http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213498001185 >”The hypothesis advanced in this paper is that, in most cases, the fundamental damage inflicted by child sexual abuse is due to the child’s developing capacities for trust, intimacy, agency and sexuality, and that many of the mental health problems of adult life associated with histories of child sexual abuse are second-order effects.”
PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS, PROJECTS, AND PARTICIPANTS
Although the CIA insists that MKUltra-type experiments have been abandoned, some CIA observers say there is little reason to believe it does not continue today under a different set of acronyms. 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MKUltra was abandoned a “cover story.” >Victor L. Marchetti, Jr. (born December 23, 1929) is a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a prominent paleoconservative critic of the United States Intelligence Community and the Israel lobby in the United States.
Paul Robeson “Paul Jr. believed that his father’s health problems stemmed from attempts by CIA and MI5 to “neutralize” his father. He remembered that his father had had such fears prior to his prostate operation. He said that three doctors treating Robeson in London and New York had been CIA contractors, and that his father’s symptoms resulted from being “subjected to mind depatterning under MKULTRA”, a secret CIA program. Martin Duberman claimed that Robeson’s health breakdown was probably brought on by a combination of factors including extreme emotional and physical stress, bipolar depression, exhaustion and the beginning of circulatory and heart problems. “[E]ven without an organic predisposition and accumulated pressures of government harassment he might have been susceptible to a breakdown.””
Frank Olson He was drugged with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and nine days later plunged to his death from the window of a New York hotel room, in what some term a suicide and others allege was an assassination by the CIA
Harold Blauer …an American tennis player who died as a result of injections of 450 mg 3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine (code-named EA-1298) as part of Project MKULTRA, a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence.
A hospital worker has been suspended over claims that she threw a scalding cup of tea over a deaf mute patient.
The 38-year-old man was badly burned.
Police and bosses at Lennox Castle hospital, near Glasgow, are probing the allegation against Linda Watson, whose duties included cleaning and cooking on the ward. https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-61089925.html
Scotland on Sunday. September 21, 1997. by Paul Rowinski.
Row as doctored report spares trust’s blushes.
Experts claim edited highlights of official report into Lennox Castle hospital ignore condemnation of unacceptable conditions.
AN official report on conditions inside a Scottish psychiatric hospital was doctored to save a health trust’s embarassment.
The final report on Lennox Castle Hospital outside Glasgow was only mildly critical when it was published last month, but the original draft was infinitely more scathing. It condemned management, basic standards of care, and reported patients’ complaints of physical and mental abuse. Read the articles in full https://prowinski.wordpress.com/investigations/http://archive.li/XjeEo
Lennox Castle was opened on September 24, 1936, by Lord Provost John Stewart was named Lennox Castle Certified Institution for Mental Defectives. It was built between 1837 and 1841, in the square style of a Norman castle for John Lennox Kincaid by architect David Hamilton (1768 – 1843). The large, three storey red sandstone mansion has battlemented corner towers, a five story tower, and a large entrance porch to the north. During World War I, the castle was requisitioned for use as a military hospital. In 1927, the castle was purchased by Glasgow Corporation for £25,000, together with 494 ha (1,222 acres) of the Lennox Kincaid estate, as part of its plans to create a hospital for the mentally-ill. Built to the designs of Wylie, Shanks and Wylie, the new institution provided twenty dormitory blocks, with sixty beds in each, accommodating a total of twelve hundred patients, six hundred males and six hundred females in separate sections. Each section also had its own dining hall, kitchen, and workshop. There was also a new central administration block, medical block, visitors’ tea-room, assembly hall with cinema, and forty additional houses which served as married quarters for the staff. During the construction phase, the castle building was used to house the hospital’s patients. When the works were completed, the castle then became the nurses home. In 1936, Lennox Castle Certified Institution for Mental Defectives officially opened. During World War II, the castle was again requisitioned for use as a hospital, with patients being transferred to huts erected in the grounds – a temporary arrangement that lasted for some forty years. In 1942, the hospital allocated beds to maternity patients, as part of another temporary arrangement, this one lasting until 1964. On November 3, 1948, Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie was born at Lennoxtown – now better known as singer Lulu Kennedy-Cairns, OBE. In 1987, the original Lennox Castle building was no longer required by the hospital, and was vacated. A phased closure plan for the hospital began in the 1990s, including a planned resettlement of all the residents. Lennox Castle Hospital closed in April, 2002. By 2004, only the original Lennox Castle building remained on the site, all other hospital buildings having been demolished, and the site cleared. On May 11, 2006, the first ground was broken to mark the beginning of construction of Celtic Football Club’s new training facilities on the site, due for completion in the summer of 2007. Builders Mactaggart & Mickel have also been granted consent to regenerate the site of the former Lennox Castle Hospital with a substantial mix of 76 properties in their Campsie View development. Lennox Castle was severely damaged by fire on May 19, 2008. Part of the tower was destroyed, and movement of the stonework may lead to the demolition of the building. The cause of the fire is undetermined.http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/LennoxCastleHospitalhttp://archive.li/V6kmY
UNMARRIED mothers, wayward teenagers and Down’s Syndrome sufferers were just some of the people starved, drugged and abused at Lennox Castle in Lennoxtown.
This ward was home for many patient’s before the hospital’s closure AFTER 21 years in Lennox Castle, psychiatrists admitted they could find nothing wrong with Marie O’Connor. “I never belonged there, at least I knew that and that’s why I wanted away,” she says.
“Your head is all full of broken bottles once you realise that you don’t belong.”
Lennox Castle, in Lennoxtown, Dunbartonshire, was less of a mental institution than a warehouse, where those deemed society’s misfits were deposited.
Truants, unmarried mothers, wayward teenagers and children with learning difficulties, Down’s syndrome or mental illness all ended up there. They were starved, drugged, physically and emotionally abused and robbed of their humanity. Wednesday sees the launch of Lennox Castle Stories, a website that gathers artwork and thoughts from former patients and staff of what was Scotland’s largest mental hospital, which closed in 2002. The project is ongoing, a partnership between arts organisation Project Ability and supported living organisation C-Cange. Marie is sitting with Norman Telfer, a pensioner put into the institution when he was 14 because he skipped school. He left 45 years later. He remembers the cold ground under his bare feet from when he ran round the blocks of the hospital as punishment for failing to address a staff member as sir. The laps were punctuated by blows from a baseball bat. He says: “Lennox Castle was a wicked place to stay. I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone.”
Conditions were so bad that in 1986, the hospital’s medical director Dr Alasdair Sim broke ranks to say that he had never worked in “a worse pit” Norman with some of his artwork
He added: “I am sick to the stomach about the plight of these poor people.” Opened in 1936 to house 1200 people, 1700 were housed there at its peak in the 1970s. They were crammed 32 to a single-sex dormitory, with no right to privacy or individuality. Part of the castle grounds now house Celtic’s training ground, opened in 2007. Players come and go, oblivious to what went on just decades before. Marie regularly ran away. She was not the only one. Those who did were chased by dogs through the surrounding woods. When returned, they were locked up for six weeks, placed on a mattress on the floor, drugged and forbidden visitors. Punishments included being dressed in a knee-length white nightshirt and being forced to scrub the floors with a toothbrush. For misdemeanours, patients would be made to sit in a nightdress at a table in the corridor and eat bread and milk. Not that mealtimes were much better for the rest. Marie says: “The patients would sit with a plate and the staff would throw a pie at them, like it was feeding time at the zoo.” One relative of a patient said he was horrified when he saw bread being thrown at his brother, like they were feeding birds. In December 1989, a study in the British Medical Journal found a quarter of patients in Lennox Castle were grossly underweight and malnourished. Marie had been placed in the hospital when she went off the rails, drinking and smoking and staying out. She was diagnosed with a learning difficulty and her parents were assured Lennox Castle was the best place for her. Marie says: “I was no different from thousands of other teenagers. I knew there was nothing wrong with me and if I hadn’t been strong in my mind, I would have gone crazy.” Many were drugged and became institutionalised, making it almost impossible to break free. Psychiatrists eventually admitted Marie had no learning difficulties and she was released but her ordeal wasn’t quite over. Four years later, aged 39, she had a son, Joseph, to a former worker at the hospital. But she had to fight to keep him and social workers visited her up to three times a day until they recognised she was a fit mother. Marie with her son, Joseph
Her life now is a happy one but at 48, she is angry that she left behind her youth in Lennox Castle. “I should never have been there,” she says. “I’ll never forget what was done to us.” Norman was a teenage orphan when social workers placed him in the castle. When he came out, he was six years short of his pension. He remembers patients being treated far worse than prisoners. He says: “The corridor had to be scrubbed until it was shining or they would kick the bucket over and you would start again. “Beds had to be made to perfection or they would tip them up and make you start again.” The men and women were given £5 a week in pocket money, which would be docked if they stepped out of line. The patients had to work, some in the laundry or, as in Norman’s case, a piggery in nearby Kirkintilloch. He got up at 6.30am, polished the floor by his bed and tidied, was fed “wallpaper paste” porridge, got a bus at 8am and returned at 6pm to be handed a scrubber and soap to clean the floors and windows. Sometimes the patients were used as entertainment. Women have talked of having to strip naked while staff laughed at them and men were made to perform sexual acts on each other for the amusement of staff. Ian Doak, 58, was placed in Lennox Castle for seven years because his mother struggled to cope with him in his teenage years. Among his artwork is an animation of plasticine figurines seen gazing out of the castle’s windows. They have eyes but no mouth, a poignant symbol of their powerlessness. Eventually, Lennox Castle became more informal but although patients could leave, many had nowhere to go and no clue how to live without the routines laid out for them. A phased programme was devised in the 1990s to support them in the community.
Lennox Castle Hospital
Norman, Marie and Ian have all been successfully reintegrated and are part of the team of former patients leading the Lennox Castle Stories project. Dr Sam Smith, who was on the commissioning team which helped close the castle and move people out, says the project is important, “lest we forget”. She adds: “It is hard for people to imagine that in our recent history, people thought it appropriate for sections of the population to be kept isolated and away from their communities and loved ones, with no choices on how their lives should be run.” In 2001, Dr Smith founded C-Change, which advocates that everyone is entitled to the help needed to allow them to live in their own home. She says: “Lennox Castle was a community but not as we understand community. This community was built on power and control, adversity and strength, weakness and loss of self.” Her greatest pleasure has been to see the smothered spirits of the patients flourish on the outside. She says: “The same people are now mothers, fathers, workers who are part of the community and have so much to contribute. I saw them being transformed in a short space of time, just by being allowed to live in their own homes.
CLAIMS that scientific experiments were done on orphans and the deportation of children to Australia and Canada must be investigated by the Scottish inquiry into child abuse, survivors insisted last night. Allegations that Scottish institutions were involved in drug tests on vulnerable children should be fully explored by the Scottish Government inquiry, according to a group representing hundreds of survivors. ‘This government must always be on the side of victims of abuse’ The Scottish Government is currently deciding what form its historical abuse inquiry should take and how it intends to uncover the deeply disturbing crimes that have been committed against children in Scotland over the last few decades. Scotland on Sunday has seen a draft submission to ministers prepared by Incas (In Care Abuse Survivors Scotland) demanding that the government sets up an investigation with a wide remit looking at abuse allegations dating from the 1930s to the present. The document says the inquiry should “review medical experimentation that was carried out on vulnerable children and adults without consent”. http://www.scotsman.com/news/inquiry-urged-over-child-experiment-claims-1-3719003 http://archive.li/rQ82R
The allegations centre on at least four institutions where thousands of children are said to have been experimented upon in conditions described as “like something out of Auschwitz”.
It is alleged that Porton Down, the top secret military facility in Wiltshire, was involved in trialling drugs for use in the Cold War on youngsters who were regarded as “feeble-minded”.
One survivor told this newspaper he has obtained written and video evidence that he will pass to the public inquiry into historical abuse of children in care when it begins next year.
The man, now in his 50s, has been advised by lawyers to conceal his identity for his own safety until his full submission can be lodged at the inquiry announced by Scottish Education Secretary Angela Constance.
However, he was willing to divulge some of his intended testimony about the treatment he and others suffered.
He said: “Six and seven year olds were tied to racks and given electric shocks.
“I was incarcerated with orderlies armed with rubber coshes.
“We were imprisoned, experimented upon, lobotomies, you name it, they did it.
“I was there, I saw it with my own eyes.
We were imprisoned, experimented upon, lobotomies, you name it, they did it
A survivor “I was classed as a misfit, a mental oddity, made a ward of court.
“My mother was killed and I became an orphan, so they took it upon themselves to have me experimented upon.”
Lennox Castle Hospital, near Lennoxtown, East Dunbartonshire, is one of four Scottish institutions alleged to have been involved.
The witness believes there may have been as many as 3,500 children who were involved in the Porton Down testing programme over the years.
He said: “They were using orphans to experiment with drugs for the Cold War.
“The drug programme ran from 1948 to 1982.
“I believe this happened throughout the UK but I’m referring to Scotland.
“I have this evidence, on paper and on film, and I will hand it to the public inquiry.
“It was like something out of Auschwitz and people will be full of revulsion when they learn the state allowed this to happen.”
