We know of psychiatry’s dark pre-WWII history in Europe.

     Austrian psychiatrist Manfred Sakel’s 1927 development of seizure-producing insulin coma therapy to “treat” schizophrenia. Psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti’s 1938 use of the brutal electroconvulsive therapy he had learned from watching pigs being prepared for slaughter, also to “treat” schizophrenia. Nazi psychiatrists supervising the murder of almost 100,000 “unfit” humans in their euthanasia program gas chambers from 1939-1941.

     But what about over here in the New World after the war?

     Psychiatry’s human destruction continued, but more covertly, in America and Canada in the 1950s through the CIA initiated and psychiatrist run “human experiment” programs such as Project Artichoke and MKUltra. For twenty years unsuspecting subjects were given massive doses of LSD, heroin, morphine, mescaline, and sodium pentothal — usually without their knowledge or consent — in an attempt to develop efficient methods for interrogation. Other unethical mind control procedures and methods were also used, with and without drugs, under the guise of “scientific research.”

     A key figure in these now infamous MKUltra mind control experiments was a prominent figure in the world of psychiatry, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association and president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association as well as the chairman of the World Psychiatric Association. Between 1953 and 1966 he was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop procedures and to experiment with drugs that would weaken an individual through brainwashing and psychological torture and force a confession from him during interrogations.

     Psychiatrists such as Cameron used the MKUltra program to hone their procedures for manipulating subjects’ mental states and brain functions through covert and extensive use of LSD. Electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal abuse, and other types of illegal torture were also used on the unwitting subjects, who were often chosen because they were easy prey: incarcerated criminals, active military, or students who were lied to about the purpose of this “research.”

     Psychiatrist Cameron not only used LSD on his subjects, but such paralysis causing drugs as curare, and he also electroshocked them with a voltage cranked up to thirty to forty times its normal setting. He developed a procedure he called “psychic driving” to “de-pattern” subjects. He would put his victims into drug induced comas for weeks at a time while playing a looped tape of recorded statements that could act as implanted commands on them.

     Earlier, in the late 1940s, Cameron had given a lecture entitled Dangerous Men and Women in which he described certain mentally ill personalities that he believed were a marked danger to all members of society. Cameron thereafter espoused and promoted the idea that a society in which psychiatry built and then developed the institutions of government, of schools, of prisons and of hospitals would be a society in which science triumphed over its dangerous and “sick” – that is, mentally ill — members.

     Perhaps Cameron saw the MKULtra programs as an opportunity for him to fulfill that evil goal.

     Cameron stated, “Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves – and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form — and we shall find ways to put an end to them.”

     His ideas of ethnic cleansing paralleled the Nazi psychiatrists’ justifications for the extermination of 100,000 of the “impure” in their gas chambers. Now Cameron was working for an American intelligence agency. Different masters. Same agenda.

     There is a further dark irony here. Cameron’s purpose to purge society of its “dangerous” personalities – the mentally ill — actually ended up creating through his MKUltra work two of the most dangerous criminals in modern American history: Whitey Bulger and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

     Both were unsuspecting victims of the MKUltra experiments.

     Whitey Bulger, while serving an early jail sentence in 1957 – long before his infamous and brutal criminal career from the 1970s to the 1990s — was given LSD every day for a year, per an NPR report. He had volunteered for what he thought was a beneficial research program in exchange for a reduced jail sentence.
Instead he spent the rest of his life never able to sleep more than an hour or two at a time because of chronic nightmares and hallucinations.

     After successfully remaining at large for sixteen years, he was finally apprehended and convicted in 2013 of eleven murders of the nineteen he was accused of.

     Domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, a child genius accepted into Harvard when he was only sixteen, underwent a total of two hundred hours of verbal abuse in the MKUltra program experiments while at Harvard. Kaczynski was submitted to “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” verbal punishment that attacked his ego and his cherished beliefs and ideas in order to cause a high level of stress in him as a participant in the experiments.

     These sessions lasted for three years.

     In an article written for the Atlantic in 2000, professor Alton Chase wrote that by the time Kaczynski had graduated from Harvard, “all the elements that would ultimately transform him into the Unabomber were in place.”

     After living as a recluse in a Montana cabin for decades, in 1998 Kaczynski was finally apprehended after the longest and most extensive investigation in the history of the FBI. He pleaded guilty to murdering three people and injuring twenty-three others with his mail bomb campaign.

     Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, are also alleged to have been the unwitting subjects of the MKUltra experiments.

     Not only were Bulger’s and Kaczynski’s lives destroyed by these MKUltra experiments, so too were the lives of the almost two dozen victims of these two crazed, psychiatric mind control subjects.

     During MKUltra’s twenty year span, more than thirty universities and institutions had been used to find unknowing subjects for 149 projects involving these psychiatric experiments.

     Cameron himself was paid $69,000 dollars to do his research at McGill University.

     Who knows how many other destroyed personalities are out there as a result of MKUltra
programs?

     We will never be sure. In 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all records of the MKUltra experiments destroyed in an attempt to keep the extent of this human destruction covert. After Cameron’s death his family also destroyed all of his own personal records as an MKUltra psychiatrist.

     It was only the Church Committee’s 1975 investigation into the abuses of the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS which discovered documents that had escaped Helm’s destruction and revealed a small part of these horrific experiments.