Posts Tagged ‘Deep Narcosis Therapy’

Interview with Dr Ronald Sandison
Friday, March 25th, 2011

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: via Phone and at Interviewee’s home
Date: 2005
Interviewee: Dr Ronald Sandison

Dr Ronald Sandison was the first British psychiatrist to use LSD clinically. Here he talks about his involvement with the drug, its effects, his thoughts on Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, R Gordon Wasson and William Sargant. At the end of the interview is a second one – much shorter, but more interesting to intelligence-watchers – in which we discuss funding for his LSD programmes in the 1950s, and debate whether he was unwittingly being used by MI5, MI6 and Porton Down as a source of information on ‘truth drugs‘.

Dr Sandison was a huge help to me when I was researching ‘Brainwash’ and we spoke many times. I thought he was a wonderful, wonderful man. He died in 2010.

The first interview here took place at his home, the second was by phone.

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How did you come to be involved with LSD?

I first went to Basel on a study group – this was about 1950, 52 – and met [Albert] Hoffman, who had restarted experimenting with LSD around 1948. By the time I was there, they were working on spiders spinning webs…

Hoffman had discovered the drug in 1938, then sat on it and rediscovered again?

That’s right, yes, you see, I have this translation here [reads from a conference paper]: ‘The medical profession has been interested in ergot…’ Another early paper, ‘14 normal people, one of whom is given LSD twice…’ What’s interesting about these are that they were not influenced by anybody else – because nobody knew what to expect. Then Hoffman went [reads on]:  ‘One subject tried to describe the state of not being in control and said “I can watch myself all the time, as if being in a mirror, and realise my faults and mental disorders. Despite my great efforts, I find it impossible to correct myself, as everything keeps slipping away and appearing at once again.” Another subject said spontaneously she was glad not to have been questioned a lot. She would not have been able to answer any of the questions either positively or negatively. One is reminded of the state of narcoanalysis, the state among others that is produced by pentothal.’

I think it was really that – people were experiencing something about themselves that they hadn’t previously known about. There was one subject who said it made her think things that were better left forgotten.

Then after that Hoffman went to the a hospital and gave LSD to a number of psychotic patients. Which he didn’t get much from. Apart from some brief work by Bush and Johnson in the States, where they gave LSD to eight psychoneurotic patients but never followed it up (and it was a rather poor paper that they wrote) we were really the first people to use LSD with psychoneurotic patients.

Why did Hoffman pick this up again?

Hoffman seemed to have this curious sort of intuition. He just said, he thought there was something in this drug, he wasn’t sure. But he never told me exactly why. I don’t think he really describes it himself. Have you come across his book? He doesn’t really go into it.

When you went to Europe, had anyone else had done anything with LSD?

No, except for Bush and Johnson in the States. They weren’t serious investigators. I learned afterwards. I think it was Charles Savage who told me that they’d said ‘Well you know we’ve got these psychoneurotic patients, we’re not quite sure what to do with them. Let’s give them some LSD and really shake things up a bit and see what happens.’ And that was really their attitude. That’s not a very scientific attitude. But they did a report that the patients seemed to have benefited. How they benefited they never described and it was a very short paper. They never showed up again, they never showed up at any of the conferences. As far as I know they never tried it again.

If they hadn’t read the German paper in 1947, how would they have heard of LSD in the first place?

I’m not quite sure how it got into America. But Sandoz was an international company and I’ve no doubt that people in New York were talking about it, and the Americans were always great at getting hold of new things.

Why were you so interested in it?

Difficult to answer that. When you’re working in a mental hospital your main problem is the enormous weight of patients. In a number of cases you’ve got the [ones that] you’d really like to do something for but you never have the time. Here was a drug which – I wouldn’t say it was a short cut to the unconscious – but it was certainly helping people to understand themselves at a deeper level. And it seemed to me that this was a worthwhile approach. And I think it was also just a curiosity about this extraordinary substance. Because it doesn’t work like any other drug. You don’t get the same results in the patient one day to the next, which would rule it out in terms of drugs where the effect is expected to be the same. At one time I compared it with penicillin and I thought let’s look at an ampoule of penicillin and an ampoule of LSD.  The effect of penicillin as far as we know is independent of what the patient thinks or does. Whereas the mood of the patient who is being given LSD is a vital factor in what happens under the drug. The co-operation between the observer and the therapist, the patient and the drug, these three, form an extraordinary combination. And the other thing that I was working on at the time was the influence of the observer.

Were there any other drugs around where the mood of the patient would affect the result?

I think the work that Shorvil and co were doing with abreactive drugs – the same applied to a lesser extent. But I think it was [different] with LSD

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Interview with Dr David Owen
Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Via telephone
Date: 2005
Interviewee: Dr David Owen (now Lord David Owen)

This interview, with Dr David (now Lord) Owen shows a far more caring side to William Sargant – and hopefully puts paid to some of the more ‘out-there’ rumours about him and his treatments (‘he wasn’t a Doctor Sinister, you know’). Is it possible for both Sargant-haters and the Sargant-lovers to be correct? Actually, I think it probably is.