Lennox Castle Hospital, which closed in 2002 and is now the site of Celtic FC’s training ground, was home to children and adults with learning difficulties or conditions such as Down’s syndrome, as well as truants, unmarried mothers and wayward teenagers.
Some patients were sent there as children, often for the most trivial reasons, and ended up spending decades locked up.
Conditions improved after a series of damning reports and investigations, including a 1986 World in Action TV documentary which led to questions in the House of Commons.
Last night, Professor Ulf Schmidt of the University of Kent, Britain’s leading expert on human experimentation at Porton Down, said he had never heard of a drug trial programme involving orphans.
He added: “That is not to say these experiments didn’t happen, but I would be very cautious in dealing with these allegations.
“Some stories have appeared and reappeared over the past 50 years, including a similar one about drug testing and euthanasia involving elderly people that was eventually shown to be false.”
Six years ago hundreds of veterans who ‘volunteered’ to take part in tests at Porton Down were offered £3million in compensation.
They were exposed to nerve agents, such as sarin gas, and hallucinogens, such as LSD.
In the most infamous case, from 1953, Ronald Maddison took part in a trial of what he believed was a cold remedy, but died within an hour of having sarin dabbed on his arm.
Other Porton Down experiments included spraying bacteria over the south coast of England and dropping cancer-causing particles from planes.
And Gruinard Island in Wester Ross had to be sealed off for almost 50 years after it was contaminated with anthrax during the Second World War.
Porton Down is the home of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, an agency of the Ministry of Defence.
My opinion in PURPLE, Links in BLUE all else quoted from source
Before I start, I just need to make clear, I DO NOT necessarily agree with what is written or said within the following links… I do however find them all interesting! Hence the blog!
Dr Jean Turner, director of Scotland Patients Association, understands people’s concern.
14th Nov 2014
SOARING numbers of Scottish patients are receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – despite resisting or refusing the controversial treatment.
Newly released health figures showthat in 2013, a third of patients treated with ECT had not given permission for the therapy to be carried out – a rise from 25 per cent in 2010 and 10 per cent in 2006. According to the report, by the NHS Information Services Division, 372 patients received ECT in Scotland last year, with only 67 per cent giving their “informed consent”. Patients that refuse the treatment can be forcibly held down and anaesthetised for the procedure.
Politicians and health campaigners have called the statistics “disturbing,” but health authorities said treatment without consent is only given if it is in the best interests of the patient.
The treatment involves a small electric current being run through the brain with the aim of producing a seizure. It can be used by doctors to help treat severe depression, schizophrenia, bipolar and those at serious risk of suicide. It has been used by psychiatric doctors since the 1930s.
It is a risky treatment and more than half of patients suffer side-effects, most commonly headaches, nausea and muscle pain.
More severe side-effects include seizures, heart problems, memory loss and personality change. Last year, Aberdeen University researchers discovered ECT therapy works for severely depressed or mentally ill people by turning down an overactive connection between areas of the brain that control mood as well as thinking and concentration. They argued it was an effective tool in somepatientsbecause it stopped the impact that depression has on that person’s ability to enjoy life.
Families are unable to refuse or agree to the treatment on a patient’s behalf, as power of attorney is exempt under current mental health legislation.
The report explained: “If the patient is not capable of providing informed consent, treatment must be authorised by an independent psychiatric opinion.”
Alison McInnes, MSP and Liberal Democrat justice spokeswoman, said: “I find these figures disturbing. It is a hugely controversial treatment and I don’t think people should be given it without their full consent.
“The fact families are not able to refuse the treatment on the patient’s behalf is also something that needs to be looked at. “There are humanrightsissues that should be looked into, but unfortunately this is a very neglected issue and often these patients don’t have anyone speaking up for them.”
Scottish Conservative health spokesman Jackson Carlaw said: “Every situation will be different and there’s no doubt some of these patients will present extreme challenges to health professionals.
“But I think the public will look at these statistics and think we should be reducing the number of those who receive this care without granting the go-ahead.” scotsman
Every year Scottish psychiatrists produce a report on the use of ECT in Scotland. This year’s report, published earlier this month, reports on the use of ECT in Scotland during 2014. There has been very little change in the amount of ECT used since the previous year: the number of patients and courses were down slightly, but the total number of treatments up slightly. During 2014, 357 people received 434 courses of treatment, or 4,443 individual treatments.
As in previous years, women accounted for more than two-thirds of ECT patients. Just over one in three ECT patients did not consent to treatment but were deemed to lack capacity and given the treatment without their consent and sometimes in spite of the fact that they were refusing or resisting the treatment.
ECT patients in Scotland are getting older. In 2014 the mean age of consenting ECT patients was 58 years and of non-consenting patients 67, up from 57 and 64 respectively in 2013. About 24 per cent of ECT patients in 2014 were aged under 50, about 45 per cent aged between 50 and 70, and about 31 per cent aged over 70. If you are a woman over 80 in Scotland, you are more likely to get ECT than if you are a woman under 40. It is interesting to compare these figures to those from Texas, one of the few other places to produce annual statistics on ECT use. The rate of ECT use in Scotland and Texas is much the same; and guidelines, etc., produced by British and American psychiatrists would appear to show in theory a broad agreement about its use. But in practice ECT is being given to different groups of people: Scottish patients are older, and their age is increasing, and they are much less likely to consent to treatment than patients in Texas.
In Scotland unilateral ECT is seldom used: just one in 25 patients received a course of treatment consisting entirely of unilateral treatment.
Women with postnatal depression and anorexia passed through Royal Waterloo’s infamous Ward 5 They were drugged and subjected to horrendous levels of ECT Unluckiest were taken to the ‘Narcosis Room’ and put to sleep for weeks There are many horrors that Elizabeth Reed recalls from her time at London’s Royal Waterloo Hospital, but one in particular lingers in her mind. She describes a small, windowless room at the top of the red-brick Edwardian building, just lit by a night lamp on a nurse’s desk.
Six beds are jammed together. The deep breathing of women in a drug-induced sleep. The fetid stench of unwashed bodies.
‘It was like being buried alive,’ she says. ‘I was lying there in the dark, hour after hour, and couldn’t move. I wasn’t aware of my body, just my head in this darkness. You could hear people moving around and other people breathing and moaning.’
Disturbing footage of a patient having narcosis treatment
While Elizabeth is one of only a handful of women prepared to speak out, her story is not unique. Up to 500 women,suffering from conditions such as postnatal depression and anorexia, passed through the Royal Waterloo’s infamous Ward 5 before it shut 40 years ago.
Heavily drugged and subjected to horrendous levels of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and even lobotomies, the unluckiest were taken to the ‘Narcosis Room’, where they were put to sleep for weeks at a time.
Almost all teenage girls and women in their early 20s, they were treated as little more than guinea pigs by controversial psychiatrist William Sargant as he conducted a bizarre experiment to ‘repattern’ their brains and cure them of depression.
If all this sounds like the stuff of science-fiction horror, it is no coincidence a new psychological thriller, The Sleep Room, by clinical psychologist-turned-novelist F. R. Tallis, draws heavily on Sargant’s scandalous treatments.
But behind the fiction, questions remain about why the women of Ward 5 were subjected to such cruelty at an NHS hospital. Two of them, now in their 60s, spoke about their experiences to Femail this week.
Survivor: Elizabeth Reed is one of only a handful of women prepared to speak out
‘It’s so easy to dismiss us,’ says Elizabeth, a 63-year-old grandmother and former marketing director from London. ‘It was a long time ago and we were psychiatric patients. Many of us were left with pieces of our memory missing.
‘We were not drooling maniacs, but if you’ve been put in a sleep room, then your memories are not going to be clear. I lost huge chunk of my past.’
Officially, the Department of Health says it no longer has records of Sargant’s work at the Royal Waterloo, affiliated to London’s St Thomas’s Hospital. However, Elizabeth has a copy of her referral letter from January 1973, stamped with the ominous words: ‘Admit to Ward 5.’ Notes reveal she was given a ‘course of narcosis’.
She had been diagnosed with ‘obsessional neurosis’ and, by her own admission, was very ill — depression compounded by a difficult childhood.
‘But many other women I have spoken to say they were suffering from milder forms of depression and anxiety,’ she says. ‘The treatment was completely out of proportion.’
She was admitted to the Royal Waterloo in spring 1973 when she was 22 and engaged to be married. After arriving on the 22-bed Ward 5, she was sedated and underwent ECT — sometimes every other day.
‘I can remember the sound of the ECT machine being wheeled down the corridor and it being switched on and off in other rooms,’ she says.
‘It was so frightening. First of all, they injected you and you had an awful feeling of falling backwards into yourself. After ECT, you didn’t know who you were.’
Treatment: Heavily drugged and subjected to horrendous levels of electro-convulsive therapy and even lobotomies, the unluckiest were taken to the ‘Narcosis Room’, where they were put to sleep for weeks at a time
Eventually, Elizabeth was moved into the Narcosis Room beside Ward 5 and put into a drug-induced sleep.
‘I was awake, but couldn’t move or speak. It was torture, lying there for hours in the darkness’
Women there were occasionally woken to be taken to the toilet or to be fed. ‘We were like zombies,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I couldn’t walk. I had to be lifted. Afterwards, they put you back to sleep again.
‘The worst time was when I started not to be asleep. I was awake, but couldn’t move or speak. It was torture, lying there for hours in the darkness.’
Sargant, a founding member of St Thomas’s department of psychological medicine, who advocated the use of drugs to treat mental illness, operated his ‘sleep room’ for ten years until 1973. Four patients are known to have died there and yet no one stepped in to stop him.
A Cambridge medical graduate, obsessed with making a name for himself, he used high doses of tranquillisers and administered ECT up to twice a week on Ward 5 and every other day in the Narcosis Room.
At the heart of his treatment was his belief that the brain could be ‘repatterned’ to erase bad memories.
His fame – due to TV and radio interviews and best-selling books – ensured a steady stream of patients. He was friends with authors Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves.
Actress Celia Imrie was 14 when she was treated by Sargant on Ward 5 and given huge doses of drugs and ECT.
In her 2011 autobiography, The Happy Hoofer, she recalls sneaking out of bed to peer into the sleep room. She describes ‘dead-looking women lying on the floor on grey mattresses, silent in a kind of electrically induced twilight’.
But to this day, she is unsure if she had treatment in the sleep room because patients were drugged on the ward before being carried there.
Up to 500 women, suffering from conditions such as postnatal depression and anorexia, passed through the Royal Waterloo’s infamous Ward 5 before it shut 40 years ago
‘You went in asleep and you came out asleep. So maybe I was in the Narcosis Room. I could not possibly know,’ she says.
The secrecy surrounding Dr Sargant’s work has even led to claims he was being bankrolled by British intelligence and the CIA. He certainly had links to the military in World War II, working at Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence biological and chemical weapons research base.
But long before he died in 1988, Sargant destroyed all his records, which might have shed light on his sinister treatments.
‘It was impossible to rebel because you were constantly drugged. It was an unreal world and I was frightened and disorientated’
According to Hilary Jameson, who arrived at the Royal Waterloo in 1970, being admitted to Ward 5 was ‘like falling into the jaws of hell’.
As a 17-year-old A-level student in Oxford, she stopped eating after her parents’ divorce, though she insists she was far from anorexic.
‘People were talking about this marvellous man in London who could work miracles,’ says the 61-year-old, now a psychotherapist.
‘He was stern, a tall, cold man with very dark eyes. He didn’t speak to me. He just told my mother that if I wasn’t admitted then I’d die.’
Within half an hour of arriving, Hilary was injected with largactil – a powerful anti-psychotic drug. ‘It was impossible to rebel because you were constantly drugged,’ she says. ‘It was an unreal world and I was frightened and disorientated.’
Forced to eat huge amounts of carbohydrates so that she put on weight, Hilary had an ever-present threat of ‘narcosis’ hanging over her if she did not show signs of improvement. ‘We used to see the women in the sleep room being taken to the bathroom or to be fed and they were like ghosts. It made you feel very worried. I couldn’t make sense of what was going on around us.’
Hilary was forced to undergo ECT and displayed to medical students by Sargant as he taught them ‘how to deal with anorexic girls’.
Actress Celia Imrie was 14 when she was treated by Sargant on Ward 5 and given huge doses of drugs and ECT
‘He came across as highly respectable and authoritative,’ says Hilary. ‘But most patients in Ward 5 were just young girls who had problems with their families. It was barbaric.’
A leading psychiatric expert, Professor Malcolm Lader of King’s College, London, recalls how, as a junior doctor, Sargant showed him his sleep room several times in 1966.
‘To be frank, I was horrified by what I saw,’ he says.
‘The women were really cramped together. It was dark. It was like twilight. There was a terrible smell of unwashed bodies.
‘It was a fraught procedure to be sedated for that amount of time. Most importantly, there was no evidence that narcosis had any effect.
‘He was doling out drugs in large doses that were way above the recommended maximum dose. I resolved never to send anyone there.’
Professor Lader also sheds light on why no one stopped Sargant.
‘He was an over-powering, imperious figure. He spoke to me as if I must approve and I’m afraid I was too junior and too cowardly to say I thought the whole thing needed properly investigating.
