Latest news with #WilliamSargant
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.
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock review – shocking tales from 1960s psychiatry
You'd think a sleep room would be cosy, but the one on Ward 5 of the Royal Waterloo hospital in London, back in the 1960s, was dark and airless, a twilight zone where up to six patients – almost always young women – would lie comatose on grey mattresses for weeks, even months on end. They had come in with schizophrenia, anorexia or, in a few cases, a youthful waywardness that their parents hoped could be cured. For William Sargant, the psychiatrist in charge, the cure lay not only in prolonged narcosis but insulin shock therapy, ECT and, if need be, lobotomy. Afterwards, the patients had no memory of what had been done to them. The Sargant method was to wipe their minds clean. Celia Imrie, later a famous actor, was admitted to Ward 5 in 1966, when she was 14. To her it was 'like being in a prison camp' and her recovery 'owed nothing' to the 'truly horrifying' Sargant and his 'barbaric treatments'. Sara (not her real name) was a year older, just 15, and remembers the 'hideous cocktail of drugs' that kept her in a zombified state. Linda Keith, celebrated for her relationship with Jimi Hendrix and at the time, in her own words, 'a pleasure-seeking, music obsessed drug addict', had about 50 sessions of ECT on Ward 5: they left her 'hugely mentally incapacitated' and unable to read. She also recalls Sargant coming on to her in his private practice. How persistent a sexual predator he was is unclear, but at least one woman registered a complaint with the General Medical Council, and there's nothing remotely redemptive in Jon Stock's lacerating account. A tall, burly 'rugger man' who hushed up the mental breakdown he had in his 20s, Sargant was cavalierly mechanistic in his approach, dismissing therapy and Freudian 'soft merchants' in his zeal for the liquid cosh and other even tougher interventions; in one of his books he recommended lobotomy, instead of divorce, for unhappy wives. He loved publicity and was occasionally a talking head on the BBC, once appearing on the Third Programme with the singer PJ Proby. He had the respect of some colleagues – including doctor and future foreign secretary David Owen – and rose to the top of his profession, with a private practice alongside NHS work in London and at the Belmont Hospital in Sutton. His 1957 book Battle for the Mind, ghosted by Robert Graves, was a bestseller, and he could boast many eminent and well-to-do clients – aristocrats, prima ballerinas, overseas royals. Gifts and donations poured in. While working at the Priory shortly before his retirement, a 'gorgeous Arabian princess' offered him a Rolls-Royce and sent five along, in different colours, for him to choose from. At his best, he was part of a movement to destigmatise psychiatric units and banish any lingering association with lunatic asylums. To more sceptical colleagues, though, he was 'Bill the Brain Slicer': arrogant, bombastic and 'soullessly one-sided'. RD Laing saw his approach as a 'regression to barbarism'; Anthony Clare was a critic, too. The six female patients whose personal testimonies form chapters in Stock's book thought him a monster. So did nurses allocated to the sleep room, whose job was to medicate the patients (usually with chlorpromazine) four times a day, and who hated the spooky ambience and 'dark alchemy of drugs and electricity'; it was, one said, 'the sort of thing you'd expect in Hitler's time'. Patient consent didn't become enshrined until the Mental Health Act of 1983 and the women were repeatedly subject to procedures to which they hadn't agreed. The side- and after-effects were dire (tremors, chronic fatigue, massive memory loss, etc) but to Sargant, Stock claims, these were 'an acceptable trade-off'. He was, Stock adds, 'possessed of a furor therapeuticus – a rage to heal – that was more in his own interest than his patients'. The sleep room regime is more than enough to convict Sargant of dubious practice, but halfway through the book Stock veers off to examine his possible involvement with MI5, MI6 and the CIA's MKUltra programme in mind control. Sargant learned a lot about brainwashing during the second world war, while treating traumatised soldiers, and his expertise found favour with the intelligence services. He also worked in the US for a time, and had close ties with a fellow sleep-room practitioner there, Donald Ewen Cameron, who was funded by the CIA. Stock speculates on what Sargant 'could' or 'might' have worked on, including LSD trials at Porton Down with MI6. But in the absence of incriminating documents (many of which remain classified) the evidence is inconclusive and, compared with the sleep room chapters, the material looks tangential, however heatedly researched. To say that 'he was unquestionably the sort of psychiatrist whom Porton Down – and MI6 – might have turned to' doesn't really nail him as an opportunistic cold war stooge. And the sensationalist chapter heading 'She told me that Sargant killed … a patient', based on a secondhand, uncorroborated story, feels a bit cheap. Of the thousands of patients Sargant treated, at least five seem to have died during narcosis. Meanwhile, he exaggerated recovery rates and didn't count relapses. And the six women who speak out in this book are haunted by what he got up to without their knowledge. On the website of the Royal College of Physicians he's called 'the most important figure in postwar psychiatry … He gave his patients hope.' Those women, along with many former nurses and doctors, would beg to disagree. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock is published by The Bridge Street Press (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- The Guardian
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock review – haunting accounts of horrific medical abuse
