I Swear by Apollo: Dr. Ewen Cameron and the CIA-Brainwashing Experiments

by Don Gillmor

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0920792723
• ISBN13: 9780920792728
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Eden Press
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

EWEN CAMERON AND THE NEW PSYCHIATRY

Don Gillmor's I Swear by Apollo is an early expose of the type of psychiatrist who is becoming all too common these days. Even before his experiments were funded by the CIA, Ewen Cameron was the epitome of the "New Psychiatry" which has replaced the "Old Psychiatry" with its emphasis upon psychoanalysis. He was arrogant, aggressive, impatient and uninterested in the inner feelings of patients except as a tool to manipulate them. He was fascinated with electronic gadgets. Not surprisingly, he became a leading advocate of the use of ECT (electroconvulsive treatment) and may have been the very person who sold it to the CIA (see Colin Ross, The CIA Doctors). As human guinea pigs, he used people who had been admitted to the Allan Memorial Institute, (over which he presided), in a state of distress, and who were in no position to protest against his exploitation of them. Seeking the amelioration of their suffering, they found that he had made them worse: over sixty per cent suffered permanent and significant memory loss. Cameron's interests dovetailed very neatly with those of the CIA, in that he was seeking an American method of "brainwashing", in his case to be used as therapy. Cameron thought that to cure someone of mental illness, one had to destroy their old personality entirely. It never occurred to him that the patient's own psyche might contain elements which could heal him, and that the therapist's role was to help bring these to the fore. In his quest for immediate results, he showed a shocking lack of concern for human life and for the suffering of his experimental subjects. He is the American counterpart of Josef Mengele. The one problem with Gillmor's book is that he view Cameron as a symbol of a passing era, when in fact, he was the harbinger of a new one. Indeed, toward the end, he has a chapter celebrating the advent of drug therapy and in particular Chlropromazine, which he calls Largactil but which is better known by the name Thorazine. Thorazine was the first neuroleptic drug to be used widely, and neuroleptics are almost as dangerous as ECT. What Gillmor obviously did not realize was that even as he wrote, in the late nineteen-eighties, ECT was coming back into fashion, and indeed is today as widely used as the anti-psychotic drugs that he believed represented an alternative. Both are prescribed by psychiatrists who, like Cameron, are arrogant, impatient, and obsessed with the quest for a quick high-tech "fix" to every problem. Their increasing prevelance represents a threat not only to individual patients but to civil liberties, for even without CIA backing, their methods can be used by a repressive government to control and punish dissenters. As for therapy, whatever their faults, the "Old Psychiatrists had it right.