‘They wouldn’t get away with it now because the law has changed. You have to show there is some logic and rationale to what you are doing.
‘But back then, he would not brook any opposition. He built up an empire filled with his acolytes.’
There were also rumours, says Professor Lader, that Sargant was untouchable because he was supported by British intelligence or the CIA. He was a frequent traveller to the U.S. and wrote in his autobiography of being entertained at the White House during one of his trips.
‘He was interested in brainwashing and so was the CIA. He may have been protected by his contacts.’
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ward 5 and Sargant’s sleep room closed when he retired in 1973 — the same year the CIA officially ended its top-secret mind-control experiments, codenamed Project MKUltra.
Whatever the truth, the young women from troubled families made perfect patients for Sargant’s experiments. F. R Tallis, who researched Sargant for his novel, says: ‘He cherry-picked them. They were easy targets — alienated from their families and unable to challenge his authority.’
‘There was no way back to my old life. I am angry about what I feel I missed out on. I’ve lost chunks of my memory’
Stephanie Simons, a 78-year-old Sussex artist, visited Sargant’s private rooms in London’s Harley Street in 1967 suffering from depression. She sheds a more sinister light on the bias towards women, recalling how he asked her to strip to the waist so he could examine her before administering anti-depressants.
‘He didn’t ask me to get dressed again,’ she says. ‘He told me to sit in a chair, naked to the waist, and talked to me for nearly an hour like that.
‘He was stern and professional, so I didn’t dare say anything.’ Today, Sargant’s reputation as a serious psychiatrist is in tatters, but there is still interest in his mind-control books.
Experiences: Behind the fiction, questions remain about why the women of Ward 5 were subjected to such cruelty at an NHS hospital
A copy of his brainwashing title Battle Of The Mind is said to have been found at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.
As for the Royal Waterloo, it closed as a hospital in 1976 and is now owned by an American university. Sargant’s sleep room is a student bedsit.
But for the women who fell into his hands, his legacy lives on. ‘He damaged us,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He destroyed our potential.’
After being discharged from Ward 5, she was unable to cope with her career in marketing and took jobs as a supermarket shelf-stacker and a cleaning lady.
‘It changed me. I lost interest in things,’ she says. ‘There was no way back to my old life. I am angry about what I feel I missed out on. I’ve lost chunks of my memory. And I can’t lay down new memories.’
Hilary adds: ‘It dulled me an awful lot. It knocked the spirit out of me. Taking so many drugs had a bad effect – by the time I was 26 I had ovarian cysts.’
In Australia and Canada, where Sargant’s methods were disastrously emulated, dozens of narcosis patients died. Those who survived were eventually compensated.
Survivors of the Royal Waterloo Hospital have been told by lawyers that the lack of paperwork and the amount of time that has passed makes it unlikely they will ever be similarly compensated. But above all, women like Elizabeth and Hilary want to be acknowledged. They want to know how Sargant can have been allowed to get away with such monstrous behaviour.
‘People talk about the sleep room as if it was something from another world,’ says Elizabeth. ‘But we’re still alive. We’re still here. We’re still suffering from what he and his colleagues did to us.’ SourceDailyMail
Child sex abuse victim aged in 20s allowed to kill herself after doctors decided post-traumatic stress was ‘incurable’11 May 2016
The woman was molested between the ages of five and 15 and had been suffering with post-traumatic stress since the abuse began
A woman in her twenties was allowed to take her own life after years of mental suffering following 10 years of sex abuse as a child
A victim of child sex abuse has been allowed toend her lifeafter doctors decided her mental disorder was incurable, it’s been reported.
The woman, in her twenties, was molested between the ages of five and 15 and had been suffering withpost-traumatic stresssince the abuse began.
She underwent ‘intensivetherapy‘ and though her psychological condition improved, doctors in the Netherlands decided to accept her request to die, theDaily Mailreported.
The woman, who has not been named, suffered from severeanorexia , chronic depression, suicidal mood swings, self-harming, hallucinations, obsessions and compulsions, according to papers released by the Dutch Euthanasia Commission.
Her condition had left her almost entirely bedridden and her psychiatrist said “there was no prospect or hope for her”, describing her suffering as “unbearable”.
A final medical report approved the “termination of life” order and the woman was given a lethal injection of drugs last year, the report said.
The papers reportedly concluded that the woman had been “totally competent” in making her decision and there was “no major depression or other mood disorder which affected her thinking”.
The woman, who has not been named, was given a lethal injection last year
The details of the case has been released by authorities in an apparent bid to justify euthanasia laws in the Netherlands.
But anti-euthanasia campaigners have hit out at the decision, including Labour MP Robert Flello, who said it suggests that being a victim of sexual abuse is punishable by death.
He told the Daily Mail: “It almost sends the message that if you are the victim of abuse, and as a result you get a mental illness, you are punished by being killed, that the punishment for the crime of being a victim is death.
“It serves to reinforce why any move towards legalising assisted suicide, or assisted dying, is so dangerous.”
The Netherlands introduced euthanasia laws in 2002 carrying out legal suicides with drugs – either injected for incapable patients or given to them for self-medication.
There were 5,561 euthanasia deaths in the country last year.
Anyone who feels they need to speak to the Samaritans can call 116 123 orvisit them online
Woman suffered from mental disorders after she was abused as a child
Condition included severe anorexia, chronic depression and hallucinations
Dutch woman, in her 20s, showed improvements after ‘intensive therapy’
She was given lethal injection after doctors said treatment was hopeless
01:17, 11 May 2016
A former victim of child sex abuse has ended her life under Dutch euthanasia laws.
A former victim of child sex abuse has ended her life under Dutch euthanasia laws because she could not live with her mental suffering.
The woman, in her twenties, was given a lethal injection after doctors and psychiatrists decided that her post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions were incurable.
It went ahead despite improvements in the woman’s psychological condition after ‘intensive therapy’ two years ago, and even though doctors in the Netherlands accept that a demand for death from a psychiatric patient may be no more than a cry for help.
The woman, who has not been named, began to suffer from mental disorders 15 years ago following sexual abuse, according to the papers released by the Dutch Euthanasia Commission. The timescale means she was abused between the ages of five and 15.
News of her death angered anti-euthanasia MPs and disability campaigners in Britain. One Labour MP said it meant sex abuse victims were now being punished with death.
It comes at a time of continued controversy over assisted dying in Britain. A steady flow of people from this country travel to die legally at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, and judges and the courts appear to be leaning in favour of making it legal to help someone to die.
Details of the Dutch case were released by authorities anxious to justify euthanasia laws and to demonstrate that mercy killings are carried out under full and correct medical supervision.
The papers said that the woman, who was killed last year, had post-traumatic stress disorder that was resistant to treatment. Her condition included severe anorexia, chronic depression and suicidal mood swings, tendencies to self-harm, hallucinations, obsessions and compulsions.
She also had physical difficulties and was almost entirely bedridden. Her psychiatrist said ‘there was no prospect or hope for her. The patient experienced her suffering as unbearable’.
The woman, in her twenties, was given a lethal injection after doctors and psychiatrists decided that her post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions were incurable. Pictured, a euthanasia clinic in The Hague. It is not known where the unnamed woman involved in the case took her own life
However, the papers also disclosed that two years before her death the woman’s doctors called for a second opinion, and on the advice of the new doctors she had an intensive course of trauma therapy. ‘This treatment was temporarily partially successful,’ the documents said.
HOW THE LAWS ON DYING DIFFER
Netherlands: Euthanasia laws were introduced in 2002. In 2015 there were 5,561 euthanasia deaths; only four were found by review officials to have been marred by ‘irregularities’.
Euthanasia is carried out with drugs, either injected for incapable patients, or provided for self-medication. Psychiatric patients can be put to death at their own request despite their mental illness.
Britain: MPs voted against an Assisted Dying Bill last year by 336 votes to 118. But the courts continue to lean in favour of laws permitting assisted dying.
Guidelines effectively mean that no one who helps someone to die will be prosecuted for assisting a suicide, a crime that carries a 14-year maximum sentence, unless they did so for financial reasons.
Treatment was abandoned last year after independent consultants were called in and said the case was hopeless.
The consultants also said that despite her ‘intolerable’ physical and mental suffering, chronic depression and mood swings, she was entirely competent to make the decision to take her own life.
The patient, they said, was ‘totally competent’ and there was ‘no major depression or other mood disorder which affected her thinking’. A final GP’s report approved the ‘termination of life’ order andthe woman was killed by an injection of lethal drugs, the report said.
In Britain yesterday her case was condemned as ‘horrendous’ by Labour MP Robert Flello.
He said: ‘It almost sends the message that if you are the victim of abuse, and as a result you get a mental illness, you are punished by being killed, that the punishment for the crime of being a victim is death.
‘It serves to reinforce why any move towards legalising assisted suicide, or assisted dying, is so dangerous.’
Tory MP Fiona Bruce, chairman of the Parliamentary All-Party Pro-Life Group, said: ‘This tragic situation shows why euthanasia should never be legalised in this country. What this woman needed, at a desperate point in her young life, was help and support to overcome her problems, not the option of euthanasia.’
Nikki Kenward, of the disability rights group Distant Voices, said: ‘It is both horrifying and worrying that mental health professionals could regard euthanasia in any form as an answer to the complex and deep wounds that result from sexual abuse.’ Sourcedailymail
I am not sure what to make of this, I am in two minds (That’s NOT “mental illness”)
On one hand, I think that if this is true, then the Doctors have committed murder. Perfectly healthy wee lassie. She didn’t have a mental illness, SHE WAS SEVERELY TRAUMATISED after a decade of horrific abuse, her mental state was PERFECTLY NORMAL & NATURAL that’s how the brain is meant to work. ANY HALFWAY DECENT PSYCHIATRIST KNOWS, what we’ve been told about mental health is a DOWNRIGHT FUKIN LIE. (links to back this up at bottom o page) Mental health MAKES MONEY. pharmaceutical companies are RAKING IT IN at the expense o people that need a wee bit help. They also used mental health system as a way to silence people. Especially VIPaedo Whistleblowers (any whistleblowers for that matter!) Its also human experimentation. These drugs haven’t been tested properly. They are WORSE than a placebo.
THEY MURDERED A WEE LASSIE (oh look mental health service have killed AGAIN)
BUT
It immediately occurred to me that this story may not be true. It is entirely possible this is psychological fukshittery. They may be trying to send a message to anyone that is mentally being put through the wringer, people who already are feeling suicidal. They MAY be sewing a wee seed in the heads of the (what they call) mentally ill.
They may as well have said…. If you are struggling mentally, HERE IS A WAY OUT. We will even help you on your way & make it VERY easy for you
The timing isnot exactly a hindrance to them either.. When half the world has a VIPaedo Child abuse Inquiry goin on.. Wouldn’t it be oh so convenient for them if some survivors were to take their own lives?? Plus we know they don’t gi a flyin toot about us, the lowly peasant scum. They desperately want to depopulate.
This “news report” certainly doesn’t harm their cause. Does it?
EITHER way.. I only have 1 thing to say..
If you are are struggling mentally, PLEASE don’t pay attention to this “news report” Talk to someone, a friend, relative, whoever. There are many great wee charities out there wi professionals to help. (Although I personally would steer clear o the govt ones & go for local charity) There are also survivor groups etc, people that are in a very similar position, Because no matter how alone and isolated you feel, you aren’t alone. Infact, I think most people have felt suicidal at one time or another. I did, a looooong time ago. Luckily I did not succeed!! Few years & several kids later, I am bloody grateful to be here. No matter how shitty life can be at times!!
Peter Gøtzsche argues that most prescriptions could be stopped without causing harm, but other experts strongly disagree
13.05.15 Sarah Boseley Health editor
Psychiatric drugs do more harm than good and the use of most antidepressants and dementia drugs could be virtually stopped without causing harm, an expert on clinical trials argues in a leading medical journal.
The views expressed in a British Medical Journal debate by Peter Gøtzsche, professor and director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark, are strongly opposed by many experts in mental health. However, others say the debate around the use of psychiatric drugs is important and acknowledge that there has been overuse of antipsychotics to quieten aggressive patients with dementia.
Gøtzsche says more than half a million people over the age of 65 die as a result of the use of psychiatric drugs every year in the western world. “Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal,” he writes.
He claims that trials carried out with funding from drug companies into the efficacy of psychiatric drugs have almost all been biased, because the patients involved have usually been on other medication first. They stop their drugs and often experience a withdrawal phase prior to starting the trial drug, which then appears to have a big benefit. He also claims that deaths from suicide in clinical trials are under-reported.
In trials of the modern antidepressants fluoxetine and venlafaxine, says Gøtzsche, it takes only a few extra days for depression in the placebo group – given dummy pills – to lift as much as in the group given the drugs. He argues that there is spontaneous remission of the disease over time.
Results from trials of schizophrenia drugs are also disappointing, he argues, and those for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) are uncertain. “The short-term relief seems to be replaced by long-term harms. Animal studies strongly suggest that these drugs can produce brain damage, which is probably the case for all psychotropic drugs,” he writes.
“Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm – by dropping all antidepressants, ADHD drugs and dementia drugs … and using only a fraction of the antipsychotics and benzodiazepines we currently use.