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The fact is [William Sargant] was an extremely controversial figure. He was not averse to – he was such a dominant personality that he, I mean he wouldn’t ask a patient: he would say ‘You’re better, aren’t you?’ And they would say ‘Yes, Doctor Sargant.’ And then he would put a tick. And then that particular ECT or whatever it was, was successful. A normal scientist would say ‘How are you feeling today?’ and they would say something and he would make a judgement about whether or not they were better. But Sargant would say ‘You’re better today, aren’t you!’ (laughs)

That meant that his terms as a researcher – he was not really always the best of, of the highest standard as an objective researcher. That, I think, is a valid criticism of him.

Did he think he was a researcher at all?

Well, he wrote many, many papers. He was a prolific publisher and he used every form of technique to get his view of psychiatry across. Like, you would sit in the consulting room with him and the doorknob would turn, and Sargant would say ‘He’s better!’ And I’d say ‘He hasn’t even walked through the door yet!’ And he’d say ‘Ah – but did you see the way he turned the doorknob? He’s better! That would have been very slow a week or a fortnight ago.’

This is the downside about him. What he was, was an optimist. It was said that he had a very serious depression when he was a registrar at St Mary’s. I think that the advantage of that is that he did understand what it was like to be depressed, and a lot of psychiatrists don’t understand it…

For me [working alongside William Sargant] was particularly interesting because I might well have ended up doing psychiatry. [Sargant] was very difficult to be – most people were either positive or negative about him. They aren’t in-between about Will. I consider that he was, for all his flaws and faults – and they were quite considerable ones – a great man. And I think one of the keys to his greatness, was that he understood.

As neurologists we used to deal with terrible pains and he used to say to us, ‘How often have you seen somebody commit suicide because of pain?’ Answer: practically never. Occasionally but very, very rare. ‘How many times have you seen somebody commit suicide on depression?’ Frequently. Ipso facto, according to Sargant, that explains why depression is such a bloody awful illness. ‘That is what people forget, what they don’t understand. This is a terrible, terrible thing. Absolutely demoralising, you just can’t live with it.’ Therefore, he would say, ‘OK, I take risks! In order to relieve them of the depression. I double the dose of the antidepressants, or I run the risk of slight liver thing’ (the drugs then were in those days questioned as to whether they had some adverse effects, especially on the liver.) … Some would say that that was a reason for dropping the drugs. For Sargant it was not at all. He would weigh up the effect of that with the depth of their depression. And if he thought their depression was very serious he would carry on with the drugs. Or double the drugs. And he would be quite open about it. He’d say ‘I think you have to assess this question of side effects vis-à-vis how ill and depressed they are. This is not just a question of making a judgement, “this drug has a side effect therefore I can’t use it”: if this drug has an effect that can help this person, then they should do so.’

So he was a therapeutic optimist, not necessarily a rationalist, and I think this did lead him to making some claims for the treatments. He over-claimed. And then his style in dealing with the analysts who didn’t believe you should have any physical methods… –  he would, run a sort of vendetta, I’m not sure if that’s the right word – a vitriolic denigration of the analysts, whereas most psychiatrists who support methods of physical treatment would still say, ‘Well, there’s a role for psychiatry and maybe even analysis.’ But this led to him being absolutely hated by anyone who thought psychotherapy had any meaning and value in psychiatry. He polarised opinion and probably did a little harm to physical methods of treatment by this record of over-claiming, this therapeutic optimism, and then this sort of bravado. But great men don’t come packaged neatly, do they? … And he IS the father of physical methods of treatment! …

He never brainwashed me! I remained catholic with a small ‘c’ on the treatments.

Did Sargant ever mention his work with the military, or intelligence agencies, to you?

No. I didn’t know him well enough to know that. And I never really kept up with him once I had become a politician. There were some aspects of him which I found – not my bag, really.

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More Source Interviews
Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Had some time to dig up more stuff. Now accessible are interviews with a handful of British and American interrogators and some of the interviews that took place for Brainwash – especially on the issue of William Sargant and ‘modified narcosis’ as practised in Ward 5 of the Royal Waterloo Hospital. I’ll be adding more shortly.

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Interview with Nightingale Nurse #2
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Via telephone
Date: TBC
Interviewee: Nightingale Nurse #2 – Senior Sister

Nightingale Nurse #2: a senior Sister who worked for a number of years, in a position of some authority, in Ward 5. From this interview, a different perspective of William Sargant emerges: a great man, a medical innovator, always keen to do what was best for his patients. This individual, a close friend of Sargant’s until he died, reveals some of the details about his involvement with the British Intelligence services

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

William Sargant?

He was a very dominant character. He had some very good ideas. He was much more compassionate than people gave him credit for. Mostly, he was at the end of his career by the time I was working with him, the last couple of years he actually retired while I was still working with him – from the NHS, not private patients. His ideas at the time were not particularly popular and he had many detractors. But the people that shouted the loudest about how little they valued his work, they were the same ones who referred their patients to him, so you can make of it what you will.

He had a reputation as something of a maverick?

Well, if you were to name some of the people that thought he was a maverick, you’d also find that they also had a reputation in one way or another…of course, all those people are now dead. Most of them. The ones who actually knew him.

