The Insanely Disturbing CIA Funded Canadian Mind Control Experiments

Añadido: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]It was the winter of 1957 and Charles Tanny was in agony. A bad dental filling had triggered a severe case of trigeminal neuralgia, leaving the 42-year-old snowblower salesman and father of three with crippling facial pain, which no doctor seemed to be able to relieve. Suspecting the problem might be psychological, doctors eventually referred Tanny to the Allen Memorial Institute, a stately former mansion and psychiatric research center on the slopes of Montreal's Mount Royal. His family hoped the institute would finally be able to ease his pain, allowing him to resume his life. But when Charles Tanny emerged three months later, they hardly recognized him. Once a warm, loving father and husband who doted on his wife and children, Tanny was now cold, distant, irritable, and often violent. Stranger still, he seemed to have forgotten nearly every aspect of his life, having no memory of his business, and barely remembering his family members. As his daughter Julie, then only four years old, later recalled, "He was like a shell of what he was before, he was just a completely different person. Unknown to his loved ones, Charles Tanny had been subjected to a series of bizarre medical procedures aimed at erasing, reprogramming, and ultimately controlling the human mind. Born of Cold War paranoia, these experiments, devised and conducted by an ambitious but misguided Canadian psychiatrist and secretly funded by the CIA shattered the minds and lives of hundreds of unwitting patients and their family, leaving a legacy of pain and outrage that resonates to this day. This is the horrifying forgotten story of Dr. Ewen Cameron and the Montreal experiments.

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[00:04:18]Though Cameron's early research covered a variety of topics including epilepsy, depression, anxiety, emotion, and psychotropic drugs, he became especially interested in the condition of schizophrenia.

[00:04:30]Originally known as dementia precox, this diagnosis was long lumped in with what is now known as manic depression or bipolar disorder until the two conditions were distinguished by German psychiatrist Emil Croplin in 1893. The term schizophrenia, meaning split mind, was coined in 1908 by Swiss psychiatrist Eugene Blueler. However, the condition has nothing to do with split personality or multiple personality disorder aka disassociative identity disorder or did nor with the literal splitting of the brain as is sometimes done to treat sufferers of severe epilepsy. Rather, Luler was referring to the splitting of the patients mind from reality as sufferers of schizophrenia typically suffer from disordered delusional thinking and intrusive auditory hallucinations. Yet despite its recognition as a distinct illness, the root cause of schizophrenia eluded psychiatrists and Ewan Cameron was determined to find it. In 1934, while working at the Manitoba Provincial Mental Hospital in Brandon, he conducted a series of experiments in which schizophrenia patients were exposed to temperatures as high as 36 to 42° C or 108° Fahrenheit for upwards of an hour and their body temperature monitored the entire time. In the resulting paper, heat production and heat control in the schizophrenic reaction, he observed that on average, schizophrenic subjects had a lower and more erratic body temperature and reacted more dramatically to extreme cold than control subjects. Now, if this approach to studying mental illness using heat and cold seems a bit odd, it must be remembered that at this time pyrotherapy or fever therapy in which patients were placed in a heated cabinet or deliberately infected with malaria was a widely accepted method for treating sufferers of neurosyphilis. But in any event, in follow-up experiments, Cameron placed his patients on extremely low water diets, giving them as little as 600 milliliters of water every day and administering diuretics to promote urination. While the study revealed no significant differences between schizophrenic and control subjects, many patients became so desperately thirsty that they took to eating snow off window seals or drinking water out of flower vases. One even died from the effects of severe dehydration. And if this all sounds extremely unethical, well indeed.

