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Wales Online
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
Celebrity Traitors star opens up on ‘coma shock treatment' at hands of cruel doctor
Celebrity Traitors star opens up on 'coma shock treatment' at hands of cruel doctor Celia Imrie, who is set to appear in the BBC's upcoming Celebrity Traitors series, was subjected to a series of cruel treatments at the hands of psychiatrist William Sargant - including being put into a 'sub-coma' Celia Imrie was one of many young women entrusted to the care of psychiatrist William Sargant (Image: Karwai Tang, WireImagevia Getty Images ) Former patients of a secure psychiatric ward at a prominent London hospital have come forward to share the traumatic experiences they endured under the care of psychiatrist William Sargant, who subjected them to inhumane and unethical treatments. For his new book, The Sleep Room, author Jon Stock spoke with several of Sargant's victims, including actress Celia Imrie, known for her roles in films such as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, as well as her upcoming appearance in the BBC's Celebrity Traitors. A disturbing pattern emerged, revealing that the majority of Sargant's patients in the notorious "Sleep Room" were women and young girls. In some cases, Sargant even recommended lobotomies as a solution for unhappy wives, rather than suggesting divorce or separation. His twisted rationale was that this drastic procedure would enable them to cope with their difficult circumstances. Jon Stock spoke to several of Sargant's former patients (Image: Hilary Stock ) Sargant's blatant disregard for his female patients' dignity and well-being was exemplified by his practice of parading them, semi-naked, in front of rooms filled with medical students. Celia Imrie, who was also under Sargant's care, told Jon how she had 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 recalled: "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." Article continues below She found herself under the care of Sargant. Celia shared: "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." Celia Imrie says that all records of her treatment have mysteriously vanished (Image: GL Weekend ) Celia said that one of the most disturbing side-effects of Sargant's treatment was that everything she 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." Celie is one of the stars in line for the BBC's Celebrity Traitors Sargant's brutal methods included frequent electroshock treatments. Celia recounted the harrowing experience, "I vividly recall every sight, sound and smell," describing the distressing scene she witnessed at just 14-years-old. Women were entrusted to Sargant for the most trivial of reasons. Jon revealed to the Mirror a case where patient Mary Thornton was placed in The Sleep Room because her parents disapproved of her relationship with an "unsuitable" boy. She shared with Jon her fragmented memories: "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." Many of the records of Sargant's work at the Royal Waterloo have been lost (Image: Universal Images Group via Getty Images ) Jon noted that this was often the reason for young women being admitted to the hospital: "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 tasked with treating the girl's infatuation, which was seen as insanity. He detailed, "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." A former student at the hospital told Jon about the incident: "Basically, Sargant brought this attractive young woman back at the end of a needle." Sargant himself underwent psychiatric treatment earlier in his life (Image: Alamy Stock Photo ) It has even been claimed that Sargant may have had ties to the CIA's infamous MK Ultra "mind control" programme. According to Jon, there are whispers that the US spy agency may have provided funding for some of Sargant's work. Jon 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." Jon confirms that Sargant did have links to the intelligence community, stating: "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." Article continues below He also admits that solid proof of Sargant's association with the CIA is hard to find. However, he notes that Eric Gow, a former serviceman who participated in drug trials under the guise of helping to cure the common cold, was administered large doses of LSD. Jon believes that Gow may have seen Sargant overseeing some of these 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).
The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
My time as a teenage psychiatric patient
Blake Morrison's review of Jon Stock's book The Sleep Room (Shocking tales from 1960s psychiatry, 9 April) mentioned that Celia Imrie was admitted to a psychiatric unit in 1966, when she was 14. I was too, in the same year and at the same age – in my case, a large acute adult ward at Stratheden hospital in Fife, their adolescent unit having no beds at the time. I was an inpatient for three weeks and am for ever indebted to the consultant psychiatrist who managed my admission, treatment and discharge to a safer environment. Morrison's review of Stock's exposé of William Sargant and 1960s psychiatry reinforces my sense of good fortune, against all the odds at the time. My relatively benign experience of psychiatric drugs was initially high doses of Largactil, which knocked me out, so were quickly reduced. But the 'dark alchemy of drugs and electricity' was all around, and my terror that I might be subjected to electroconvulsive therapy treatment and the dire post-treatment after-effects that I witnessed in my fellow inpatients never left me. That it was acceptable for a vulnerable adolescent to be subjected to this speaks itself for the barbarism of those with influence and power in mental health practice at the time. Stock's calling out of the horrors is, I suspect, the tip of the iceberg. William Sargant is not alone in his being 'possessed' of self-interested furor therapeuticus – 'the rage to heal'. It's a universal driver that gives priceless energy and motivation, but needs vigilant and collaborative professional regulation to function safely – along with committed investment for child and adolescent mental health services as well as adult mental health services, whose waiting lists sadly lengthen every Tudor HartLondon Do you have a photograph you'd like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers' best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
Telegraph
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A shocking tale of abused women in a leading British hospital
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.
