You’d think a sleep room would be cosy, but the one on Ward 5 of the Royal Waterloo hospital in London, back in the 1960s, was dark and airless, a twilight zone where up to six patients – almost always young women – would lie comatose on grey mattresses for weeks, even months on end. They had come in with schizophrenia, anorexia or, in a few cases, a youthful waywardness that their parents hoped could be cured. For William Sargant, the psychiatrist in charge, the cure lay not only in prolonged narcosis but insulin shock therapy, ECT and, if need be, lobotomy. Afterwards, the patients had no memory of what had been done to them. The Sargant method was to wipe their minds clean.
Celia Imrie, later a famous actor, was admitted to Ward 5 in 1966, when she was 14. To her it was “like being in a prison camp” and her recovery “owed nothing” to the “truly horrifying” Sargant and his “barbaric treatments”. Sara (not her real name) was a year older, just 15, and remembers the “hideous cocktail of drugs” that kept her in a zombified state. Linda Keith, celebrated for her relationship with Jimi Hendrix and at the time, in her own words, “a pleasure-seeking, music obsessed drug addict”, had about 50 sessions of ECT on Ward 5: they left her “hugely mentally incapacitated” and unable to read. She also recalls Sargant coming on to her in his private practice.
How persistent a sexual predator he was is unclear, but at least one woman registered a complaint with the General Medical Council, and there’s nothing remotely redemptive in Jon Stock’s lacerating account. A tall, burly “rugger man” who hushed up the mental breakdown he had in his 20s, Sargant was cavalierly mechanistic in his approach, dismissing therapy and Freudian “soft merchants” in his zeal for the liquid cosh and other even tougher interventions; in one of his books he recommended lobotomy, instead of divorce, for unhappy wives. He loved publicity and was occasionally a talking head on the BBC, once appearing on the Third Programme with the singer PJ Proby.
He had the respect of some colleagues – including doctor and future foreign secretary David Owen – and rose to the top of his profession, with a private practice alongside NHS work in London and at the Belmont Hospital in Sutton. His 1957 book Battle for the Mind, ghosted by Robert Graves, was a bestseller, and he could boast many eminent and well-to-do clients – aristocrats, prima ballerinas, overseas royals. Gifts and donations poured in. While working at the Priory shortly before his retirement, a “gorgeous Arabian princess” offered him a Rolls-Royce and sent five along, in different colours, for him to choose from.
At his best, he was part of a movement to destigmatise psychiatric units and banish any lingering association with lunatic asylums. To more sceptical colleagues, though, he was “Bill the Brain Slicer”: arrogant, bombastic and “soullessly one-sided”. RD Laing saw his approach as a “regression to barbarism”; Anthony Clare was a critic, too. The six female patients whose personal testimonies form chapters in Stock’s book thought him a monster. So did nurses allocated to the sleep room, whose job was to medicate the patients (usually with chlorpromazine) four times a day, and who hated the spooky ambience and “dark alchemy of drugs and electricity”; it was, one said, “the sort of thing you’d expect in Hitler’s time”. Patient consent didn’t become enshrined until the Mental Health Act of 1983 and the women were repeatedly subject to procedures to which they hadn’t agreed. The side- and after-effects were dire (tremors, chronic fatigue, massive memory loss, etc) but to Sargant, Stock claims, these were “an acceptable trade-off”. He was, Stock adds, “possessed of a furor therapeuticus – a rage to heal – that was more in his own interest than his patients”.
The sleep room regime is more than enough to convict Sargant of dubious practice, but halfway through the book Stock veers off to examine his possible involvement with MI5, MI6 and the CIA’s MKUltra programme in mind control. Sargant learned a lot about brainwashing during the second world war, while treating traumatised soldiers, and his expertise found favour with the intelligence services. He also worked in the US for a time, and had close ties with a fellow sleep-room practitioner there, Donald Ewen Cameron, who was funded by the CIA. Stock speculates on what Sargant “could” or “might” have worked on, including LSD trials at Porton Down with MI6. But in the absence of incriminating documents (many of which remain classified) the evidence is inconclusive and, compared with the sleep room chapters, the material looks tangential, however heatedly researched. To say that “he was unquestionably the sort of psychiatrist whom Porton Down – and MI6 – might have turned to” doesn’t really nail him as an opportunistic cold war stooge. And the sensationalist chapter heading “She told me that Sargant killed … a patient”, based on a secondhand, uncorroborated story, feels a bit cheap.
Of the thousands of patients Sargant treated, at least five seem to have died during narcosis. Meanwhile, he exaggerated recovery rates and didn’t count relapses. And the six women who speak out in this book are haunted by what he got up to without their knowledge. On the website of the Royal College of Physicians he’s called “the most important figure in postwar psychiatry … He gave his patients hope.” Those women, along with many former nurses and doctors, would beg to disagree.
• The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock is published by The Bridge Street Press (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
