Book by:
Naomi Klein
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007.

Review by:
Richard Peet
Graduate School of Geography
Clark University

  In the 1950s, McGill University’s Allen Memorial Institute performed a series of experiments on an unsuspecting group of psychiatric patients. The experiments involved isolating patients, administering huge amounts of electronic shocks mixed with drug cocktails, and then feeding them recorded messages for 16 to 20 hours a day, for weeks on end. The psychiatrist involved, a certain Dr Ewan Cameron -- “Dr. Shock I” -- believed that drastic therapy would “completely de-pattern” the patients’ minds, enabling Cameron to rebuild new personalities on the resulting clean slate. The actual effects were disastrous – schizophrenia, hallucinations, regression to childhood, thumb-sucking, lives ruined, people with previously minor complaints loosing all touch with reality. Oh Canada! Cameron’s experiments were funded by the US CIA as part of the Agency’s cold war effort at developing special interrogation techniques to use on prisoners accused of being communist agents – 44 universities and 12 hospitals were involved an investigation into brain washing that eventually was publicly abandoned as practically useless and a “terrible mistake”.