“This would lead to healthier and more long-lived populations. Because psychotropic drugs are immensely harmful when used long-term, they should almost exclusively be used in acute situations and always with a firm plan for tapering off, which can be difficult for many patients.”
In the BMJ discussion, which is a curtain-raiser for the Maudsley debate at King’s College London on Wednesday, Gøtzsche’s views are countered by Allan Young, a professor of mood disorders at King’s College London, and John Crace, a psychiatric patient and Guardian writer.
They argue that the research evidence shows the drugs do work and that they are just as beneficial and effective as medication for other complex conditions. In fact, they are badly needed, they say, because psychiatric conditions are the fifth leading cause of disability worldwide. Many psychiatric patients suffer from other physical conditions, they add, which are a bigger cause of early death than suicide.
They point out that the effects and safety of drugs are monitored and studied in the general population after the research trials have ended. “Nevertheless, many concerns have been expressed about psychiatric drugs and for some critics the onus often seems to be on the drug needing to prove innocence from causing harm rather than a balanced approach to evaluating the available evidence,” they write.
“Whether concerns are genuine or an expression of prejudice is not clear, but over time many concerns have been found to be overinflated.”
They cite the example of lithium, now thought to have less severe side-effects than once feared, and clozapine, an atypical antipsychotic. Clozapine was thought to have increased patients’ risk of death, but recent data has been reassuring, they say.
Dementia experts said use of antipsychotics for elderly patients who become difficult to handle had been a problem. “The dangers of long-term use of antipsychotic drugs for symptoms of aggression and agitation in dementia were highlighted in an Alzheimer’s Research UK-funded study in 2009 and since then moves have been made to reduce their use,” said Dr Simon Ridley, of Alzheimer’s Research UK.
But he and Dr Doug Brown, director of research and development at the Alzheimer’s Society, both argued that drugs such as Aricept, specifically developed for people with dementia, had some effect and were needed.
Dr Michael Bloomfield, academic clinical fellow in psychiatry at the Medical Research Council and University College London, said Gøtzsche’s view that most psychotropic drugs could be stopped without harm was not supported by the evidence.
Long-term use of schizophrenia drugs appeared to reduce early deaths, but he added: “In practice, there need to be regular reviews of treatments between a patient and their psychiatrist in order to continually weigh up the pros and cons of any treatment.” TheGuardian
Through rare historical and contemporary footage and interviews with more than 160 doctors, attorneys, educators, survivors and experts on the mental health industry and its abuses, this riveting documentary blazes the bright light of truth on the brutal pseudoscience and multi-billion dollar fraud that is psychiatry.
We think you have the right to know the cold, hard facts about psychiatry, its practitioners and the threat they pose to our children. Get the truth—watch this film.
Governments, insurance companies and private individuals pay billions of dollars each year to psychiatrists in pursuit of cures that psychiatrists admit do not exist. Psychiatry’s “therapies” have caused millions of deaths.
From its beginnings in the 1700s, using the practices of confining, restraining and isolating people with mental problems in institutions, psychiatrists have cashed in on human misery.
Redefining man as an animal without a soul, psychologists and psychiatrists thought man could be manipulated as easily as a dog could be trained to salivate at the sound of a bell.
CHAPTER 4: PSYCHIATRY: THE MEN BEHIND THE HOLOCAUSTWATCH HERE
The Nazis killed millions. Their justification was psychiatry and psychology’s theory of eugenics—that certain people were inferior and should be exterminated and their kind bred out of the race. These architects of the Holocaust were never brought to justice.
From apartheid in South Africa to the Ku Klux Klan and experiments on minorities in the United States, the most brutal racists were inspired by eugenics which justified injustice, inhumanity and denial of human dignity to millions.
Men fight and die for the right to speak and act freely. Psychiatry conspired with those in power in Communist Russia to strip the rights of political dissidents and to define their “search for justice” as a mental disorder to justify their imprisonment.
CHAPTER 7: BRAIN DAMAGE: PSYCHIATRY’S MIRACLE CUREWATCH HERE
If an ice pick were accidentally shoved behind someone’s eyeballs, or they were jolted by 120 to 240 volts, leaving them convulsing and barely breathing, they would be rushed to a hospital. To a psychiatrist, these acts are “treatment.”
Psychiatric drugs are not designed to cure, but to suppress symptoms and physically damage the person taking them. Claims of safety and efficacy are made with each new “miracle pill”; its dangers only later exposed. Psychiatric drugs kill.
CHAPTER 9: PSYCHIATRIC COERCION & RESTRAINTWATCH HERE
Today, psychiatrists’ use of physical and chemical restraints in mental institutions is a very lucrative procedure. Admitting that death is often inevitable from such procedures, psychiatrists literally get away with murder.
Working in a “profession” made up of people who commit rape, extortion and fraud, many psychiatrists have received prison sentences and civil fines. Minimally, ten percent of psychiatrists sexually assault their patients, with one out of every twenty victims a minor.
Psychiatrists charge huge sums of money to insurance companies, governments and anyone else who will pay to “treat” made-up mental disorders.
CHAPTER 12: KIDS IN PSYCHIATRY’S CROSS HAIRSWATCH HERE
Millions of children are given psychiatric labels for normal childhood behavior and prescribed psychiatric drugs that drive them to commit violent acts and suicide.
CHAPTER 13: PSYCHIATRY, HIDDEN INFLUENCEWATCH HERE
Psychiatry has pushed its agenda of control, power and domination onto an unsuspecting society for over sixty years, infesting the fields of law enforcement, education, medicine, politics and many others.
CHAPTER 14: CCHR RESTORING HUMAN RIGHTS & DIGNITY TO MENTAL HEALTH WATCH HERE
Psychiatrists act above the law—locking people up with no trial, stripping them of their human rights while enforcing unwanted treatments. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has exposed, fought and won against psychiatry’s violations for over thirty-six years.
(Ssshh! don’t tell anyone, brought a wee tear to my eye!)
Psychiatric Damage
Anyone whose mother, wife, sister or father, brother, son, child or friend has been killed or damaged by psychiatric “treatment”, please write full particulars and any documentary evidence to CCHR.
{So, we are NOT FAT.That’s because we are being bled dry! WE ARE HAVIN TO RELY ON FOODBANKS SO WE CAN EAT
1 in 4 Scots kids live BELOW EU POVERTY LINE
& happy? Well, after reading that, I’m no very fukin happy right now!}
DAY 2
3 x COULD DO BETTER
1 x PASS
{W O W… THATS ABYSMAL!}
DAY 3
3 x PASS
1 x COULD DO BETTER
1 x FAIL
{WELL, THAT IS BETTER, BUT ITS STILL NO GREAT IS IT?& AS FOR POLICE SCOTLAND, THEY MURDERED A MAN IN COLD BLOOD &ARE STILL COVERING IT UP (SHEKU BAYOH) & THEY LEFT LAMARA BELLFOR 3 DAYS DYING AT SIDE O ROAD DESPITE NUMEROUS CALLS FROMPUBLIC!!I WOULD CALL THAT A FAIL..}
“I firmly believe is the result of having a government that always puts Scotland first”
I DON’T GIVE A FLYING TOOT WHAT YOU FIRMLY BELIEVE SWEETHEART. YOU CAN BELIEVE THE MOON IS MADE OUTTA MARSHMALLOWS & FIZZ WIZZ FOR ALL I CARE. YOUR BELIEFS DO NOT ALTERED THE FACTS.
“Voters know our record is a good one, which is why they give us such ringing endorsements”
HAS SHE READ THE REPORT? WHERE IS THIS GOOD RECORD?AS FOR US BEING MORE POLITICALLY AWARE SINCE INDY REF…
A. THAT’S CAUSE WE WERE ROYALLY SHAFTED & SNP HAVE DONE FUK ALL ABOUT IT SO, WE HAVE HAD TO BE MORE AWARE.
B. YOU CANNY TAKE THE CREDIT FOR US NO BEING THICK AS MINCE!!
“Police number have reached a record high”
AYE, WE LIVE IN A POLICED STATE RIGHT ENOUGH!
& HAVE YOU MET ANY O POLICE SCOTLAND?THOSE WITH ANY BRAIN CELLS ARE CORRUPT &THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE REST… I’M SURPRISED U HAVEN’T INTRODUCED VELCRO INSTEAD OF BUTTONS ON THEIR UNIFORMS.
“Crime is at an all time low”
SAYS WHO? POLICE SCOTLAND? THE SAME POLICE SCOTLAND THAT ADMITS FALSIFYING RECORDS? AYE??
OUR STEEL INDUSTRY IS GONE
OUR FISHING INDUSTRY GONE
FOODBANK USAGE UP
HOMELESS-NESS UP
POLICE SCOTLAND ARE FREE TO MURDER PEOPLE
CHIEF OF POLICE IS AN EX SDS & SPECIAL BRANCH FAILURE!
The researchers described an eight-year-old epileptic boy as “unlovable” before the trials began but after around 1,100 doses of a powerful tranquilizer he became “almost likable”.
Such medical experimentation will form part of the SNP’s child abuse inquiry, with chair Susan O’Brien QC to launch the call for evidence in Glasgow this week.
The group of nine boys and three girls were subjected to testing while in the care of the state at Lennox Castle Hospital, near Lennoxtown, Stirlingshire in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The children – as well as four young women – were all described as “mentally handicapped”, although in two patients this was “of the non-specific genetic type”.
This unlovable 8-year-old epileptic boy ‘held a reign of terror’ of bites, slaps, kicks and nips over his unfortunate fellow patients
One case history
They were given droperidol, a tranquiliser which was banned as an antipsychotic in Britain and America in 2001 after being linked to heart problems and a number of deaths.
It is still licenced for use in hospitals to prevent nausea in post-operative patients, although the maximum dose for under-18s is 1.25mg.
The youngsters in Lennox Castle were given up to 60mg a day for up to 19 months, with the average dose 20mg a day.
Each patient was also given a cocktail of other drugs to counter the “extrapyramidal side-effects” caused by droperidol – such as tremors, hallucinations, hyperactivity and anxiety.
Two patients suffered so severely they had to be removed from the study, which was published in the Journal of International Medical Research in 1980.
One case history states:
“This unlovable 8-year-old epileptic boy ‘held a reign of terror’ of bites, slaps, kicks and nips over his unfortunate fellow patients. Previous attempts to control his aggression with thioridazine, pericyazine and haloperidol had been unsuccessful.
“For the last 18 months he has been maintained on a regime of droperidol (10 mg b.d. [twice daily]), benzhexol (2 mg b.d.) and phenytoin (90 mg b.d.) and has since not bitten a single person.
“Furthermore, his hold upon the ward has ceased and he himself has been the victim of other patients’ aggression. He is now described as being ‘almost likeable’.”
A nine-year-old epileptic boy was described as “very overactive, moody and bad tempered” before the droperidol regime transformed him into “the most popular child in the ward”.
Two 10-year-old boys who were prone to self-injury – one with Cornelia de Lange syndrome and one with hyperkinesis – also showed improvement.
The study concludes: “Oral droperidol thus appears to offer an advantage over conventional treatments for the management of behavioural disorders in the mentally handicapped.”
However, Gabrielle Shaw, CEO of National Association for People Abused in Childhood, said yesterday: “This is a grotesque example of how some of the most vulnerable children in society have been abused when they should have been protected. To hear an eight year old boy being described as ‘unlovable’ is de-humanising and unacceptable. Even more extraordinary is how relatively recent this was.”
Droperidol was withdrawn from sale in the UK following a review by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
An MHRA spokeswoman said the review was instigated “following concerns about its effect on heart rhythm (QT prolongation) particularly following long term use of high doses. This review resulted in the manufacturer voluntarily withdrawing the product from the market in 2001.
“The droperidol product that is used as an anti-emetic (severe post-operative nausea and vomiting) is used at much lower doses and for short periods of time.”
Alan Draper, parliamentary liaison officer for the In Care Abuse Survivors group, which represents survivors north of the Border, said the study should form part of the forthcoming inquiry.
He added: “These children were simply given to doctors to experiment on and nobody was looking out for their interests. They had carte blanche to do as they wished. Who had responsibility for the children, was it the local authorities, the health boards or the government? There will be a number of these survivors who will come forward to the inquiry. This experimentation may have been done in good faith but who was protecting the best interests of the child? These were living human beings being experimented on because they had been abandoned by their families and the state just let it happen.”
Lennox Castle Hospital was opened in 1936 and was home to thousands of mentally handicapped patients before it finally closed its doors in 2002.
A spokeswoman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, which has inherited the hospital records, said the health board “would fully co-operate with any official enquiry”.Found Here
Firefighters are battling a “well developed” blaze at a former Lanarkshire hospital.
Crews were called to the site of the old Hartwood Hospital, near Shotts, North Lanarkshire, at around 4.30pm on Sunday.
Seven fire engines are attending the scene but have been unable to enter the derelict building due to safety concerns.
No one has been injured in the fire.
A spokesman for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) said: “Firefighters arrived to find a well developed fire within a large derelict building.
“Firefighters were unable to conduct internal firefighting operations due to the unsafe condition of the building. Crews are conducting external firefighting operations using an aerial rescue pump and main jets.
