Dark Therapy: Brainwashing and Forced Confinement
What happens when the system that says it'll help you instead uses you as part of their sick experiment? We're looking into two stories of people who were promised help, and instead became stuck in a broken system and faced brainwashing, torture, and imprisonment.
Have your own story to share? Contact us.
SOURCES
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/elizabeth-packard
https://www.newspapers.com/image/741358643/?terms=Elizabeth%20Packard
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/woman-awarded-100-000-for-cia-funded-electroshock-1.492157
Moore, Kate. The Woman They Could Not Silence: Elizabeth Packard’s Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear. Scribe, 2021.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Penguin, 2014
TRANSCRIPT
How our minds work has remained one of the universe's greatest unsolved mysteries. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to figure it out.
From Freudian theories claiming you’re attracted to your mother, all the way to Lobotomies and more, we’ve tried a variety of ways to understand ourselves, and not all of them have been successful. And some of them have been down right tortuous
I want to start by saying I’m very pro therapy and mental health services. I’ve utilized it at times in my life where I’ve needed to gain back control over my thoughts and I’ve benefited from it. But with my dark curiosity, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were times where it had gone off the deep end. Where the person who was being entrusted to make sense of someone's mind l took it too far. And I can’t believe what I found.
I’m going to tell you two stories today. Two stories of women who were promised help for their conditions, but were instead held captive within a broken system. The first is about a young girl who was being used as a guinea pig in an experiment without her knowledge, and the second is of a woman who was trapped against her will after her husband had her committed. As always, listener discretion is advised.
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore
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When Gail Kastner was in her late 40’s, she started dating a man named Jacob. If you asked Gail about him, she would describe Jacob as her soul mate. They started dating in the early 80’s, and from the onset they just got each other, which was a rare find for Gail. She felt like she had a lot of idiosyncrasies that made it hard for her to date people. Like, for instance, she was incredibly absent-minded. Beyond just forgetting where she put her keys. If you asked her the date something in her life happened, she’d sometimes be off as much as 20 years. It almost felt like certain wire in her brain were just not connected.
Then there was how little things that would send her into a panic. The shock of her garage door opener when she pressed it, the sound her hair dryer made.
And When she panicked, it was intense. Gail would sometimes fall to the floor in the fetal position and suck her thumb. She’d talk like a baby until she’d snap out of the trance. Occasionally during these episodes, she’d soil herself. All because of the sound of her hair dryer, the click of her garage opener.
Most people couldn’t handle these episodes, But Jacob seemed to have unending patience for Gail. He had a soft spot because he himself struggled with intense mental health issues that he was in the process of getting help for.
See, Jacob had survived the holocaust, and the trauma he carried from it also made his mind act in ways that were hard for others to understand. He too mixed up dates and would panic over mundane things, and He seemed uniquely suited to have empathy for Gail’s situation.
Jacob also knew that his mental health issues could be traced back to a traumatic event. Gail’s however, seemed to have sprung out of nowhere. When he asked her what she thought the root cause of her panic was, she claimed she had always struggled with her mental health. In her early 20’s she’d go into such intense depressive episodes she would end up hospitalized, sometimes even comatose.
But everything before her early 20’s she couldn’t remember. People would sometimes approach her on the street, claiming they knew each other from childhood. After a few moments of confusion, Gail would laugh and nod, “Oh, I know who you are, I just can’t quite place you”. She’d then confess to Jacob later that she made that part up to get out of the conversation. She really had no recollection of these people
This was the part that bothered Jacob. He also had intense gaps in his memory, and as he searched for answers, he learned about memory loss as it relates to trauma. He always felt there must have been a reason for Gail’s mental health to be so bad, this couldn’t have materialized out of nothing. And every time Gail would panic at the sound of her hair dryer he wondered what it was that made her this way.
One day, in 1992, Gail and Jacob were walking past a newspaper stand when a headline jumped out at him, “Brainwashing Experiments: Victims to be Compensated”. He bought the paper and the two went to a nearby coffee shop to read it. Immediately, words started jumping off the page at Gail. The story was about a psychiatric experiment gone wrong, and how Victims of a Montreal doctor’s crimes complained of side effects like memory loss, baby talk, and incontinence. The two looked at each other, what they were describing was freakishly similar to the symptoms Gail had been experiencing.
But the article only got more shocking the further they read.
According to the article, patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a doctor in Montreal at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute, were receiving monetary compensation for his violations of medical ethics. These violations included isolating patients, administering almost lethally high doses of electrical shocks, keeping them medically asleep, and exposing them to experimental drug cocktails.
Gail swore she never had any involvement with the Allan Memorial Institute, but she vaguely remembered hearing about experiments happening at McGill. Jacob empowered her to write to them and see if they had a medical file on her. So she did. At first, she doesn’t hear anything, but then she gets a reply.