[00:06:40]Following the revelation of the grotesque human experiments carried out by the Nazis during World War II, human medical experimentation without informed consent was outlawed as per the 1947 Nuremberg Code. And ironically, Ewan Cameron was one of the many psychiatrists present at the 1946 Nermberg trials in which top Nazi officials and military officers were brought to justice. You see, Cameron was part of an international team tasked with evaluating the mental state of former deputy furer Rudolph Hess, one of Adolf Hitler's oldest and most loyal acolytes. On May the 10th, 1941, Hess had made an unauthorized flight from Germany to Scotland, ostensibly to contact Air Commodore Douglas Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton, and enlist his help in brokering peace between Britain and Germany. Over the course of his five years in British custody, Hess's behavior grew increasingly paranoid and erratic, and he claimed to be suffering from amnesia, allegedly having no memory of his former life and actions. Cameron and his fellow psychiatrists were thus tasked with determining whether Hess was mentally competent to stand trial in Nuremberg. While Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Hines Layman diagnosed Hess as level four psychotic, the highest grade of insanity, stating that the prisoner had impractical ambition, impulsiveness, reasoning based on symbolism rather than logic, confabulation with a tendency toward the bizarre, as well as rigid egocentric attitude. Cameron disagreed, pointing out that Hess's symptoms were inconsistent with real amnesia and that the former deputy furer was merely feigning memory loss as a defensive measure. Hess was ultimately declared fit to stand trial and on September the 30th, 1946, found guilty on two counts: crimes against peace and conspiracy to commit crimes. Unlike many other top Nazis who were given the death penalty, Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment in Berlin Spendow prison. From 1966 onwards, he became the 600 cells facilities sole prisoner, being guarded by a rotating contingent of Eastern and Western block troops at the cost of nearly 800,000 Deutsch marks or $2.5 million every year. Though multiple appeals were made to release Hess on humanitarian grounds, the Soviets and East Germans staunchly refused, and Hess remained in Spandow until August the 17th, 1987, when he committed suicide at the age of 93. Yet, despite the horrific philosophies and actions he witnessed at Nuremberg, Cameron continued to hold many, shall we say, problematic attitudes. In the wake of the trials, he published a number of papers, including Nuremberg and its significance, Life is for Living, the social reorganization of Germany and Dangerous Men and Women, in which he concluded that the Germanic race was naturally and irrevocably predisposed to dictatorship, violence, and cruelty, and that the drastic reorganization of German society was necessary to eliminate it as a threat to Western civilization. Further, Cameron viewed mental illness as a social contagion that must be aggressively snuffed out using large-scale state sponsored intervention programs. This thinking in turn manifested in disturbingly eugenesis views wherein Cameron divided the population into the strong and the weak and argued that the latter should not be permitted to reproduce. as he himself wrote, "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged sick personalities are to ourselves and above all to our children whose traits are taking form, and we shall find ways to put an end to them." This all brings us neatly to the most famous or rather infamous period of Ewen Cameron's career. In 1953, while working at the Allen Memorial Institute, Cameron developed the theory of psychic driving, in which he posited that a patient's psyche could be manipulated and reconstructed by exposure to verbal cues or dynamic implants played on a continuous loop. These cues could be recorded by the patient themselves or by their psychiatrist. The idea was to stimulate the retrieval of allegedly repressed memories and emotions from the subconscious and force the patient to confront them. in the process forcing a psychological breakthrough. Cameron's research into this and other unorthodox therapy techniques became known as the Montreal experiments. The results of psychic driving could be dramatic and disturbing. In one 1956 case, a 40-year-old woman was made to record the statement, "If you don't keep quiet, I'm going to leave you behind." Originally spoken by her mother when she was a child. This recording was then replayed to her on repeat. After 45 repetitions, the patient became extremely distressed, began violently shaking and hyperventilating, and begged Cameron to stop. Indeed, over the course of his research, Cameron noted a wide variety of patient reactions, which he grouped into six categories. Immediately constructive response, in which the patient experienced severe distress after 10 or fewer repetitions. Partial block, in which the patients feelings were so intense they impeded subsequent communication with their therapist.

