3 days ago
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
