BBC and newspapers. He died in 1988. READ MORE It appears that Sargent's raison d'être was to treat mental health conditions by physical means. The brutal treatment regime at the Sleep Room was his brainchild and a manifestation of his near obsession to utilise physical interventions to treat mental distress. It is also a chilling manifestation of his unfettered power and the acquiescence of the medical establishment around him. Jon Stock in The Sleep Room captures this tyranny in a gripping manner. Stock has written several psychological thrillers; his writing here, however, is constrained in the best sense. There is a dignity and sensitivity embedded in Stock's accounts of the women's stories that make up this scandal. Several chapters explicitly focus on individual women who were often involuntary inhabitants of the Sleep Room. Each of these chapters is titled using the woman's name. The actor Celia Imrie is one; she was just 14 when she began her de facto incarceration in the Sleep Room as a 'treatment' for anorexia. Sargent offered the alluring promise of reprogramming the human mind, an offering that in the Cold War era was of immense interest to the CIA and M15. Stock goes into great detail concerning Sargent's somewhat tentative links to these organisations, describing a fascinating episode concerning a non-consensual trial of LSD as a potential 'truth drug'. However, at times I felt that this was almost a separate story and detracted somewhat from the brutal impact Sargent had on the lives of his patients. Stock reveals a frightening scandal at the heart of the British medical establishment, a scandal that crossed class divides, had international reach, appears to have been facilitated by the establishment for decades and has had the most debilitating impact on the women involved. While reading, I couldn't help wondering if Sargent's obsession with physical treatment of mental illness had reached Irish shores, and if there is a Sleep Room scandal yet to emerge here. Paul D'Alton is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology at UCD
Daily Mail
03-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock: The top actress who was sedated and given electric shock treatment to cure anorexia
The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock (Bridge Street Press £25, 432pp) An airless hospital dormitory in perpetual semi-darkness, day and night. A musty smell of sweaty slumber and human breath. Occasional moans of bewilderment. Eight young women, some as young as 14, lie in a state of drug-induced sleep for weeks at a time, 20 hours out of every 24. They're known as the 'Sleeping Beauties'. Every six hours, they're chivvied awake by nurses and led stumbling to the lavatory. Without their knowledge or consent, they're given frequent bouts of electro-convulsive therapy, causing them to jerk and twitch, rubber plugs jammed between their teeth. This is not science fiction. It really happened, to hundreds of patients (most of them girls and young women) in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the Sleep Room in Ward Five of the Royal Waterloo Hospital. The theory was that 'deep sleep therapy', or 'continuous narcosis', combined with ECT, would 'upset patterns of behaviour and re-programme troubled minds'. The doctor who ran this dystopian hellscape was William Sargant, the tall, striking physician in charge of psychological medicine at St Thomas' Hospital, of which the Royal Waterloo was an annexe. He believed that mental ill-health was a physical condition, which needed to be treated as such. He had no time for Freudian talking therapy, or what he called 'sofa merchants'. His control over the sleeping patients was total. With the 'Sleeping Beauties' safely in their sedated state they wouldn't be in a position to protest. Who would send a daughter to such a place? The answer was middle-class mothers at their wits' end when their daughters refused to eat, or get rid of an 'unsuitable' boyfriend; or who was stubbornly recalcitrant, wayward or depressed. Sargant promised parents that his treatment would be like a re-set of their daughters' brains. Sometimes it worked for a short time, but Sargant had no interest in long-term results. Often, there was a relapse. 'Sargant still features in my nightmares,' says the actress Celia Imrie, one of six former Sleep Room patients who provide their raw testimonies in Jon Stock's horrifying exposé of Sargant's Sleep Room. Imrie was sent to Ward Five by her mother in 1966, aged just 14. She was suffering from anorexia that had started when, after applying for a place at the Royal Ballet School, she had discovered a rejection letter on her mother's desk, saying she was 'too big ever to become a dancer'. She was so heavily drugged with the antipsychotic Largactil (which so dulled the senses that it was known as 'liquid cosh' or 'the chemical straitjacket') that she had double vision and couldn't stop shaking. 'I was injected with insulin every day, too,' she says. 'I think I had what was called 'sub-coma shock treatment' – you weren't given enough insulin to induce a hypoglycaemic coma, but it was enough to make you drowsy, weak, sweaty and hungry.' Once, Sargant took her with him to a hospital lecture theatre, to be his exhibit. 'I had to take my clothes off so students could see how thin I was.' She has tried to find her hospital records, but they have 'vanished' or been destroyed. So she's not sure whether she had ECT, though she guesses she did. She was powerless under the treatment of the 58-year-old Sargant, with his piercing eyes 'like washed black pebbles'. He was treated like a god, breezing in through the swing doors, worshipped and obeyed by everyone. She realised the way to get out was to eat. 'My recovery had nothing to do with him or his barbaric treatments.' 'I didn't wake up for six weeks,' recalls Linda Keith, whose parents checked her in to Ward Five in 1969 when she was a 23-year-old Vogue model. 'My parents always referred to me as being 'ill' rather than the more accurate description of me: a pleasure-seeking, music-obsessed drug addict. What they wanted was a tame, house-trained lapdog.' What they got, after submitting their daughter to Sargant's treatment, was a woman 'without a mind. I'd been rendered completely helpless.' During the narcosis, Linda was subjected to 50 sessions of ECT. The result was that she could no longer choose anything and needed help with the simplest tasks. 'I wasn't happy or unhappy. I wasn't there.' She had also forgotten how to read. After being discharged, she went to see Sargant at 23 Harley Street, and asked him when she might read again. He said he didn't know. Then, she recalls, 'he came on to me. He tried to hug me and kiss me on the mouth. I ducked and hit him so he went over onto the ottoman pouffe.' Before being sent to Ward Five, Linda had an affair with Keith Richards (who would later write the song Ruby Tuesday about her) but left him for Jimi Hendrix. A few years after Sargant had stopped treating her, she bumped into him in Bond Street and called him 'a monster' to his face. To read this disturbing book is a stifling experience. Stock powerfully evokes the eerily subdued atmosphere of the Sleep Room and brings out the sinister creepiness and the arrogance of Sargant. He discovers that Sargant himself had been admitted to Hanwell Asylum in 1934 for depression. It was here that he became convinced that 'insanity' would one day be perceived as a series of physically treatable disorders. He wanted to save people from being incarcerated in asylums for months or years (that was an admirable aim) and he believed that a short, sharp, 12-week shock would do the trick. All very well in theory – but as this book shows, the results could be disastrous. Another patient, 15-year-old 'Sara', suffered terrible memory loss, a kind of 'severe Alzheimer's', and the antipsychotic drugs left her with a permanent Parkinsonian tremor. Stock also suggests that Sargant shared his research with, or might even have been partly funded by, Porton Down, the MI5, MI6 and the CIA. In the 1950s, Porton Down conducted LSD experiments on young corporals, who took part in exchange for a bit of money. The aim was to disorientate people so that they 'forgot how to lie'. It's all very murky, and Stock doesn't quite nail Sargant's involvement. By far the most memorable aspect of this disturbing book is the unforgettable image of those drugged, sleeping girls incarcerated in the top floor room overlooking Waterloo station.