A letter shows up that says the Allan Memorial Institute has no record of Gail Kastner being admitted to the facilities.
So maybe this wasn’t going to be the answer she was looking for. Maybe her distress did materialize out of nowhere, maybe it was just something wrong with her brain.
Time marches on, still with no answers, until One day, Gail goes out to check her mail. Inside with the regular letters, is a big folder that’s been crammed in to fit. She brings it in and shows Jacob, and he asks her to open it in front of him. Inside, there are 138 pages detailing her time at the Allan Memorial Institute. On the admitted by line, it reads, Dr. Ewen Cameron. The doctor at the center of this scandal.
By reading through her medical file, Gail starts filling in some of the gaps in her life. It’s revealed that in the 50’s, Gail was an eighteen year old nursing student at McGill, and was plagued with anxiety. Her file describes her as cheerful, sociable, and excelling in her studies. But it also notes that she had a psychologically abusive father who was causing her undue stress. That’s how she found herself in Dr. Cameron’s therapy practice.
Dr. Cameron was a Scottish born American with a prolific background. He had been president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, President of the World Psychiatric association, and president of the American Psychiatric association. Perhaps it was his distaste for the old psychiatric approach and embrace of the new that set him apart. He thought talk therapy was Freudian and outdated. This was the 50’s, there were newer, more exciting theories and practices in therapy, and Dr. Cameron wanted to be on the forefront of them.
One theory he was particularly fond of, was that a person’s personality could be wiped clean from them, and another personality could be inserted in it’s place. But how do you wipe the personality out of someone
Well, in a paper he published in 1960, Cameron said he believed there were “two major factors that allow us to maintain a time and space image. The forces are 1. Our continued sensory input and b our memory.” Basically, sensory input tells us where we are, memory tells us who we are, and the two combined give us a sense of self.
First, he experimented with how to get rid of sensory input. He had gotten a large sum of grant money to convert the horse stables behind the school into sensory deprivation boxes. What those were, were soundproof rooms that were filled with white noise. The subjects, who were students that were offered $20 to take part in a mysterious study, would put on dark goggles and the lights would be turned off. They also had cardboard tubing put on their hands and arms, which “prevented him from touching his body, thus interfering with his self image.”
The subjects were kept in the box for weeks, one even enduring isolation for thirty five days. They were not told the length of the study beforehand, as consent forms at the time waived subjects of just about all of their rights.
The next issue Dr. Cameron had to overcome was memory. He noticed that another popular psychiatric tool from the time, Electric Shock therapy, caused amnesia and memory loss in patients. So he bought a Page-Russel machine, a standard electro shock machine at the time. The psychiatrists who invented the machine recommended each patient get a total of twenty-four shocks, but Dr. Cameron was administering up to 360 shocks per patient, 15 times the maximum dosage.
“There is not only a loss of the space-time image but a loss of all feeling that it should be present.” he wrote in a 1962 paper. “During this state, the patient may show a variety of other phenomena, such as loss of a second language or all knowledge of his marital status. In more advanced forms, he may be unable to walk without support, to feed himself, and he may show double incontinence….all aspects of his memorial function are severely disturbed.
Patients who received the intense amount of shocks regressed to childhood behavior, which Cameron believed was necessary. He wanted to take them back to a time before their mental illness materialized. Even after all this, the deprivation and the shocks, he noticed that they still seemed like themselves, in a way. Their personalities hadn’t been fully eradicated. So he tried to depersonalize them with drugs. A cocktails of uppers, downers, and hallucinogens were given to the patients. Sometimes they were induced into a sleep that lasted weeks. And while they were in this vegetative state, Dr. Cameron would play tapes that read reprogramming messages to them on a continuous loop. One said “You are a good mother and wife and people enjoy your company.” One patient had to endure these messages for 101 days.
This was what Gail was being subjected to. This was what happened when she started Dr. Cameron’s treatment plan. Her chart read that she had been subject to multiple induced comas, long period of drug-induced sleep, eight times as many electro shocks as was recommended, and drug cocktails for when the rest didn’t wipe her personality completely out.
It was horrifying to read, but Things started making sense to Gail. She had experienced all of the symptoms described in the report, and while she still had no memory of being under dr. cameron’s care, it’s clear that the effects of what happened still lingered in her subconscious. Maybe the constant shocks were the reason that he garage door opener sent her into a panic when it accidentally shocked her. It validated her experience, and in it’s own way, it made her feel better. It made her life make a little more sense.
But nothing could prepare her for what she read next.