Certainly it’s 33 years since I left Ward 5. And the people that were with him were not that much younger than he was, and the younger ones that came after him didn’t know his work or him. They only knew of it – roughly.

He was something of a legend?

(laughs) Well, it would be nice to think that he was a bit of a legend but I think that he wasn’t, unfortunately. Formidable – had some very good ideas. He was intolerant of some aspects of the work that his colleagues were doing. He wasn’t as bitchy about some of his colleagues as they were about him. He certainly stood by his old methods and defended them up to the hilt and people didn’t like that.

You were on Ward 5?

Yeah. I was the **** **** [role]. I was approached by **** ****, probably the last Matron of Thomas, to go to Ward 5 because there had been a very unfortunate suicide and she wasn’t happy with what was going on there… I was inclined to decline, but she was also a very formidable Matron and I agreed to go for 6 months and no longer to sort it out. I stayed till ’72.

What it was like in 196* [when you arrived]?

There were a lot of people that were uncertain of what they should do. They were betwixt and between, it was at a time when there was much more openness in terms of psychiatric nursing and some of them that were on the staff had come from very large mental institutions and they didn’t want to be in such a specialised unit. They didn’t have the necessary skills and couldn’t do some of the work… to deal with things such as modified narcosis. They weren’t skilled enough to do that. And there was this through-put of student nurses who were doing this training… getting psychiatric experience. They were all very, very keen but some of them were out of their depth.

How big was Ward 5?

Maybe – can’t remember – maybe 26 beds, slightly more, slightly less. There were a couple of single rooms for private patients, but most of the rooms were for two except for the narcosis room which was for five.

The narcosis room was already there when you arrived?

Oh yeah, had been going for some time. It was a dormitory with 5 beds in it, lights over each bed, small lockers, and a little recess – not a recess but an area where the nurse sat – there was always a nurse there 24 hours a day, sat with a shaded light, and the patients were actively – active every 4 hours or so, they were up and fed and exercised before they went back to sleep, aided and abetted by some of the medication that they had.

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Interview with MI6 Psychiatrist
Friday, November 12th, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: TBC
Date: September 3rd 2004
Interviewee: MI6 Psychiatrist

This interviewee, a senior psychiatrist who has since died, was a former close colleague of William Sargant’s, and himself did carry out work for the British Intelligence Services. Although understandably cagey about speaking too directly, I suspect that his version of things is pretty accurate.

Sargant, it seems, was involved at some level, but was never an official psychiatrist to either MI5 or MI6: apart from anything else, he was notoriously indiscreet. MKULTRA-watchers will of course demand to know why I should believe that this guy wasn’t himself involved in some sort of deception operation. But I’ve seen very little evidence that anything he says here is untrue.

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I heard that Sargant was advising the MoD and, it’s been stated, the British intelligence services?

He didn’t talk about that. He wasn’t allowed to. Officially. I mean, he talked about it generally, but not specific matters.

One interviewee told me that he used to vanish off to clandestine meetings…

No, no. The world wasn’t like that in those days. There weren’t clandestine meetings – for all I know there were at night but I didn’t follow him.

I was also told that he flatly refused to sign the Official Secrets Act.

No. He wouldn’t have. I agree entirely. We didn’t in those days sign the OSA. We gave advice – so I mean, certainly Sargant gave advice but it wouldn’t have been advice about matters which required signing the Secrets Act.

Because times were different back then?

No. I used to do occasional things but I never signed up. Neither did Sargant

Sargant was fond of gossiping though, wasn’t he?

Sargant did, yes. But he wouldn’t have given away secrets in any sense. He was certainly indiscreet.

That wouldn’t have discouraged the MoD/whoever?

Yes, but they would have got his opinion without necessarily going into the details. You don’t necessarily go into the details about why X or Mrs X was behaving like this. You know, you can just ask him general questions. Which Sargant would have loved doing. He loved doing things for the government.

Sort of: ‘Here’s a patient’? Or ‘We wonder what the Chinese might be doing?’

‘We wonder what the Chinese are doing.’ He wasn’t part of the official group of psychiatrists who saw sick spies and things like that.

He never did that?

No. Not as far as I know.

Truth drugs appear to have been experimented with by the British intelligence community for a while and then discarded as pretty much useless?

I honestly can’t tell you but I can tell you from experience that that’s what we found and that was generally accepted. You know, you might as well stick a pin in somebody’s testicles and expect an answer as give someone a truth drug and expect an answer.

You say ‘from experience’. What experience?

I don’t want to talk about my experiences. Experimentation took place in a vague sort of way. I mean, at the Royal Waterloo Hospital, part of Thomas’, we used to experiment in whether or not we could get confessions from people who had been – who were suspected of this or that. But it wasn’t done in any sort of scientific way, if that’s what you mean.

Perhaps most hospitals were doing this at the time?

I think they were, yes.

At Waterloo, this wasn’t something linked to the government? You weren’t officially asked to conduct this type of research?

No, no. I was a junior then at Thomas’. Certainly as far as Thomas’ and the Royal Waterloo.

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