[00:11:22]reject and later acceptance, in which the patient rejected the verbal cues for up to 10 days before finally internalizing them. Rejection and escape, in which patients violently rejected the cues and quit therapy before eventually being readmitted to treatment in a state of extreme mental disturbance. Continued action, in which patients found the verbal cue comforting and therapeutic, and development of defenses, in which patients experienced a complete inversion of the verbal Q's intended effect. For example, an alcoholic developing even more intense cravings for alcohol. At first, Cameron administered psychic driving over relatively short periods, but sessions gradually became longer and longer, with Cameron often playing dynamic implants to patients over headphones as they slept. He then experimented with sensory deprivation techniques in order to enhance the techniques effectiveness, placing patients in dark soundproof rooms with fitted darkened goggles over their eyes. Later he began using tranquilizers like chloropromisine and sodium amorbidol to induce clinical comas allowing psychic driving audio to be administered for up to 20 hours per day over a period of up to 30 days. He also manipulated the audio recordings to emphasize certain sounds and frequencies and experimented with a variety of psychoactive and other drugs including the paralytic cur, the stimulant methamphetamine hydrochloride and the recently discovered hallucinogen LSD.

[00:12:45]But while Cameron's goal was to accelerate the process of therapeutic organization associated with conventional psychotherapy, many of his experiments had the exact opposite effect, inflicting what Cameron called mental deattering and exacerbating his patients pre-existing psychosis.

[00:13:01]However, in his published works, Cameron either downplayed or outright denied most of these failures, claiming that of all his psychic driving experiments, in only one has there been seen a possible persisting trauma resulting from the implant. In 1957, Cameron's work received a welcome boost when he was approached by representatives from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, who agreed to fund his work to the tune of $69,000, nearly $840,000 in today's money, over the course of the next 6 years. Little did Cameron know that at the time, the society was actually a front for a top secret CIA mind control research project known as MK Ultra. MK Ultra grew out of the extreme paranoia caused by the Cold War. By the 1950s, the United States military had become convinced that the Soviet Union and its allies were well advanced in the field of brainwashing and mind control, seeing no other explanation for the immense psychological hold the Soviet state held over its citizens. These suspicions were further aroused by incidents during the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 in which American servicemen captured by North Korea were supposedly brainwashed into turning against their own government.

[00:14:10]events which famously inspired Richard Condan's 1959 paranoid thriller novel, The Manurion Candidate, and its classic 1962 film adaptation. Desperate to close this perceived mind control gap, in 1951, CIA director Alan Doulles launched Project Bluebird, later expanded and renamed Project Artichoke, and finally MK Ultra.

[00:14:32]Directed by Sydney Gotautle, MK Ultra sought to develop effective techniques for manipulating or outright controlling the human mind in order to, for example, neutralize or facilitate the interrogation of enemy agents.

[00:14:44]Gotautle's program was divided into a number of sub projects, each with its own specific goals and methodologies.

[00:14:50]Sub projects 2, 8, 10, 63, and 66, for example, study techniques for drugging subjects without their knowledge and the ability of various psychoactive drugs such as LSD, measculine, and alcohol to render subjects more vulnerable to interrogation. While Sub Project 124 studied the disassociative effects of inhaling carbon monoxide gas, or injecting various thyroid hormones.

[00:15:13]While most of MK Ultra's studies were conducted in clinical settings by licensed medical personnel, others were rather more unconventional. Perhaps the most infamous of these was Sub Project 35, aka Operation Midnight Climax, in which operative George Hunter White, a rough criminal character best known for infiltrating Chinese American drug rings, hired prostitutes to lure unwitting subjects to CIA safe houses and slipped them various psychoactive drugs, allowing agency researchers to study the effects of sex and drugs on the human psyche. At the 1954 convention of the American Psychological Association, MK Ultra officers discovered the work of Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Donald Heb of the Allen Memorial Institute, an early pioneer in the field of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to adapt and rewire itself under certain conditions in the early 1950s. Heb conducted a series of experiments involving sensory deprivation. McGill University students were paid $20, around $260 today, to lie in bed for days on end. They were fitted with dark goggles to block out their sight, cardboard tubes over their arms to prevent them from touching themselves, and headphones playing continuous buzzing sound. No human interaction was permitted except for a few minutes every day when they were fed and toileted by attending nurses. After three days of this treatment, subjects began to experience vivid, often frightening auditory and visual hallucinations. Despite this, however, many endured the ordeal for up to 16 days. Seeing potential in this technique for use in interrogation, the CIA looked more closely into Dr. Heb's work, at which point they discovered the even more promising research of his colleague, Dr. Ewin Cameron. In January of 1957, Sydney Gotautle launched Sub Project 68 of MK Ultra, funneling CIA money into Cameron's research via the fictitious Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. By this time, Cameron had moved on from his original psychic driving research to an even more extreme technique known as depatterning, which sought to cure schizophrenia and other psychosis by wiping a patient's psyche clean and rebuilding it from the ground up. on this one. In 1934, Hungarian American psychiatrist Lattislaw Maduna made the since debunked observation that schizophrenics suffered from epilepsy at lower rates than the general population.