“There are no reports of injuries and Police Scotland officers are in attendance to control traffic.”
The former psychiatric hospital closed in the late 1990s. found here
Blaze: People said they could see large flames coming from the former hospital.
Firefighters are tackling a blaze at a derelict psychiatric hospital.
Fire crews attended the incident at the former Hartwood Hospital near Shotts after receiving reports at 4.34pm on Sunday.
Crews are said to have found a “well developed fire” when they arrived.
Firefighters were unable to tackle the blaze from the inside of the building due its unsafe condition.
This meant they had to focus their efforts on tackling the fire from the outside with the use of an aerial rescue pump and main jets.
Police Scotland officers were in attendance to control traffic.
The fire service said there are no reports of injuries.
Members of the public have shared photos of the blaze on social media. found here
So, YET ANOTHER fire in an EMPTY, Psychiatric Hospital in Scotland… If this carries on, people are gonna start thinking there is something dodgy going on. Like, I d’no, they are being deliberately set ablaze in order to DESTROY ANY EVIDENCE?
Studies in Intelligence, December 2009 [97 Pages, 1.65MB] – Contents of this volume include the following topics, articles, comments and reviews: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: Operation INFEKTION Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign; The Origins of Modern Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance – Military Intelligence at the Front, 1914-18 25; INTELLIGENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW: An Experiment in Collaboration on an Intelligence Problem – Developing STORM, a Methodology for Evaluating Transit Routes of Transnational Terrorists and Criminals; INTELLIGENCE IN PUBLIC MEDIA: The James Angleton Phenomenon – Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors”: Wandering in the Angletonian Wilderness; On the Web: Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions: James Angleton and CIA Counterintelligence; The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One; Vietnam Declassified: CIA and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam; OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II; The Secret War in El Paso: Mexico Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906-1920; The Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf; Comment – In Defense of John Honeyman (and George Washington); Books, Film, and Television Reviewed in Studies in Intelligence, 2009.
Studies in Intelligence, March 2010 [76 Pages, 3.28MB] – The Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was founded in 1974 in response to Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger’s desire to create within CIA an organization that could “think through the functions of intelligence and bring the best intellects available to bear on intelligence problems.” The center, comprising professional historians and experienced practitioners, attempts to document lessons learned from past activities, to explore the needs and expectations of intelligence consumers, and to stimulate serious debate about current and future intelligence challenges. To carry out this mission, CSI publishes Studies in Intelligence, as well as numerous books and monographs addressing historical, operational, doctrinal and theoretical aspects of the intelligence profession. It also administers the CIA Museum and maintains the Agency’s Historical Intelligence Collection of published literature on intelligence.
ALPHA Regarded as “general” or regular programming within the base control personality; characterized by extremely pronounced memory retention, along with substantially increased physical strength and visual acuity. Alpha programming is accomplished through deliberately subdividing the victims personality which, in essence, causes a left brain-right brain division, allowing for a programmed union of L and R through neuron pathway stimulation.
BETA Referred to as “sexual” programming. This programming eliminates all learned moral convictions and stimulates the primitive sexual instinct, devoid of inhibitions. “cat” alters may come out at this level.
DELTA This is known as “killer” programming, originally developed for training special agents or elite soldiers (i.e. Delta Force, First Earth Battalion, Mossad, etc.) in covert operations. Optimal adrenal output and controlled aggression is evident. Subjects are devoid of fear; very systematic in carrying out their assignment. Self-destruct or suicide instructions are layered in at this level.
THETA considered to the “psychic” programming. Bloodliners (those coming from multi-generational Satanic families) were determined to exhibit a greater propensity for having telepathic abilities than did non-bloodliners. Due to its evident limitations, however, various forms of electronic mind control systems were developed and introduced, namely, bio-medical human telemetry devices (brain implants), directed-energy lasers using microwaves and/or electromagnetics. It is reported these are used in conjunction with highly-advanced computers and sophisticated satellite tracking systems.
OMEGA A “self-destruct” form of programming, also known as “Code Green.” The corresponding behaviors include suicidal tendencies and/or self-mutilation. This program is generally activated when the victim/survivor begins therapy or interrogation and too much memory is being recovered.
GAMMA Another form of system protection is through “deception” programming, which elicits misinformation and misdirection. This level is intertwined with demonology and tends to regenerate itself at a later time if inappropriately deactivated.
Skye McAlpine. Alistair McAlpine, Lord McAlpine, was the Tory Party Treasurer while Thatcher was prime Minister.
Senior Tory ‘wrongly linked’ to child abuse
– Telegraph.co.uk
– The Guardian
The Guardian and Telegraph have named Lord Alistair McAlpine – as a person ‘wrongly linked’ to child abuse.
A local councillor, Keith Gregory, who was a victim of abuse at Bryn Estyn, told the Guardian he did not believe Lord Alistair McAlpine was the person involved.
Keith Gregory said he thought a different member of the McAlpine family who lived locally may have been mistaken for Lord McAlpine.
Steven Messham told the Waterhouse inquiry his abuser was dead, whereas Lord McAlpine is alive.
When a Times reporter put Lord McAlpine’s name to Steven Messham in 1996, Steven said his abuser was called Tom.
Lord McAlpine
When a young girl wrote to Margaret Thatcher to say that her parents were divorcing, Margaret Thatcher offered to meet the girl herself.
In the letter, written on 1 July 1981, Mrs Thatcher invited the girl to London to meet her and to see Parliament.
The girl’s identity is not revealed and it is not known whether she accepted Mrs Thatcher’s offer.
Sir Jimmy Savile, close friend of Margaret Thatcher. Anonymous writes:
“Savile had a hideaway home in Scotland.
“Now 25 years back Savile appeared at the school sports day to give out trophies.
“It later transpired he abused two children – one a girl aged 13 and my cousin who was a boy aged 11.
“The school denied both kids out of hand and said they would sue if it was said again.
“My uncle phoned Childline several times and was given the runaround.
“My uncle went to the local paper and was turned away.
“The wednesday after he was coming home from work when two men beat him badly and told him keep his mouth shut.”
Sir Jimmy Savile with Childline’s Esther Rantzen.
There were many gay people in Thatcher’s cabinet.
“She appointed gay ministers including the tragic Earl of Avon (son of ex-Prime Minister Anthony Eden) who was one of the earliest victims of Aids.”
Lord Alistair McAlpine.
Moshe Solomons writes:
“Savile … gave a beautiful gift to my synagogue; it was a hand made wall tapestry with a Star of David; this silk wall hanging had real gold and silver threads, this would not have been a cheap gift, he was not a regular visitor but his close freind Lord Goodman was.”
Margaret Thatcher had many Jewish links.
Margaret Thatcher appointed Victor Rothschild as her unofficial security adviser.
In 1994, Roland Perry, in his bookThe Fifth Man, claimed that Victor Rothschild may have helped Israel to gain important nuclear secrets.
Lord Victor Rothschild is reported to have been the chief figure in the ‘Cambridge’ Soviet spy ring, which included Blunt, Burgess and Philby.
The Bryn Estyn home, one of the children’s homes in Wrexham in North Wales, which were the scene of child abuse. “The Scallywag magazine alleged that the peer referred to in the article is Lord M….. of the governing Conservative Party.”
Jonathan Freedland, on 31 10 2003, wrote in The Guardian:
Margaret Thatcher had a Cabinet “which included no fewer than five Jews: Lord (David) Young, Malcolm Rifkind, Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson and Keith Joseph.
“More old Estonians than old Etonians,” joked the aged Harold Macmillan.
From Jewish tribal review: “As half of 1% of the British population, Jews in the Margaret Thatcher era held 5 of 20 cabinet positions.
“Her high office Jewish contingent included Nigel Lawson, Leon Brittan (Trade and Industry Secretary), David Young (Minister without portfolio, Malcolm Rifkind (Foreign Secretary), and Keith Joseph…
“I was born to a Lithuanian father and am of Jewish descent,” noted Minister David Young.
“My only brother, Stewart, is chairman of the BBC. My father used to say, ‘One son deputy chairman of the government, another chairman of the BBC — that’s not bad for immigrants.”
Claire McAlpine. Claire McAlpine was 15 when she died. She left behind a diary naming many famous people who had abused her. Jimmy Savile was interviewed by a newspaper about the death of Claire McAlpine.
“Foreign Office officials were so concerned about Margaret Thatcher’s pro-Israeli sympathies when she became Tory leader they wanted her to break off links with local Jewish groups, according to newly-released official papers.
“Files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, under the 30 year rule reveal that diplomats feared she would be seen by Arab countries as a ‘prisoner of the Zionists’.
“One official even suggested that she should give up her Finchley parliamentary seat in north London – with its large Jewish community – for somewhere more palatable to Arab opinion.
“The issue of Thatcher’s membership of groups such as the Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley and Conservative Friends of Israel was raised during a visit by shadow foreign secretary Lord Carrington to Jordan in 1975.”
Bryn Alyn children’s home in North Wales. “MI5 did overwatch the Welsh home and MI5 was run by Rothschild and Mossad.”
Scallywag Magazine alleged that MI5 used to take foreign diplomats to Bryn Estyn and other children’s homes in the North Wales, give them boys to ‘play’ with, and secretly film them as they buggered, abused and tortured boys, and then keep the tapes as evidence.
Over a dozen victims who complained of abuse by the paedophile ring ‘have met suspicious deaths’.”
Reportedly, “The magazine alleged that the peer referred to in the article is Lord ……
“Another regular participant in the activities at Bryn Clwyd was alleged by Scallywag to be ……. for years a leading mover and shaker in successive Conservative administrations.
“Scallywag alleged that ….. was a sadist with an abnormally large penis, who was particularly violent and without mercy in his treatmentof the boys. The magazine alleged that on regular occasions his victims would end up in casualty wards. He was a leading political fixer and adviser to Margaret Thatcher….
“The former children connected with this empire of evil who died in mysterious circumstances may have been murdered by the British security services, the price of their silence their lives.”
“Policemen, social workers and prominent public figures have been accused of belonging to a paedophile ring which indulged in a relentless campaign of physical and sexual abuse in children’s homes in North Wales.
“The names of the alleged members of the ring have been given by witnesses in public sessions of the North Wales Child Abuse Tribunal, but they have been suppressed by the tribunal’s chairman, Sir Ronald Waterhouse QC, who has threatened the media with High Court proceedings if they print them.
“The Guardian today publishes for the first time detailed evidence about the alleged ring, which is said to have been based in Wrexham, and to have infiltrated local children’s homes over a 20 year period.
“Witnesses claim that members of the ring used their connections with police and social services to conceal their activities. All of the accused have denied the allegations.
“Those named to the tribunal include:
“A man who bears the same surname as a prominent Conservative supporter.
“Two witnesses have told the tribunal of a rich and powerful man who belonged to the alleged ring…”
“Jonathan Evans, Director General of MI5, went to Sevenoaks School. He was born in 1958 which would put him there around 1970-1977 – the same time as headmaster Alan Tammadge and the other names posted. Does the head of our security services recall paedophiles operating in Sevenoaks School while he was there?”
Anonymous writes:
“Sevenoaks School in Kent was another place where paedophiles abused the boys.
“Strange tales include the mysterious disappearance of the German chemistry teacher Willy Bleyberg in Jugoslavia () and the unsolved sexual murder of gay Irish housemaster Casey McCann in Brazil () and the physics and english teachers who left to live their own pupils.
“Such was life at a premium public school in the seventies, where many of the people your blog names were regular visitors.”
Anonymous writes: Anonymous has left a new comment on your post “THATCHER’S PEOPLE“:
“In the early seventies runaway children and teenagers from the provinces would arrive at a main London rail station, where, waiting to talk to them as they came off the trains, was a well dressed man associated with the Krays.
“The Krays would take the boys and put them up in a communal house and encouraged to become rent boys.
“Transvestite singer Boy George has spoken of this time in his life and Peter Tatchell was threatened with exposure when he wanted to stand for Parliament.
“Jimmy Saville was a regular visitor to the house in Norfolk and there was one in Suffolk too. “MI5 did overwatch the Welsh home and MI5 were run by Rothschild and Mossad.
“Rothschild’s group the Apostles were sexual degenerates (Their song which you still hear today at gay meetings was “little boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday “) and this allowed Sir Anthony Blunt to blackmail many people for Rothschild and the Jews that ran Russia.”
Jason Smith, aged 14, who was killed by a child abuse gang in 1985. Jason is believed to have lived in Islington council’s Conewood Street children’s home. (Jersey child abuse link to Islington, London) Ronald Penny writes:
“I remember the Krays’ boys’ house in Norfolk.
“They would persuade people to try out the boys then blackmail them, exactly as in a recent comment like Anthony Blunt.
“The racing driver D…. ….. was a regular to visit the boys.
“The Krays charged from £20 – a fair sum back then.
“The krays were protected by several police such as Superintendent Coppen who lived in Walthamstow near the Krays.”
Derek Slade – left. ..
SPOOKS AND SPARES; GIRL MODELS AND RENT BOYS
Judy Garland and the UK’s Kray Twins (). Judy Garland was said to be a victim of brainwashing by the spooks.
The spooks and the police protect child abuse rings?
