The CIA paid for a psychiatrist in Montreal to play the same taped sentence to sedated patients, up to 16 hours a day.

His name was Donald Ewen Cameron, and he wasn’t some back-alley quack working out of a basement. (That would almost be more comforting.) He was the first director of the Allan Memorial Institute, the psychiatric teaching hospital at McGill University, and the first chairman of McGill’s psychiatry department. People went to him for help.

In 1957, a woman from Winnipeg named Velma Orlikow checked into the Allan Memorial because she was depressed after having a baby. Her family says she was injected with LSD and made to listen to Cameron’s voice on tape, for hours, on repeat. Years later, her granddaughter put it this way: “She was very jumpy and her nerves were just shot.”

So, let’s talk about what Cameron was doing to people....

What was psychic driving?

Cameron wrote up his method in a 1956 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry titled “Psychic Driving.” The patient lay sedated, sometimes immobilized, while a tape loop played one message over and over. A typical course was 10 days of negative messages aimed at whatever Cameron decided was wrong with your personality, followed by 10 days of positive messages meant to replace it. A single statement could be repeated hundreds of thousands of times.

Cameron also believed he could erase a person and start over. His depatterning treatment meant electroshock at up to 75 times the normal intensity, large doses of drugs like LSD, and drug-induced comas, one of which reportedly ran 86 days. The goal was to wipe out a patient’s memories and take them back to a childlike state, and then play the tapes to build someone new on top of what was left.

So, to be clear, a doctor with a hospital, a university title, and government money behind him was trying to erase people’s minds on purpose so he could rebuild them the way he wanted them.

Who paid for it?

From 1957 to 1964, the CIA funded Cameron’s work through a front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. The Canadian government is believed to have put in about half a million dollars of its own between 1950 and about 1965. In 1977, the CIA had to answer for it in front of the US Senate, in a hearing on MKUltra, the agency’s mind control program.

I want to be fair here, because the record is more complicated than “evil doctor works for the CIA.” A 2023 paper in the journal History of Psychiatry by Jordan Torbay argues that Cameron started these experiments before the CIA ever contacted him, and that he probably didn’t know where the money was coming from. That may well be true. The people writing the checks knew exactly what they were paying for, though. Torbay writes that the CIA saw this work as a possible Cold War weapon.

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What happened to his patients?

In 1988, nine of Cameron’s former patients got compensation from the US government, and Velma Orlikow was one of them. She died in 1990. In 1992, Canada paid $100,000 each to 77 survivors, and her family got nothing, because she wasn’t alive to collect it. More than 250 other people who applied were turned down, some because they couldn’t produce their medical records and some because the government decided they hadn’t suffered enough.

Think about that for a fucking second. You were drugged into a coma and played tapes until you didn’t know who you were, and then the government wanted to see your paperwork.

Why does any of this matter now?

Back in 2021, I wrote that repetition is the main way that thought control is enacted through the news. I still think that, and Cameron is the clearest proof I’ve found of why. His entire method came down to one idea - if you say the same thing enough times to someone who isn’t in a position to question it, it eventually sticks.

Nobody has to sedate you for that to work. In 2018, Sinclair Broadcast Group had anchors at its local stations all over the country read the same script on air, word for word, including the line “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” Somebody cut the clips together, and it’s dozens of different faces saying the same sentence in the same rhythm. If you only ever watched your own local station, you had no way of knowing you were hearing a script.

My personal opinion: the news running in the background while you cook dinner, while you’re tired and not really paying attention, is the closest thing most of us have to Cameron’s tape loop. You’re not strapped down and pumped full of drugs. You’re just not listening closely enough to argue with it.

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How do you catch a loop working on you?

When you hear the exact same phrase twice in one day from two different sources, write it down, along with where you heard it. You’ll start to see how often it happens, and how fast.

Pay attention to the phrases that come out of your own mouth before you’ve thought them through. When you catch one, ask yourself where you heard it first. Often enough, the answer might be a TV you weren’t even watching.

Don’t leave the news on in the background. If you’re going to watch it, watch it on purpose, with your full attention, so the part of you that argues is awake for it and your critical thinking abilities are fully engaged.

Tell me in the comments what phrase you’ve caught on a loop lately. I want to know how many of us are hearing the same ones.

What was psychic driving?

Who paid for it?

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:

What happened to his patients?

Why does any of this matter now?

How do you catch a loop working on you?

Further Reading

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The CIA Funded a Psychiatrist Who Played Tape…