The Sleep Room

The Sleep Room was a 1998 Canadian television movie about experiments on Canadian mental patients that were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s by Donald Ewen Cameron and funded by the CIA's MKUltra program. It originally aired as a miniseries and is based on the book In The Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada by Anne Collins.

The first half of the film details the evolution of Cameron's experiments using a procedure he called psychic driving which included continuous loop taped messages while the patients were under the influence of curare and LSD, as well as intensive electroshock treatments. The second half covers the legal efforts of the patients and their attorneys in the 1980s to obtain a settlement. The film was directed by Anne Wheeler and starred Leon Pownall, Macha Grenon, Nicola Cavendish, Donald Moffat, Diego Matamoros and Marina Orsini. It won several Gemini awards, including best television movie, best direction, best performance, best sound, and outstanding special effects in make-up.[1][2][3][4]

Plot

Dr. Ewen Cameron, as the head of the Allan Memorial Institute in Quebec, Canada, was interested in the repatterning of the brains of those with mental illnesses. He hypothesized that mental illness could be attributed to learning the wrong responses to situations. Cameron's study aimed to de-pattern the brain into an essentially infantile state, before re-patterning the brain to learn the correct responses to situations. The infantile state included a loss of the ability to speak, walk or control one's bowels and was generally irreversible.

Cameron's primary method of de-patterning the brain was to place patients in a medically induced coma for several weeks at a time, while delivering powerful electric shocks used to further disorient the brain. This effectively wiped the minds and memories of many of his patients and is one of the greatest ethical dilemmas of this study.

References
  1. Ray Conlogue, "'The Sleep Room's Missing Memories", The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 1998-01-10, page C2
  2. "The Sleep Room", The Canadian Historical Review, Volume 80, Number 4, December 1999 pp. 698-705
  3. Remarks by James C. Turner Inauguration of the Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. Chair of Public Interest Law April 12, 1999
  4. Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, Gemini Awards Database Archived 2016-11-21 at the Wayback Machine


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