[00:17:29]Hypothesizing from this that the two conditions were somehow antagonistic, Meduna began chemically inducing epilepsy-like convulsions in his patients using injections of CAM4. And later hypothesizing that the two conditions were somehow antagonistic, Meduna began chemically inducing epilepsy-like convulsions in his patients using injections of CAM4 and metrosol because sure why not. 7 years earlier, Austrian-American psychiatrist Manfred Sel noted how one of his schizophrenic patients who also suffered from diabetes emerged from a diabetic coma with notably improved clarity of mind. Based on this observation, he developed the technique of insulin shock therapy in which patients were given massive doses of insulin to induce a coma which was maintained for several hours before being reversed by the administration of glucose. This procedure was repeated daily for up to several weeks. However, all of this was labor and time inensive to administer and produce serious side effects. And so starting in the 1940s, they were gradually supplanted by electroconvulsive therapy or ECT aka electroshock therapy. Developed by Italian psychiatrist Uno Sunleti in 1938, this technique involved the application of powerful electric pulses to the patients temple to induce convulsions far quicker and more controllable than earlier methods. ECT quickly became a go-to treatment for a wide variety of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia. And while popular media, like the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, has painted ECT as outdated and barbaric, it is still occasionally used today to treat severe cases of major depression with patients being sedated and given muscle relaxants to prevent them from convulsing. However, Cameron's deattering technique went far beyond regular shock therapy. You see, one of the unfortunate side effects of ECT is memory loss, and it was precisely this effect upon which Cameron was counting.

[00:19:18]His original method involved using tranquilizing drugs like thorazine to place patients in a prolonged sleeping state for 20 to 22 hours per day over a period of 10 days. This was then followed by intensive rounds of ECT administered until all the patients to quote original delusional ideas and all other evidence of their schizophrenic behavior were completely wiped away.

[00:19:40]Unfortunately, this method had the side effect of wiping away quite a lot of their memories and even drastically altering their entire personalities, turning them into helpless, childlike blank slates with no knowledge of their own lives or identities and often suffering from aphasia, i.e. the inability to speak, impaired motor function, and even incontinence. As Cameron wrote, "The patient loses all recollection of the fact that he formerly possessed a space-time image which served to explain the events of the day to him and lives in the immediate present without a conceptual span limited to a few minutes and to entirely concrete events. At this point, patients entered what Cameron termed the phase of rehabilitation during which they were gradually allowed to reemerge from their amnesia with Cameron noting that patients display a considerably greater amnesia for his schizophrenic behavior than for his concurrent normal behavior in the period prior to treatment. During this period, patients were closely monitored by doctors and nurses, and any residual schizophrenia symptoms were treated with additional rounds of ECT. After about a month of recovery, the patient was discharged to their family and given frequent checkup appointments and further ECT treatments as required. In a 1959 paper, Cameron claimed that the procedure was highly effective, especially for severe cases of anxiety, obsessivempulsive disorder, or schizophrenia, and various personality disorders resistant to other forms of treatment for which recovery consists not in repair of damaged aspects of the individual's personality, but in a rearrangement. Indeed, in the paper, he stated that out of 16 schizophrenic patients subjected to deeppattering, 11 showed good results during follow-up appointments, though in many cases, some residual evidence of schizophrenia was noted. As time went on, Cameron's methods grew even more extreme, often combining depatterning with his older technique of psychic driving. For example, by 1959, the complete treatment procedure involved placing patients in an induced coma for up to 30 to 60 days, during which time they were made to listen to repetitive verbal cues over headphones. This was then followed by intensive sessions of ECT to wipe the patients psyche and yet more psychic driving sessions often administered under the influence of broomemides, thorazine, barbituates, PCP, and other drugs. The idea being to completely break down the patients psyches and rebuild them from the ground up in a more structured logical fashion.

