Leyla Sanai has narrated this article for you to listen to.
When the actress Celia Imrie was 14, she was admitted to an NHS hospital where she was given medication intended for delusional, hallucinating, agitated schizophrenics. Though not diabetic, she was regularly injected with insulin, which lowered her blood sugar so that she became shaky, anxious, ravenously hungry and so confused she couldn’t recognise her own family. Yet she was one of the luckier ones. Other patients were given enough insulin to induce a coma caused by dangerously low glucose levels, and some even died.
Why was Imrie subjected to this? Because she was anorexic and had been placed in the care of a notorious psychiatrist who believed in aggressive physical therapy. William Sargant had failed to make it in his chosen specialty of hospital medicine because he had published research that was subsequently found to be nonsense. As a young doctor, he had insisted that a form of anaemia caused by inadequate B12 absorption could be cured by taking large amounts of iron. Anaemia can be caused by lack of iron, B12 or folate, but if you are deficient in one mineral or vitamin, receiving a different one will not help.
So Sargant had to abandon his dreams of being a great consultant physician, and pivoted to psychiatry instead. This is, of course, a hugely important specialty since anything that can be done to alleviate the suffering caused by mental illness is welcome. But Sargant was too macho for talking therapies, which he believed took too long and didn’t work anyway. Instead, he embraced all sorts of crazy physical interventions, most of which had terrible side effects. His idea was that driving disturbed patients to a state where their body was immensely stressed would reset harmful thought patterns. He worked at St Thomas’s and also at the Royal Waterloo Hospital, where he had a whole domain, ward five, in which to carry out his experimental treatments.
One room on ward five was known as the Sleep Room. Nurses who worked there, who were generally students – Sargant didn’t like anyone who could challenge him – reported a stinking place where patients would be drugged for weeks or months with up to ten times the dose of anti-psychotic drugs used by other psychiatrists. They were almost all women, some having been referred to Sargant by their distraught parents because they enjoyed an independent lifestyle which was thought might harm them. One such was the 23-year-old model Linda Keith, who cavorted with Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix, and had a voracious appetite for recreational drugs. The patients in the Sleep Room would be woken every few hours to be fed and taken to the toilet, and were then drugged again. The nurses were also meant to wash them, but it was difficult to clean patients who were heavily sedated and groggy – hence the stench of dirty bodies in the room.
Most of these patients would be taken for ECT at least three times a week. None of them had consented to any of the treatments they received. Sargant was convinced that his methods worked, because when patients were eventually woken, they often seemed not to exhibit the same anxieties or cravings as before. But he didn’t do any long-term follow-up, and most relapsed and suffered severe memory and cognitive loss.
The extent to which Sargant made up the rules as he went along is evident from some of his more bizarre treatments. Because insulin drives glucose into the cells, where it is converted to fat if not used for energy, he at one time thought that putting on weight was therapeutic in itself, and prescribed huge portions of mashed potatoes every few hours, in addition to all the other meals. If patients didn’t improve, he readily referred them for lobotomy, by which part of the frontal lobe of the brain is crudely destroyed.
Sargant also became fascinated by the idea of reprogramming the mind after brainwashing, through giving vast doses of sedative drugs. This brought him to the attention of the British security services and the CIA, and some of the research funding he received was reputed to come from these agencies. Horrific immoral experiments were carried out, such as giving LSD to people without their knowledge.
It is extraordinary to think of how many unethical practices occurred in the name of psychiatry in the relatively recent past. This arrogant man – who also made passes at several of his patients – would today be unveiled as an immoral charlatan. Jon Stock’s lucid account is gripping and shocking.
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