The UK’s spooky Tavistock Institute ‘researches mind control’ ()and the Tavistock strategy ‘includes the use of drugs’. ()
“I used to model for Harley Street specialists… starting in 1958 as a 12 year-old.“The police, led by top-cops Joe Simpson and Shirley Becke, used to supply Profs Emanuel Miller and Richard Asher with the drugs they wanted to study, and used me as a guinea-pig!
“There would be several off-duty coppers present to see the result and work out how to deal with an acid-head.”
Anon comments on the link between brainwashing and the following lyrics:‘let me take you DOWN (Negative trigger) cos you’re going to, (instruction) strawberry fields (fantasy) NOTHING IS REAL. (disasociation)
Joseph Simpson supplied the drugs?Sir Joseph Simpson (1909 – 1968) was the head of the London Metropolitan Police, from 1958 to 1968.Simpson apparently turned a blind eye to the crimes of the major London gangsters known as the Kray Twins.(http://www.personenencyclopedie.info…bertjohngraham)”Even when they turned to murder, there was no attempt to catch them.”()Some very powerful and spooky people were at work.
Christine Keeler and the Kray Twins(http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/tag/gay/page/2/) The Christine Keeler-Profumo scandal helped Harold Wilson, friend of Israel, to become UK prime minister.The Krays reportedly ran a child abuse ring linked to top people.The Krays liked boys and so did a lot of the top people.The Krays were Jewish and gay.Among the characters in this saga were:Lord Boothby, who was very close to Winston Churchill, and who liked masochistic sex with rent boys.Boothby’s close pal Tom Driberg MP, who was a rent-boy loving spook with links to Russia and hence Israel.Driberg’s very close friend Harold Wilson, whose chief friends were businessmen with links to Israel.Jewish businessman Harold Kissin.Influential Jewish lawyer Arnold Goodman.The ‘Jewish Establishment’ apparently wanted to protect Driberg, among others.(Notorious : The Immortal Legend Of The Kray Twins, by John Pearson /)
The spooks see to it they have people in all places, areas, influences, races, creeds…
They bred ‘spares’ for this, especially amongst the poor…
When radio and film and tv came along, the spares who showed a talent (and not a few who didn’t, but had the right ‘look’) were sponsored to succeed.
I saw this with my own eyes in 50’s-60’s showbiz. It was more rife in American circles, probably because the big money there…
I know of one Brit pop-star who was a spare, knew him as a kid back home…
I knew Brian Epstein in ’61-’62, in London, and met 2 other pop-stars (to-be) one who ‘virtually’ admitted to me he was a spare…
The other was more reticent but didn’t say ‘no’…
He was murdered later on…
Ask yourself this, if there was a major crisis, a REAL one, who would you rather listen to, a politician or a pop-star…
That’s when the spare earns his money….
The spooky Tom Driberg (left) with the Russian spy Guy Burgess, friend of Lord Ted Rothschild. ()
Tom Driberg was the “Labour MP with a penchant for cottaging, rent boys and spying (on his own party for MI5), who managed to escape exposure on all counts.
“The policemen used to escort him from the loos of the Albert Embankment if there was an important vote going on in Parliament.” (The Pink Paper, 7th. November, 1997, issue 506, page 15.)
In Tom Driberg, His Life and Indiscretions, Francis Wheen asks a question about Driberg:
“Can the man who in the 1920s was anointed by Aleister Crowley to succeed him as the Great Beast be the man who in the 1960s tried to persuade Mick Jagger to become a Labour MP?”
Wheen refers to a lunch with Crowley at the Eiffel Tower restaurant; this was when Driberg became Crowley’s heir.
Maxwell Knight recruited Driberg as an agent for MI5.
In 1941 the communist Anthony Blunt arranged for Driberg to be expelled from the Communist Party.
1940 Lord Ted Rothschild (above) suggested that communist Anthony Blunt should be invited to join the UK secret service. He also rented a house to his communist friend Guy Burgess. Rothschild worked with communist Kim Philby at the MI6 offices established at the Rothschild family mansion in Paris.(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSrothschild.htm). In the book ‘The Fifth Man’, Roland Perry puts the case that Ted Rothschild was a major spy for Russia and Israel.
“His was a glorious indulgent life that included a highly public wedding in 1951 just a few years after he had concluded an extravagant series of affairs with soldiers, sailors and airmen.”
“By far the best story (and one which may even be true) has him fellating Labour party icon Nye Bevan after a bibulous lunch…
“Although Driberg avoided any public scandal during his lifetime, it appears that the Kremlin was able to blackmail him into becoming a KGB agent – codename Lepage – after one blowjob too many in Moscow.
Driberg went as a day-boy to a local school called the Grange. It was here at the age of eleven where he began sexual experimentation with other boys…
In the autumn of 1935 he gave two unemployed miners a place with him in his bed, but when his hands began to wander the men went to report him at the local police station.
On 12th. November 1935 Tom Driberg ended up in court at the Old Bailey on a charge of indecent assault, but he was found not guilty.
His boss, Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), ensured that there was no press coverage, although Tom Driberg had to go to see the editor of The News of the World.
There may have been some reciprocal arrangement as Lady Astorhad pleaded with Lord Beaverbrook to keep the homosexual charges against her son Bobbie Shaw out of the papers…
Christine Keeler, who attended some of Lord Astor’s sexy parties at Cliveden. Keeler was the lover of a Russian spy and Jack Profumo, the UK Secretary of State for War. ()Website for this image
Driberg had a lucky escape when caught with a Norwegian sailor in an air raid shelter in Edinburgh. Fortunately the policeman was an avid reader of the William Hickey column and let him off. In fact the policeman and Tom Driberg became friends and exchanged letters…
In 1949 the Labour Party conference elected him to the National Executive Committee, and he was re-elected every year from 1950 to 1972…
Tom Driberg was chair of the Labour Party in 1957-58.
In 1965 he was appointed as a Privy Counsellor.
He had been an MP for thirty years when he retired in February 1974.
In 1975 he was made a life peer and became Lord Bradwell.
Brad Lane with Reggie Kray at Gartree prison. (Yorkshire Post)
Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing’s views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label.[2] Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.[3]
Career
Laing spent a couple of years as a psychiatrist in the British Army Psychiatric Unit at Netley, part of the (Royal Army Medical Corps;[8]conscripted despite his asthma that made him unfit for combat), where he found an interest in communicating with mentally distressed people. In 1953 Laing left the Army and worked at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, becoming the youngest consultant in the country.[9] Isabel Hunter-Brown, who worked at the hospital at the same time as Laing, suggests that the Glasgow approach to mental illness, and many of Laing’s ideas, were influenced by the work of David Henderson, who in turn credited the American Adolf Meyer.[7] During this period Laing also participated in an existentialism-oriented discussion group in Glasgow, organised by Karl Abenheimer and Joe Schorstein.[10]
In 1965 Laing and a group of colleagues created the Philadelphia Association and started a psychiatric community project at Kingsley Hall, where patients and therapists lived together.[12] The Norwegian author Axel Jensen contacted Laing at Kingsley Hall after reading his book The Divided Self, which had been given to him by Noel Cobb. Jensen was treated by Laing and subsequently they became close friends. Laing often visited Jensen onboard his ship Shanti Devi, which was his home in Stockholm.[13]
In October 1972, Laing met Arthur Janov, author of the popular book The Primal Scream. Though Laing found Janov modest and unassuming, he thought of him as a ‘jig man’ (someone who knows a lot about a little). Laing sympathized with Janov, but regarded his primal therapy as a lucrative business, one which required no more than obtaining a suitable space and letting people ‘hang it all out.’[14]
Inspired by the work of American psychotherapist Elizabeth Fehr, Laing began to develop a team offering “rebirthing workshops” in which one designated person chooses to re-experience the struggle of trying to break out of the birth canal represented by the remaining members of the group who surround him or her.[15] Many former colleagues regarded him as a brilliant mind gone wrong but there were some who thought Laing was somewhat psychotic.[16]
A planned film about the devilish and messianic genius of British psychiatry comes at a time when his controversial theories are finding new currency despite his and their flaws, writes Stephen McGinty
IN HER new memoir Edna O’Brien described RD Laing, the messianic psychiatrist of the counter-culture, as “part Lucifer, part Christ”. Had she been alive today, his motherAmelia Laing might have nodded in agreement, before reaching for her scissors to cut up the relevant chapter into little pieces and flushing it down the toilet, as she would do with all her son’s publications. For there was no doubt in her cracked mind that little junior carried with him the whiff of brimstone and, given her insistence that he was born at a time when physical relations with Mr Laing had long since been shelved, what else could he be but a curious case of divine conception?
She, however, was never likely to play the role of a devoted Mary, weeping at his feet as he crucified himself in later years with drink and drugs. No. She would inspire his work, not through acts of love, but ones of hate. When Ronald David Laing was five years old his favourite toy in the world was a little wooden rocking horse. One day he returned home from school to be told by Mummy that she had burned the horse on the family fire as he had grown far too attached. I wonder if the new movie about the life of RD Laing, announced last week, will focus on this betrayal, just as the immolation of Charles Foster Kane’s sledge in Citizen Kane was the secret to his last word: “Rosebud”.
It may be 23 years since Laing died of a heart attack on a tennis court in St Tropez (he was winning) but he is enjoying a cultural resurgence this autumn. He is in the running for the Turner Prize, as the subject of the Glaswegian artist Luke Fowler’s 70-minute film, All Selves Divided; enjoys a prominent role in Ms O’Brien’s critically acclaimed memoirs where she recounts how Sean Connery helped talk her down after taking LSD under Laing’s guidance; and now there are plans for a £3.5 million biopic of his life with Robert Carlyle said to be interested in the role.
And then there is Dominic Harris’s new book of photographic portraits of the former patients of Kingsley Hall, the experimental clinic that RD Laing set up in a former community centre in Powis Road in the East End of London, where, between 1965 and 1970, residents dubbed their rooms in faeces, regressed to infancy and popped LSD as a means of releasing then wrestling into submission their inner demons. While there is no doubt over the colour of his character, the question is what, if anything, remains of the content of Laing’s psychological concepts in today’s world of biological psychiatry and its focus on genetics and physical treatments?
One of the turning points in Laing’s life was when, after graduating from Glasgow University Medical School (six months late as he failed his finals through lack of study and an excess of drink) he was conscripted during National Service into the British Army psychiatric unit. At the time the treatment of the mentally ill was chilling, physical and largely silent. Insulin induced comas were common, as were electro-convulsive treatment and, if all else failed, lobotomy. Conversing with patients was actively discouraged on the grounds that conversation with a schizophrenic was “fanning the flames of their psychosis”. No good could possibly come from a conversation was the established attitude, one that Laing set out to disprove when he joined the staff of the Gartnavel Royal Hospital, whose superintendent Dr Angus MacNiven gave the young psychiatrist the opportunity to try out his own theory.
At the time, the hospital was grim, grey and overcrowded, utterly unconducive, in Laing’s view, to mental well-being. So, for one year Laing moved 12 of the most stubborn schizophrenic patients into a large comfortable room where he listened closely to their fears and phobias and paranoid thoughts. After 18 months everyone had made such progress that they were able to return to their families. However, within a year, all of them were back in Gartnavel, but Laing refused to accept the arguments of his colleagues that schizophrenia was a life-long condition, instead, in his mind, the root cause of such mental anguish lay in society and, most importantly, with the family.
He argued that what parents viewed as acts of love towards their children were actually violent acts designed to control and condition them. He was inspired, in part, by “game theory”, a concept developed by an American mathematician called John Nash, who believed that everyone acted selfishly and for their own motives and that altruism could not exist. (A Freudian analyst would argue it was also an idea learned at his mother’s knee.) It was, however, fruit from a poisoned tree as Nash was, at the time, an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic whose fearful condition had coloured his view of the world. (A film was made of his life: A Beautiful Mind.)
Yet the book Laing wrote, based on his experiences at Gartnavel, The Divided Self (1960) became a world-wide best-seller and turned him into the world’s most famous psychiatrist. Over the course of a decade, the Sixties, his timing was impeccable, his key ideas took off. These were that “madness” or “mental illness” can be understood but it was necessary for the psychiatrist to use the concepts of existential philosophy to enter into the private universe of the patient, and that the particular manifestations of any psychosis could be understood by studying their family, where its root cause would be located. He also argued that insanity was a legitimate response to what he viewed as an insane world and that madness could have positive effects if used as a journey of self-discovery which would then lead to a new enlightenment.
Laing believed that the only way to heal the mentally ill was to develop their trust, which was impossible in a locked ward where the psychiatrist had a key and the opportunity to leave at any time. The idea behind Kingsley Hall was that patient and psychiatrist were equals and that all ideas were open to exploration. The most famous case was Mary Barnes, who wished to be reborn and whose birth was re-enacted with residents forming a womb through which she struggled out. She would then cry for attention and would only feed from a bottle administered by Laing. When she began painting on the walls with her faeces, the commune debated how much “smell space” a person was reasonably entitled as her room was next to the communal kitchen. A solution was found when another therapist suggested she work with paints. Barnes went onto to become a successful artist.
