Latest news with #JonStock
Daily Mirror
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Celebrity Traitors star survived 'horrors' under doc who 'electrocuted' patients
A British doctor who presided over inhuman experiments to cure patients of 'illnesses' from eating disorders to unsuitable love affairs may also have been involved with the CIA's mind-control experiments says author Jon Stock Former inmates of a secure psychiatric ward at a central London hospital have revealed the harrowing story of psychiatrist William Sargant's brutally unethical treatments. Author Jon Stock met with a number of Sargant's patients, including award-winning actress and Celebrity Traitors star Celia Imrie. A disturbing majority of Sargant's patients in the so-called 'Sleep Room' were women and young girls, Jon Stock told the Mirror. More than once Sargant recommended a lobotomy, instead of divorce or separation, for unhappy wives. The sick doctor once explained: 'A depressed woman, for instance, may owe her illness to a psychopathic husband who cannot change and will not accept treatment. Separation might be the answer, but... we have seen patients enabled by a [lobotomy] to return to the difficult environment and cope with it in a way which had hitherto been impossible.' Sargant's callous disregard for the women under his care extended to parading them, nearly-naked in front of rooms full of medical students. Celia Imrie was another victim of Sargant. The actress has starred in dozens of British movies from Bridget Jones's Diary to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and is soon to be back on our screens in the BBC's Celebrity Traitors. She told Jon how she developed an eating disorder as a young girl, after being told she was 'too big' to pursue her dream of becoming a ballet dancer. She explained: 'I worked out every means possible to dispose of food, determined to get 'small' enough to be a dancer, and I was soon little more than a carcass with skin.' She soon found herself in the hands of Sargant. Celia said: 'The side effects were startling. My hands shook uncontrollably for most of the day, and I'd wake up to find clumps of my hair on the pillow. 'But the worst consequence was that everything I saw was in double vision. When Sargant came into the room, there were two of him. It was horrific and terrifying. 'Even simple tasks such as picking up a glass of water became impossible. I was injected with insulin every day too. Sargant was a big believer in fattening up his patients to get them well and you soon put on weight with insulin. 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. 'I will never know for sure if I was given electric shocks during my stay," Celia added. "Some years back, I tried to find my hospital records, to see the details of my treatment. Unfortunately, Sargant seems to have taken away a lot of his patients' records, including mine, when he retired from the NHS in 1972. 'Either that, or they were destroyed. I can't remember ECT happening to me, but I can remember it happening to others.' Sargant's barbaric methods included regular electroshock treatments. 'I vividly recall every sight, sound and smell,' Celia recalled. 'The huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain, she made as her tormented body shuddered and jerked; the scent of burning hair and flesh. It was a terrible thing for a fourteen-year-old to witness.' Women were put in Sargant's hands for the flimsiest of reasons. Jon told the Mirror that patient Mary Thornton was admitted to The Sleep Room after her parents suspected that her romance with an 'unsuitable' boy. She told Jon that she also only has patchy memories of her treatment: 'One is of the electrodes being attached to the side of my head. I remember the complete, utter terror because I didn't even know who I was.' Jon says this was a common cause of young women's hospitalisation: 'In the mid 1960s, for example, a wealthy businessman contacted Sargant, explaining that his daughter had fallen in love with an 'unsuitable' local man in Europe and wanted to marry him.' Sargant was employed to help cure the young girl's love-struck 'madness.' He explains: 'A photo later emerged of Sargant, the father and a heavily sedated daughter standing at the door of the aeroplane that had returned her to the UK.' One former student at the hospital told Jon: 'Basically, Sargant brought this attractive young woman back at the end of a needle.' According to some sources, Sargant is also associated with the CIA 's bizarre 'mind control' program MK Ultra. Jon says that there are rumours that the US spy agency helped fund Som of Sargant's work. He explains: ' The minutes of St Thomas' Research Advisory Committee meeting reveal that in September 1963, Sargant announced that an anonymous donor would fund the salary of a research registrar (£80,000 a year in today's money) for two years. Sargant refused to reveal the donor's identity.' He certainly had some involvement with the intelligence community, Jon says: 'Sargant did regular work for MI5 – in 1967, for example, he was called in to assess the mental health of Vladimir Tkachenko, a suspected Russian defector.' Admitting that Sargant's association with the CIA is one of the hardest parts of the story to prove. Jon says that Eric Gow, a former serviceman who had volunteered to undergo drug trials – under the impression that he was helping cure the common cold – was given massive doses of LSD. He says that he feels sure he recalls seeing Sargant overseeing some of this bizarre experiments at the MOD 's chemical and biological research facility at Porton Down. The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock is published by the Bridge Street Press (£25).
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.