See, Dr. Cameron was publishing a lot of papers about his studies, and those papers were being read all over the world. eventually, they caught the eye of some very important people. Remember when I said that Cameron got a grant to remodel the barns into isolation boxes? That money came from somewhere. Somewhere that was interested in mind control in the 50’s, and was willing to pay a lot of money to fund experiments.
The CIA.
Yea, Dr. Cameron’s dark experiments were funded by the United State’s CIA, specifically as part of MKUltra. MKUltra was the US Government's attempt to find psychologically advanced ways to break prisoners and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. Gail and many other patients were collateral damage in this dark scheme
It may seem obvious now, but this didn’t work. Instead of washing a person clean of their personality and inserting a new one, Cameron just fractured the personality the person did have, it completely backfired. He left his subjects with messy, untenable psyches, and no resources to try and put themselves back together. More than half of the patients he saw were unable to hold down full time jobs after leaving his care.
Gail and jacob worked together to file a claim against the university, and she was quietly awarded $100,000 in 2004 for the undue suffering she experienced at the hands of Dr. Cameron. 77 other patients recieved payouts, but at the time Gail was awarded, there were 253 claims that had been rejected.
She passed away in 2009 but the crimes committed against her will not be forgotten. And hopefully by uncovering them, we can make sure they never happen again.
More after the break
Our next story is a tale of another woman who was given a false promise of help and instead was betrayed by the medical system. This is the Story of Elizabeth Packard
In June of 1860, Elizabeth’s husband, Theopholis Packard, took an axe and tried to break into her room through a window. He was coming to have her committed to an asylum.
That morning, when Elizabeth awoke, she exited her room to see her husband and three hulking, angry men behind him, beelining towards her room. She had a feeling she knew what they wanted. Theophilus had been telling people around town he thought she was crazy, and now they were coming for her. She quickly locked her door and jumped back into bed. But that didn’t stop the men. The next thing she knew, an axe was bursting through her window at the behest of her husband, and hastily, the men dragged her from her home to deposit her at the Illinois state asylum and hospital for the insane.
Yes, shockingly, the man attempting to reach his wife via axe was not considered the mentally ill one. At least not by the standards at the time.
As Elizabeth was riding in the back of a carriage towards the hospital, she reflected on why, exactly, she was in this situation. Why she was being committed against her will.
It started, she imagined, at the beginning of her marriage to Theophilus.
Though there was quite the age gap, she was 22 and he was 37, the two seemed well suited for each other. They were both Calvanists, also known as reformed Protestants, had both struggled with their faith and questioned their beliefs, and had both attempted to go to seminary. But over time, Elizabeth's questioning of her faith pulled her further away from Calvinism, while Theopholis doubled down on the faith.
She was interested in new ideas being shared at the time, the women’s movement, abolition, progressive christianity, even seances and mediums. One night during a seance, she swore her late mother came to her with a warning. Prepare for persecution, she told Elizabeth in a candlelit room. How right she would be.
Theophilus didn't appreciate his young bride’s new perspective. He had started to work for the church, and patrons would come in asking about his wife’s new ideas. Some had even started visiting her private bible study, a group he was shocked to learn had swelled to 40 devoted listeners.
At a time where women didn’t have many opportunities to lead groups, Elizabeth was proving to be a captivating leader. She was charismatic and eccentric. She’d talk fast and jump from subject to subject, her ideas were wild and new, but she had a way of commanding a crowd that was now a threat to her husband's parish.
The more of his followers that her new group stole, the more he resented her. And one night, he figured out a way to silence her forever.
See, Theopholis knew that Elizabeth had a secret, and he knew that he could use that secret to his advantage.
He knew that years ago, when Elizabeth was just 19, she suffered from something doctors described as “Brain Fever” Again with the Victorian diagnoses that don’t tell us anything. Brain fever referred to a myriad of different head ailments, and could have been one of a few things. She could have suffered from a bout of meningitis, she could have just had migraines. sometimes it was just used to describe over excited women, and Elizabeth was a passionate woman who could talk your ear off about any of her wild ideas, she would have definitely been described as over excited
Her father suggested that she spend some time in an asylum to rest, an idea which was horribly embarrassing to Elizabeth. She didn’t want the stigma that came with retreating to an asylum for some time, plus she didn’t feel like she was mentally unwell. In the end, she was brought to Worcester hospital for the insane in 1836. On her intake form, her father wrote that the cause of her Brain Fever was corsets that were too tight, and stress from teaching. And just like that, she was locked away for months
Theopholis knew that she had already been committed once, and that would make it easier for her to be committed again. In 1860, when he’s having this thought, there was a law in place in Illinois that said any husband could have his wife committed without her consent, and he planned on using that law to his advantage.