[00:21:59]At this point, you're probably not going to be surprised to learn that despite Cameron's breezily optimistic reports, the actual results of his experiments were often horrific. Many patients emerged from depatterning psychologically and emotionally shattered. Their personalities erased or flattened or suffering from even worse psychosis and behavioral problems than when they were admitted to Cameron's care. Others like Velma Orlau admitted to the Allen Memorial with postpartum depression suffered lasting neurological and physical effects, requiring years to recover their memories or even relearn how to read, speak, or use the bathroom.

[00:22:32]Some, like the aforementioned snowblower salesman and loving father Charles Tanny, never recovered. His daughter Julie recalling, "He didn't know me or my two siblings. He remembered my mother, but he didn't remember he had children or that he had a business or anything. And he was very detached. That never changed. He never came back to the person he was before. Before it was always about us. He built skating rinks, took us to Belmont Park. When my father came home, it was just complete detachment that never went away. And for three children under 10 years old, that's very traumatic. At the age of 60, Charles Tanny suffered a massive stroke, possibly the result of the massive doses of ECT he received while at the Allen Memorial. The event left him unable to speak, write, or walk, forcing his family to care for him round the clock until his death in 1993 at the age of 78. As Julie Tanny later stated, "I paid the price for those experiments my whole life." Between 1957 and 1964, when Cameron's CIA funding finally dried up, an estimated 400 patients were subjected to depatterning, most of whom had been admitted for relatively minor afflictions and were never told what the experimental treatment entailed. And while some were genuinely helped by the procedure, this was almost certainly by accident. You see, around the time of the Montreal experiments, one of the sedative drugs commonly used by Cameron, thorazine, was found to be a highly effective antiscychotic and soon became the standard treatment for schizophrenia. It was thus likely the administration of this drug and not Cameron's depatterning techniques which led to the observed improvements in some of his patients symptoms. Even worse, Cameron was likely aware of this fact since the first major paper on the antiscychotic properties of thorazine by the aforementioned Dr. Hines Layman and GE Hanrahan was published in 1954, a full 3 years before Cameron published his own findings. Indeed, Cameron's methods were ultimately determined to be ineffective and were never adopted by the rest of the psychiatric community.

[00:24:28]Nor did Cameron's research produce an effective means of brainwashing or mindontrolling subjects, though certain elements of psychic driving and depatterning were integrated by the CIA and other government agencies into techniques for enhanced interrogation.

[00:24:42]As for the MK Ultra itself, the program officially came to an end in 1973. While two years later, many of its highly unethical activities were exposed by the United States Senate Select Committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligent activities, aka the Church Committee, along with other top secret CIA projects like Cointtelp Pro, which sought to undermine American civil rights organizations, Operation Mockingbird, a program of domestic media manipulation and propaganda dissemination, and Project Shamrock, in which American telecom companies secretly agreed to share telephone traffic with the National Security Agency.