The liberal use of LSD, which was legal at the time, led to two patients leaping off the roof. As Laing ascended into the role of counter-cultural guru, he abandoned his first wife and five children and delved deep into drink and drugs and by 1970 Kingsley Hall was shut down. Yet, while Laing’s belief that the cause of schizophrenia lay in the family was wrong and, in many ways, cruel for those who had struggled so long with children or siblings, his idea that the mentally ill should not be locked away behind high walls but should, instead, be treated as part of the community has been largely accepted.
He viewed Kingsley Hall as an asylum, in the Greek sense of the word, which means a place of refuge, which many patients found it to be, but as Dominic Harris discovered when he tracked down and interviewed a number of them, the yolk of mental illness cannot be as easily cast off as Laing believed.
If Laing reached his zenith in 1967, he spent the next 22 years falling down to earth, during which he was stripped of his medical licence and suffered a similar depression to his father, before finally landing on a clay tennis court in the south of France. However, in recent years the wildness of his ideas have been broken down to a valuable core, as Anthony Clare, who famously interviewed him for his Radio 4 series In The Psychiatrist’s Chair, went on to write: “The fact remains that this complicated, contradictory, agonised and spiritually tortured man exacted a formidable effect on British and world psychiatry. He dragged psychiatric illness, and those who suffered from it, right on to the front cover of newspapers and magazines where they have remained ever since and he gave the most powerful and eloquent voice to those who until then had been mute in their isolation.”
Laing’s last words were not a plea for the return of his hobby horse but one last cry against the arrogance of the medical establishment. When told a doctor had been called he replied: “What f***ing doctor?”
Sean Connery with first wife Diane Cilento in 1965
11:34 Mon 24 Sept 2012
AN IRISH writer has recounted how James Bond star Sir Sean Connery warned her not to take LSD because he had experienced a bad trip when he tried the hallucinogenic drug in the 1960s.
In her new memoir ‘Country Girl’, Edna O’Brien claims the Edinburgh-born actor told her how his trip with renowned psychiatrist RD Laing had unleashed a “freight of terrors”.
Irish author Edna O’Brien. Picture: Neil Hanna
Sir Sean has never spoken publicly about his involvement with Laing, who famously argued that the use of Lysergic acid diethylamide had therapeutic benefits.
But the 82-year-old former 007 star’s first wife, Diane Cilento, had previously alleged that Laing persuaded him to take the powerful drug to help him deal with stress surrounding the 1964 Bond film ‘Goldfinger’.
Cilento alleged in her own memoir, My Nine Lives, that Laing, who died in 1989, gave the Bond actor a tab of pure LSD.
“No one was privy to what happened over the next six hours, but I believe that, with his enormous reserve and armouring, Sean resisted the drug,” she wrote.
“As a result, he had to go to bed for several days to recover.”
Taking LSD was legal at the time, and possession of the drug was only outlawed in Britain in 1966.
According to the Sunday Times newspaper, O’Brien describes a conversation she had with Sir Sean in May 1970 when she was planning to meet Laing and take the drug herself.
“I had learnt from Sean Connery, with whom I had dinner the previous evening, that his own LSD trip with Laing – both being old friends from Scotland – had its own freight of terrors,” she is quoted as writing.
“Yet I did not cancel the appointment. It was as if in some way I believed I could go through with it and yet escape the terrible ordeal,” she wrote.
O’Brien writes that she had “hideous” hallucinations after taking LSD which included Laing being transformed into a rat and her kitchen walls into flesh.
The author, who found success following the publication of her 1960 novel ‘The Country Girls’, claims that, as she neared the end of her psychedelic experience, Sir Sean came to see how she was faring.
TheScotsman
R D Laing was idolised by 1960s hedonists and demonised by conservatives. A new film will tell his extraordinary story
Monday 29 December 2008
He was the celebrity psychiatrist to swinging London who swapped the sterile wards of post-war mental hospitals for showbusiness parties where he rubbed shoulders with troubled rock stars, actors and artists eager to share their problems with him.
But by the time of his death on a Riviera tennis court in 1989 at the age of 61, R D Laing’s reputation was at an all-time low, dismissed as the drunken high priest of failed Sixties hedonism, a fallen icon of the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll generation and wrecker-in-chief of traditional nuclear family values.
A new film telling the life and times of the radical Scots-born therapist considered to be Britain’s answer to US psychedelic guru Timothy Leary is to be brought to the screen next year. Among those considered to be his most celebrated admirers at the height of his influence in the 1960s when he was a regular feature on television were the Beatles, Jim Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
His fellow Glaswegian Robert Carlyle, himself brought up in hippie communes, is in talks to play the role of the maverick doctor who turned medical convention on its head by searching for the roots of mental illness in the stresses within the family and other close relationships.
Carlyle, who made his name starring in the film Trainspotting and was last month cast in a leading role in a major new US series of Stargate Universe, is a long-time admirer of Laing’s ideas, intrigued by his larger-than-life personality. “For the past 10 years I have wanted to play Laing in a film,” he has said.
Much of the movie, to be shot on location, will be centred on Laing’s work at Kingsley Hall in east London, now home to the Gandhi Foundation, where he devoted himself to a radical experiment in which mentally ill patients and their doctors lived together, offering a humane counterblast to the electro-shock and drug therapies made notorious in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
But it is for his work with celebrities and his troubled private life for which he has been most recently remembered. Among his most famous patients was a young Sean Connery, then struggling to come to terms with his new-found superstardom after appearing as James Bond in Goldfinger. Connery’s first wife Diane Cilento recalled how the actor was persuaded by Laing to take the powerful and at that time legal hallucinogenic LSD to deal with the stresses of his career and the anxieties left from his strict working-class upbringing in Edinburgh.
Laing accompanied Connery on the psychedelic trip, taking a smaller dose of the drug. Ms Cilento later described how the meeting came about. “[Laing] demanded a great deal of money, complete privacy, a limo to transport him to and from the meeting and a bottle of the best single malt scotch at each session,” she said. As well as suffering from bouts of alcoholism and depression, Laing fathered 10 children by four women.
But he became a hero to the counter-culture despite his much-publicised personal shortcomings. Laing’s official biographer, Bob Mullan, who is securing finance for the film, described discussions with Carlyle over starring in the production. “As an actor, he has that same mixture of charm, sharp intelligence, sexiness, vulnerability and utter malevolence that is suited to the role. Indeed, depending on your point of view, Ronnie Laing was either a seductive saint or the devil,” the author said. Hayley Atwell, who recently starred alongside Keira Knightley in The Duchess, has also been approach-ed to play Laing’s second wife Jutta, Mr Mullan added. Today Laing’s views, based as much along European existentialist philosophical lines as conventional psychiatric ones – his approach is often characterised as Sartre meets Freud via Karl Marx – have endured. There are several major institutes, including one in Canada and another in Switzerland devoted to studying the principles which informed his ideas, made famous in books such as The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience.
Life before Death is the result of a collaboration during 1977 and 1978 between the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989) and the composers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley. It takes the form of a series of sonnets and other poems written and performed by Laing to an original musical score.
The album was recorded at the Regent’s Park Recording Company, London, and issued on the Charisma label in 1978. The musical direction and orchestrations were by Nic Rowley. The recording engineer was Stephen Lipson, assisted by Alan Jacoby. The sleeve artwork was designed by Hag.
MS Laing – Papers of Ronald David Laing
Papers of Ronald David Laing.
MS Laing G – General correspondence of Ronald David Laing
General correspondence of R.D. Laing.
MS Laing GW144
Letter from Dr Martin M. Whittet to R.D. Laing. May 1965. Invitation to retiral dinner for Dr Angus MacNiven of Gartnavel Royal Hospital. Typescript. Includes reply …
Fifty years after Ronald David Laing set up his experimental mental-health facility – without locks or drugs – a play and a film aim to examine his legacy.
Monday 30 November 2015
Analyse this: opinions are largely divided on the legacy of RD Laing with his wife, Jutta Corbis
He was named after the velvet-voiced Hollywood actor Ronald Colman, a prophetic choice for a future psychiatrist to the stars, who treated Sean Connery for James Bond-stress in the early Sixties by introducing him to the hippies’ favourite psychedelic drop-out drug, LSD. Arguments have raged ever since over whether Ronald David Laing’s radical methods made him a true shaman – a discoverer of profound truths about the human psyche – or just a very clever showman with good PR.
The Beatles, Jim Morrison of The Doors and the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes all worshipped at the celebrity court of this charismatic high priest of Sixties counter-culture, the so-called “acid Marxist” considered by some to be a less wacky British version of America’s anti-Establishment, acid-head psychologist, Dr Timothy Leary. First published in 1960, RD Laing’s seminal work, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, was written when he was just 28 years old; it became a best-seller and earned him a global reputation. Yet nearly three decades later, in a 1989 Channel 4 documentary transmitted the year he died, Laing wryly remarked of his own legacy: “I feel I’m regarded [by my psychiatric colleagues] as a brilliant man who is pretty disturbed.”
A man who challenged medical orthodoxy as much as he did was always going to make enemies within the Establishment. Laing argued that the old Bedlam-based system of incarcerating people with mental illnesses and treating them with anti-psychotic drugs and inhumane electric-shock treatment had contributed to people’s psychological and emotional distress and was therefore part of the problem. With his beliefs in the power of self-healing, he became an important part of the anti-asylum movement, which worked towards the community-care model that is the norm today – a process first advocated in 1962 by the then Tory health minister Enoch Powell (for mainly economic reasons).
His boldest experiment was the idealistic concept of the “safe haven” for mental-health patients, without locks or any anti-psychotic drugs, that he and fellow founders of the UK mental-health charity, The Philadelphia Association, set up at Kingsley Hall 50 years ago in Bromley-by-Bow in London’s East End. The association, which continues today, was set up to challenge accepted ways of understanding and treating mental and emotional suffering; key to that was, and still is, a commitment to conversation as a way of articulating what disturbs people.
Oscar Pearce and Alan Cox (above) in ‘The Divided Laing’, a black comedy premiering at the Arcola Theatre in London (Adam Bennett)
To mark that 50th anniversary, a new jet-black comedy, Patrick Marmion’s The Divided Laing, or The Two Ronnies, is now premiering at the Arcola Theatre, starring Alan Cox as Laing in a production by the mental-health theatre group, Stepping Out Theatre. Meanwhile, David Tennant has signed to play Laing in a new feature film to be shot next year, Metanoia, by a Laing biographer, the film-maker Robert Mullan, with co-stars Elizabeth Moss from Mad Men, Michael Gambon and Gabriel Byrne. Tennant claims to have “long been fascinated” by Laing’s life and work“, while another celebrity fan is the author Hilary Mantel, who states on the official RD Laing website that ”it is time to look freshly at a brilliant pioneer whose work has been widely, perhaps deliberately, misunderstood“. Read in full HERE
One of his most daring theories was that the root causes of some mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, might not be biological in origin, but were rather the result of environmental factors, particularly those that could exist within the sufferer’s immediate family. Though he achieved fame in the era before a new generation of pharmaceutical remedies were developed for use in the field of mental illness, depression and associated disorders, Laing had long argued that his profession was deeply misguided. According to a 1971Times Literary Supplement review of one of his books, Laing claimed that “a psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them to sleep again, helps to drive them crazy.”
Laing’s own background seemed to be a textbook case for dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. He was born on October 7, 1927, in Glasgow, Scotland, the only child in a middle-class home, but his mother Amelia claimed that she was still a virgin when he was born, and both parents insisted they had not had sexual relations for some time prior to his conception. He was a lonely child, and his parents neither socialized with neighbors nor let him play with other children. Amelia once allegedly burnt her son’s favorite wooden horse because he was so attached to it, but from his father he did inherit a deep appreciation for music and literature.
Appalled by Conventional Psychiatry
Laing read voraciously as a teenager, excelled in Greek and Latin as well as track, and was drawn to psychiatry after reading French playwright Antonin Artaud, who had a history of psychiatric hospital stays. He decided to enter medical school at the University of Glasgow, and after receiving his degree in 1951 went on to serve two years in a medical corps unit of the British army. He continued his professional training in psychiatry in Glasgow, and took his first job as a staff psychiatrist at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in 1955. The standard treatments of the era included electro-convulsive therapy, or shock treatment, which Laing considered not just barbaric but useless, as well as surgical procedures such as the lobotomy. Another common procedure was the insulin-induced coma, and all of these, Laing felt, served to isolate mentally ill persons from society, not heal them. One experience that was particularly saddening to him was the first New Year’s Eve he spent at work, when the patients joined with the staff in singing “Auld Lang Syne,” the classic musical farewell to the old year. The patients smiled, laughed, and participated in the revelry as if they were not “different” from the staff. “If any drug had this effect, for a few hours, even minutes,” he wrote many years later in his autobiography, “it would be world famous.”
Laing also saw early in his career that his fellow doctors seemed to distance themselves emotionally from their disturbed patients, and came to consider this a deeply flawed professional approach. He was able to put some of his daring ideas into practice when he convinced colleagues at the Gartnaval Hospital outside Glasgow to set up a “rumpus room” for some of the patients in a ward where 60 women were housed. The women, all deeply disturbed, were not allowed any personal possessions whatsoever, and had little personal autonomy. Laing took 12 of them and let them spend a day in a much cozier setting, a room with rugs, books, and magazines, and where they were allowed to choose their own clothes and even have their hair styled. The women’s communication skills improved markedly, and many were even discharged from the hospital, though they were all eventually readmitted over the next year.