How could a law this cruel exist? Honestly, you might not even be wondering that, it was the 1860’s and there were so many irrational laws, but let me give you some context. Before this law was put into place in 1851, a jury had to decide if someone was unwell enough to be committed to an asylum. A man could suggest his wife be committed, but it wouldn’t happen unless a jury of other men ruled her to be unfit for society. it was decided that these trials were embarrassing for women, and to spare the gentler sex of the public humiliation, a new law was passed that just allowed husbands to decide for their wives.
As you can imagine, this lead to a huge swell of bad men having their perfectly sane wives sent away. What they had essentially created was a prison system run on recommendations, disguised as a mental health retreat.
But for Theopholis to have Elizabeth sent away, he first needed two doctors notes claiming she wasn’t sane. So, he went on a campaign across town to get others to back him up on his accusations against his wife. This was not hard. Traditional calvinists thought Elizabeth’s ideas were dangerous, and they were happy to declare her “insane”. in June of 1860, her husband and three other men took an axe to her window, and dragged her away.
She was brought to the Illinois state asylum and hospital for the insane. This time on the intake form, it was written that she suffered from “excessive application of body and mind”. Her husband felt she was applying herself too much and needed a long, long rest.
And a long rest she would get. For the first four months, Elizabeth was kept in a nicer room on a higher floor and she felt this was indicative that she wasn’t crazy, and the doctors knew it. Why else would they be treating her so kindly?
But in secret, the doctor watching over her, Dr. McFarland, was writing home to her husband saying otherwise. He was telling Theophilus that Elizabeth had lost all maternal and marital instincts. This was a huge insult at the time. If she didn’t have those two things, she was useless to society, so it was decided that Elizabeth would be moved to a lower, much rougher floor.
On the day it was decided Elizabeth would be moved, she actually thought she was going to be released. She was put in front of an appeals board with her bags nearly packed, excited to go home and see her children. But the solemn faces of the board said otherwise.
Instead, she was put in the wing of the hospital with women who had severe conditions. The patients were horribly neglected, there was human waste everywhere and many women were boney and frail from being underfed. It became clear to Elizabeth that this system devised to rehabilitate was only going to destroy her. Now, she was done playing nice, she knew that behaving and sitting quietly was not going to get her released, so she started making a bit more noise.
When family members of patients in her ward arrived, Elizabeth would pull them aside and tell them how horrible their loved one was being treated. She became an advocate for those unable to speak up for themselves. She started writing a book about her experience, and sending letters home to her children to explain what was happening. One of her sons would visit her often. He knew she was being treated unfairly and was trying to get her freed. But still, Theopholius continued to rule that she was unfit for her duties as a wife, so in the asylum she stayed.
In september of 1892, 2 years after she had been committed, she had another meeting with the appeals board for potential release. But Elizabeth had realized something. If she were to be released, she’d have nothing. She’d have no community or family, there was no way Theophilus would let her see her children. She had no money to start a new life because at this time, all money a woman made was automatically given to her husband. And she felt like she still had work to do inside the asylum. So she asked to not be released. The board gladly obliged.
Elizabeth would stay inside the asylum until 1864, almost 4 years after she was involuntarily committed. When she was finally released, Theophulis begged the board to keep her committed, and when they refused, he moved himself and their children away. A court granted him full custody as they were his property.
But this story, unlike Gails, has a somewhat happy ending. Elizabeth dedicated the rest of her life to passing laws for the rights of women and the mentally ill. She went on to publish a book of her writings inside the asylum, which showcased the cruelty and inhumane conditions she faced. She lobbied for women to own their own money and have parental rights over their children. And most importantly, she lobbied to end the law allowing husbands to have their wives committed against their will.
In 1867, years after the law was originally passed, it was unanimously voted to irradicate it. Men could no longer have their wives committed at their will. It was a huge victory for women in Illinois. Women now had a right to a trial if it was suggested they should be committed, allowing them to prove their sanity. The law worked retroactively as well, meaning any woman who had previously been committed at the behest of her husband could now be released upon a trial. This granted freedom to thousands of women.
As for Elizabeth, well, in 1869 she helped pass a law that gave women equal rights as their husbands to property and the custody of children. After this law was passed, Theophilus waived his parental rights and sent the children back to live with their mother in Chicago. She passed away at the age of 80 after a life of political activism and reform.
The stories of Elizabeth and Gail will not be forgotten. We still have a long way to go when it comes to treating mental health conditions, and I wanted to use this episode to show how far we’ve come in the past 150 years. A broken system will break the people inside, and we share these stories to remember those who were abandoned by these systems. Also as a reminder to always advocate for yourselves when seeking help. The history of mental health treatments is dark but hopefully we can at least learn from it
I’m going to share more of these stories with you in the future, so make sure to tune in for more Dark Mental health treatment episodes in the future. But for now, This has been heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Sound design and Mix by Peachtree Sound.
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