[00:25:16]So, what happened after? Did Cameron or anyone else involved suffer any consequences for these rather unethical practices? For decades, the victims of the Montreal experiments and their families suffered in silence and confusion, having little idea of what had actually been done to their loved ones. But after a 1980 episode of the Canadian Investigative News Program, The Fifth Estate, exposed the Montreal Experiments to the public, many of the victims began filing lawsuits against the Canadian government, McGill University, and the CIA, demanding compensation for the harm inflicted by the Allen Memorial Institute. While outofc court settlements resulted in several victims receiving $750,000 from the CIA in 1988 and $100,000 from the Canadian government in 1992. None of the agencies involved took any responsibility or apologized for the Montreal experiments with the official Canadian government statement reading, "The government of Canada believes in taking a fair and compassionate approach to victims and their families. In this case, the government acknowledges the damages and painful scars of the victims who underwent the depatterning treatment technique as well as the impact on their families and has taken action to provide assistance to those affected. As a result, in 2017, 77 plaintiffs led by Julie Tanny filed a class- action lawsuit against the Canadian and American governments. After two years of complex legal battles, the plaintiffs ultimately won the case, while soon afterwards, a Canadian judge ruled a further 250 victims would be allowed to seek compensation from the Canadian government. As for the mastermind behind the Montreal Experiments, Dr. Cameron abruptly left the Allen Memorial Institute in 1964, allegedly due to internal politics. Most of his research papers were unceremoniously thrown out, meaning much of what happened behind the institute's walls remains mysterious to this day. Nonetheless, Cameron continued to enjoy an illustrious career serving as president of the American and Canadian Psychiatry Associations, the World Psychiatric Association, the American Psychopathological Association, and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. He died on September the 8th, 1967 at the age of 67, suffering a heart attack while hiking with his son.

[00:27:20]At no point in his life was Cameron ever held to account for nor did he express any remorse over his highly unethical and psychologically devastating experiments. However, it must be remembered that despite the drafting of the Nerburgg Code in 1947, this was merely a set of guidelines and not legally binding with the principle of informed consent in human medical research not being fully embraced until much later in the century. Furthermore, the strategic pressure of the Cold War and the relentless technical and scientific optimism of the 1950 and 1960s fostered a widespread attitude of the ends justify the means among many academics and government officials. And while today Cameron is inextricably linked with the tragic and disturbing legacy of MK Ultra, it is unlikely that he even knew his research was being funded by the CIA. In the contract signed between himself and the fictitious society for the investigation of human ecology, Cameron agreed to study the breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patients behavior by means of particularly intense electroshocks depatterning. Two, the intensive repetition 16 hours a day for 6 to 7 days of the pre-arranged verbal signal. Three, during the period of intensive repetition, the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation. Four, repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient after the conclusion of the period into continuous sleep for 7 to 10 days. This matched exactly the work Cameron had already been conducting, and aside from funding, it does not appear that the CIA had any influence on the direction of his research. In the end, Cameron's experiments were highly structured, rigorous, and grounded in what were then the most up-to-date scientific theories.

[00:28:52]Theories which tragically proved to be insanely wrong. Indeed, most of Cameron's colleagues at the Allen Memorial remembered him as conscientious, meticulous, and good-natured with fellow psychiatrist Dr. Peter Roer describing him as a genuine fellow, a typical Scott in some ways. Sometimes though, in the Allen, if he took a dislike to someone, he could be very vengeful. But he was a very good psychiatrist, right up to date. His way of working was well within the limits we had at the time. I think if he were around today, he would be able to defend his actions. And speaking of defending actions and informed consent, one of many cases that spurred a change on this one was the story of Dr. Chester Southam, who injected hundreds of people with cancer without their knowledge just to see what exactly would happen. He defended himself in this, essentially stating that telling the patients he was doing this would have just stressed them out needlessly. He goes on, "It is not necessary to present the subject with what you feel are inconsequential data, and it is unethical to ram down his throat information which is detrimental to his condition." While he did get his medical license suspended for a year for this, two years later, he was elected as the president of the American Cancer Society. So, yeah, the past, everybody.

[00:30:02]For more on this rather darkly fascinating story yet again showing the past was the worst as well as how exactly it's possible to catch cancer from someone, see our video injecting people with cancer without their consent linked here. Thank you for watching and don't forget to subscribe.