Published Ground breaking Book
Laing moved to London in 1956, taking a post at the Tavistock Clinic there. He began putting his revolutionary theories on paper, and the first of his books,The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness, was published in 1960. In it, he argued that schizophrenia was merely an adaptive reaction to what he termed the loss of self. There were two types of families, he explained: serial and nexial. Serial types allow each member a greater sense of individuality, in which members consider themselves a family unit though their primary actions, and activities are not dependent on one another. The other kind, nexial, is characterized by relationships that are much more interdependent. In this second kind of family, Laing wrote, the weaker or more insecure members may begin to internalize personality traits of stronger members. This leads to the fragmented or split personality that is the hallmark of schizophrenia.
The idea that madness could be the result of an individual’s inability to conform to the expectations of others had already been theorized a few years earlier by Gregory Bateson, and was known as the double-bind theory, but Laing would receive much more media attention for this, thanks in part to his controversial statements. According to a Times Literary Supplement article by Aubrey Lewis, in The Divided Self Laing admitted to “a certain personal difficulty I have in being a psychiatrist … Except in the case of chronic schizophrenics[,] I have difficulty in actually discovering the signs of psychosis in the person I am myself interviewing.”
Laing won a study grant to carry out extensive research on family relations at Tavistock in the early 1960s, and also took a post as director of the Langham Clinic for Psychotherapy around this same time. The family relations study involved extensive interviews with relatives of those who suffered from schizophrenia, and similar interviews with so-called “normal” families. Meeting with the control group, he once said, “was a more gruelling experience than speaking with the families of schizophrenics. They were just so dead and stifling and, at the same time, it was very hard to describe what the deadening was. So it was difficult to say what the difference between the two was, except that in the normal family nobody cracked up,” he wrote, according to a Harriet Stewart article in the Guardian.
Laing also challenged another standard wisdom of the psychiatric profession, which asserted that the gibberish speech of the psychotic patient was irrelevant to their treatment. He argued instead that such disoriented speech might be a legitimate articulation of their problems, and could be analyzed, in much the same way that non-structured Symbolist poetry was parsed by scholars. In a third contentious theory, Laing argued that psychotic episodes could be viewed as part of the mental health journey, rather than setbacks on it. Disturbances, rather than being disruptive, might instead be seen as a type of shamanic journey to find one’s true inner self.
Laing began to emerge as the leading figure in what was known as the anti-psychiatry movement, though he was not technically a committed adherent. He did, however, raise many objections to the standard treatments of the time, and argued for a more humane approach. In 1964 he founded the Philadelphia Association, a charity that ran hostels offering schizophrenics a more compassionate course of therapy. Several other leading professional names were also involved in this project, and the most famous of the treatment facilities was at Kingsley Hall in London’s East End. Here, staff attempted to erase the lines between themselves and their patients, and to become a model for an alternative mental asylum of the future. As a result, the staff sometimes behaved oddly, illicit drug use was rampant, and raucous parties upset the neighbors. Counterculture celebrities, including members of the Beatles, often stopped by to witness the mischief.
Laing realized that the Kingsley Hall experiment was not working out as well as he had hoped. “My dictum was no transgressive behaviour,” he once said, according to Theodor Itten, an Austrian professional who became one of Laing’s many protégés and delivered a symposium on the Philadelphia Association work in 2005. “Just because you are out of your mind doesn’t mean you can take a hammer and bash someone’s skull in…. However, my attitude in that respect wasn’t shared by other people who were actually there. This was the area of doing [your] own thing, you know, if someone needs to smash a door backwards and forwards for several hours every night and keep everyone in earshot awake, well that’s their thing. I couldn’t negotiate with what I thought was a complete loss of common sense.”
Kingsley Hall and its founder’s theories were often mocked by the more mainstream members of the psychiatric profession. One of the reasons Laing’s detractors refused to take him seriously was his lack of standard scientific evidence that his practices worked better than the standard treatments. He countered with the argument that most in his profession were still working to isolate the mentally ill from the rest of society. In his 1967 book, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise, which also emerged as a classic text of the counterculture and the left, he theorized that perhaps it was society that was truly ill, not the mentally ill person. Although Laing’s ideas and revolutionary treatments stirred great controversy in the profession, many of his more sympathetic ideas eventually found their way into the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Psychiatric nurses, who in Laing’s college days were prohibited from speaking to severely ill patients lest they bring on a psychotic episode, found that greater interaction with their patients seemed to indeed have therapeutic benefits, and also made their jobs more rewarding.
Arrested for Drug Possession
Laing’s fame grew as the decade progressed. He made lecture tours of the United States, and was featured in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary series. Along the way he became acquainted with other heroes of the hippie era, such as Timothy Leary, best known for his support of the acid trip, or LSD experience. Back in London, local authorities finally shut down Kingsley Hall in 1970 in response to complaints from neighbors, but other Philadelphia Association hostels continued to operate in the London area for a few more years. Laing busied himself with other projects, including “rebirthing” seminars in which participants emerged from special bags sewn from gnu skins, and he also began writing poetry. He practiced privately for a number of years, and wrote more books, including volumes of poetry and extractions from extensive interviews with children.
Laing was arrested in 1977 for possession of hallucinogenic drugs, and admitted a few years later that he had been a heavy drinker at one point in his life. His autobiography, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist, was published in 1985. According to Alfie Kohn’s review of the book forPsychology Today, Laing wrote that he was “still more frightened by the fearless power in the eyes of my fellow psychiatrists than by the powerless fear in the eyes of my patients.” He died of a heart attack on August 23, 1989, while playing tennis in the French Riviera resort town of St. Tropez.
In 1965, the psychiatrist opened a residential treatment centre that aimed to revolutionise the treatment of mental illness. Five decades on, those who lived and spent time there look back on an era of drama and discovery
‘A radical moment’: Kingsley Hall residents, 1965.
Sun 2 September 2012. Updated Wed 27 January 2016
The maverick psychiatrist RD Laing once described insanity as “a perfectly rational response to an insane world”. In 1965, having served as a doctor in the British army and then trained in psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London, Laing formed the Philadelphia Association with a group of like-minded colleagues. Their aim was to bring about a revolution in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.
“We aim to change the way the ‘facts’ of ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ are seen,” a later report-come-manifesto explained. “This is more than a new hypothesis inserted into an existing field of research and therapy; it is a proposal to change the model.”
He was a guru to the Beatles and a brilliant psychiatrist who redefined the family — but his own children remember only drink, adultery and violence. Russell Miller investigates the madness of RD Laing.
Published: 12 April 2009
Eighteen months before she died of leukaemia at the age of 21, Susan Laing, RD Laing’s second oldest daughter, was interviewed by The Sunday Times Magazine for a 1974 feature about the children of celebrities. Her contribution was unutterably sad. She claimed that her father, then the best-known psychiatrist in Britain bar Jung and Freud, could not get accustomed to his children being grown up. “We’ve got too many problems for him,” she said. “He can solve everybody else’s, but not ours.”
It was a rare insight into the chaotic private life of a man lauded as one of the most controversial and remarkable figures in the history of psychiatry. RD Laing frequently asserted that mental illness was rooted in the family, yet he treated his own family abominably. He abandoned his first five children and left.
Woodend Hospital is a hospital located in the Woodend area of Aberdeen, Scotland which is owned and operated by NHS Grampian. Woodend Hospital opened in 1927 as a general hospital with a special block being set aside for the treatment of non-pulmonary tuberculosis, pneumonia and similar cases.[1]It now provides electiveorthopaedic surgery, rehabilitation and care of the elderly in conjunction with the other hospitals in the NHS Grampian area, with admissions in excess of 3000 patients a year.[2]
DOME, the Department of Medicine for the Elderly is based here. This is used as a base for University of Aberdeen geriatric medicine students.[2]
Postcard of Woodend Hospital dating from the First World War when it had been taken over as a military hospital. The card shows a concert being given in front of the main entrance block.
Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen was constructed as a Poor Law Institution, designed by the local firm of Brown & Watt, it opened on 15 May 1907 and was one of the last poorhouses to be built in Scotland.
During the First World War the institution was taken over as a Military Hospital (from 24th May 1915 to 1st June 1919).
The postcard above shows a concert underway, there is no message written on the back to give a clue as to when exactly the concert took place. It may have been the one described in the Aberdeen Evening Express in September 1915 when the band and pipers of the Scots Guards visited Aberdeen.
The local Aberdeen newspapers published during the First World War carry many mentions of Oldmill, most concern the numbers of wounded arriving by train in the city and thence out to the hospital. There were also appeals for wheeled chairs and books, and numerous accounts of entertainments and concerts laid on for the wounded men.
A detail of the centre of the postcard showing the main entrance to Oldmill Hospital and the band performing in front
Zooming in on the centre of the postcard shows the band arranged in front of the main entrance, with patients and nurses looking on from open windows and the balconies. I don’t know whether the uniforms here are plausible as Scots Guards, they are perhaps too indistinct to be able to tell. The Gordon Highlanders also gave an open air concert, in September 1916.
The Aberdeen Sailors’ Mission Choir gave the very first concert at Oldmill in July 1915, only weeks after the first patients arrived on 25 June. An ambulance train had arrived at Aberdeen Joint Station shortly after 4am with 100 wounded soldiers from the battlefields of France and Flanders, 83 of whom were transferred to Oldmill.
Postcard of Oldmill Military Hospital, Aberdeen produced during the First World War
This is another postcard produced during the war. The institution was still relatively new when war was declared, and it was with reluctance that the parish council relinquished it to the military, but when the need for more hospital accommodation for the wounded became urgent the council yielded. Many of the poorhouse inmates were evacuated to Rosemount and Westfield schools, which had also been commandeered to take the war wounded, others were boarded out.
Detail of the postcard, showing the bridge part way along the long entrance drive
The notice on the right gives the weight limit that the bridge could withstand at just over 3 tons. The map below shows the hospital complex in the 1920s, after it had been returned to the parochial authorities. The bridge pictured above crossed a roadway that provided access to two detached buildings in the grounds. I think these may have been the nurses’ home and the Governor’s house, but more research is needed to establish whether that is so or not. Although I am fairly confident that the left-hand building was the nurses’ home, a later map marks a tennis court next to it.
Extract from the 2nd edition OS map, revised in 1924. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
The hospital continues in use by NHS Grampian though now its main entrance is on the North side from Eday Road. It is a handsome building, certainly a fine example of its type despite the parsimony of the parochial board. When the plans for the poorhouse were reported by the Aberdeen Daily Journal readers were assured that,
‘As the general view of the poorhouse to most people will be from the Skene Road, a few hundred yards away, it is not intended that any expense should be put upon fine masonry details, and the effect of a satisfactory composition will, therefore, be obtained by means of grouping of the various buildings and arranging them in such a fashion as to give a suitable yet dignified appearance to the whole.’ [Aberdeen Daily Journal, 22 Nov 1901, p.5]
The original buildings on the site form an impressive group which have retained many of their contemporary features. The grey granite is enlivened on the hospital block by the glazing patterns of the upper sashes. The water‑tower on the poorhouse block is elaborately turreted and decorated with a diminutive cupola and the projecting bays are linked at ground level by an arcade at the centre and verandas elsewhere.
Woodend Hospital, view from the east, with the water tower and to the right the former dining hall of the poorhouse, photographed in 2014
Woodend Hospital Gate Lodge, now Thai Buddhist Temple, Queen’s Road, Aberdeen, photographed in 2014
During the First World War the institution was taken over as a Military Hospital (from 24th May 1915 to 1st June 1919). In 1926 the hospital sections were taken over by Aberdeen Town Council and re‑opened as the Woodend Municipal Hospital in October 1927.
From the beginning there was a separate nurses’ home, which was a mark of the progress in poor law medical provision. This was replaced c.1936 by a new larger nurses’ home in an austere cubic manner. It was designed by A. Gardner, the city architect, to accommodate 130 nurses. [Sources: Grampian Health Board, Common Services Agency, plans. See also workhouses.org]
Summerfield Hospital functioned as an annexe of Woodend Hospital.
Extract from the 2nd Edition OS Map revised in 1924. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
It was built for patients of the Aberdeen district of the county and was originally situated well outside the town – just to the north-east of the poorhouse. It opened on 24 August 1900. When the city boundaries were extended in 1934, Aberdeen Corporation took over the hospital and carried out extensive renovations, reopening it in 1937. However, it became a maternity hospital under the National Health Service. It closed in 1991 and has since been demolished, on the site now stands offices of NHS Grampian.
In-patient antenatal and postnatal care is delivered through the five wards plus the labour ward. The wards are named after areas of Aberdeen which once had maternity homes.
Rubislaw ward
Westburn ward
Ashgrove ward
Summerfield ward
Hazelhead ward
ANNIE LENNOX WAS BORN IN THE SUMMERFIELD HOSPITAL!
But if you follow the wiki link it takes you to Aberdeen Maternity Hospital. NOT Summerfield Hospital!
}
Firefighters are battling a “well developed” blaze at a former Lanarkshire hospital.