A child of 14 is forced to walk on to a stage and strip to her underwear. Tiny and mute beneath the stacked rows of medical students, she is paraded for their benefit by a consultant psychiatrist some 44 years her senior. It is 1966 – the peak of Swinging 60s' hedonism, liberalism and youthful counterculture – but in a locked psychiatric ward in London's Royal Waterloo hospital, unspeakable violations are being inflicted upon patients. The perpetrator-in-chief, William Sargant, is the subject of thriller writer Jon Stock's first nonfiction book, The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal. One of the most notorious figures in British psychiatry, Sargant initially wished to be a physician. He pivoted to psychiatry after one of his earliest pieces of research met with a humiliating reception at the Royal College of Physicians, causing him to suffer a nervous breakdown and spend time in a psychiatric hospital himself. At this time – the 1930s – effective psychiatric treatments were virtually non-existent. Serious mental illness usually led to lifelong incarceration in an asylum. But the therapeutic nihilism of psychiatry was shifting towards optimism. Psychiatrists began experimenting with so-called 'heroic' therapies, such as putting patients into insulin comas or giving them electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to try to 'reset' their brains. Sargant firmly believed that a broken brain was no different to any other damaged organ or limb, and best fixed with aggressive physical treatment. Not for him the namby-pamby chitchat of Freud's 'sofa merchants' and their spurious talking cures. Rather, psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia could all be cured with excessive doses of drugs and electricity, or, if they failed, with surgical lobotomy. Sargant's patients were sequestered away behind locked doors on the top floor of the hospital. The most infamous part of his ward was a six-bedded area known as the Sleep Room. Here, the patients, nearly all of whom were female, were drugged into long-term stupors, being roused from their beds only to be fed, washed or given innumerable doses of ECT. A typical 'narcosis' treatment comprised three months of near-total unconsciousness, after which time the patient had often been reduced to a 'walking zombie' with permanent memory loss. The Sleep Room is peppered with haunting first-hand accounts of horrific treatment at the hands of William Sargant. The actor Celia Imrie, for example, the aforementioned child, was admitted under Sargant's care because she was close to death from anorexia nervosa. She recounts being forced to drink such large doses of chlorpromazine – the first antipsychotic - that she dribbled, shook uncontrollably and found her hair in clumps on her pillow. She was injected daily with enough insulin to make her drowsy, weak, sweaty and near comatose. She remembers other women around her having huge rubber plugs jammed between their teeth before the high-voltage electricity of ECT was sent through their temples, and their bodies 'shuddered and jerked' with the 'scent of burning hair and flesh'. Sometimes a patient would reappear on the ward with their head thickly bandaged, scarcely able to walk after being lobotomised. Amid the moans, screams and stale stench of sleep, Imrie recalls the nurses reporting her own resistance to the drugs to Sargant, to which he ominously responded: 'every dog has his breaking point'. To say that these stories are difficult to read is an understatement. Even as someone who learned, as a medical student, about the unspeakable mid-century vogue for lobotomy – permanently subduing patients by gouging out parts of their frontal lobes – some of the accounts made my skin crawl. It is to Stock's great credit that he places patient testimony centre stage, allowing several patients to tell their stories at length in their own, unedited words. Sargant himself is depicted as a sinister, all-powerful, 'simian' monster who ran his ward as a personal fiefdom in which he could pursue, unchecked, his conviction that effective treatments worked by physically erasing and reprogramming disturbed minds. A darker benefit of his Sleep Room was the absolute power it gave him over his charges. Once rendered unconscious, a patient could be subjected to treatments they might otherwise never have consented to, such as scores, or even hundreds, of doses of ECT. As Sargant himself put it: 'What is so valuable is that they generally have no memory about the actual length of the treatment or the number of ECT used.' Before long, colleagues had nicknamed him 'Bill the Brain Slicer' and 'Sargant the Shock'. His fascination with techniques for brainwashing led to speculation that he may have collaborated with the CIA's MKUltra programme into mind control, though no definitive proof of this is provided by Stock. At least five of Sargant's patients died during narcosis. The dangers of artificially prolonged sleep included deep vein thrombosis, pressure sores, infection and paralysis of the gut, all of which could be fatal. Though the disproportionate number of female patients under his care was not, in itself, evidence of misogyny, his treatment of particular individuals locates him firmly within that psychiatric tradition. He was perfectly willing, for example, to regard female independence as synonymous with madness and in need of social correction. One young woman was dispatched to Sargant by her wealthy businessman father after she fell in love with an 'unsuitable' man in the 1960s. Sargant 'helped' the situation by subjecting her to months of narcosis, ECT, antipsychotics, antidepressants and the 'truth drug', sodium amytal, after which she was successfully returned to her family with all memories of her boyfriend completely erased. Obedience had been achieved through physical obliteration of the mind. While there is no denying Sargant's lack of medical ethics, and his authoritarianism and reliance on dogma as opposed to clinical evidence, The Sleep Room can present him as almost cartoonishly villainous. With eyes 'like washed black pebbles', 'sadomasochistic stubbornness' and a 'prodigious enthusiasm for pill popping', he sweeps the wards like a demented demigod, barking orders to terrified staff and patients alike. This portrayal unhelpfully flattens very real and complicated issues over how best to treat serious mental illness. Patient consent – the bedrock of all good medical practice – cannot always be obtained when a patient's illness means they lack capacity to make decisions for themselves. Even today, with a modern emphasis on the rights of patients, the responsibilities of clinicians and the need for humanity in psychiatry, enforced treatment is sometimes the only way to prevent a severely unwell psychiatric patient harming or killing themselves. ECT, for example, although used much less frequently than in Sargant's day (and rightly so), can be a life-saving last resort, as in patients with catatonic depression. With more nuance and less condemnation, Stock could have interrogated more richly the complexities of how best to treat disabling and life-threatening psychiatric illness. Rachel Clarke's most recent book, The Story of a Heart (Abacus), has been shortlisted for the Women's prize for nonfiction 2025 The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock is published by the Bridge Street Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
