On Mount Royal stands a gray stone mansion with a tower, built so its owner could watch his steamships come into Montreal Harbor. Inside, there was a door that patients walked past with their backs pressed against the wall. The doctor behind that door was being paid by the CIA. The money, $62,045, was routed through a front organization under a memo stating he would remain completely unwitting.
This is the story of the sleep room, the hospital ward the CIA secretly paid for. It begins in 1951, with a word: brainwashing. The term first appeared in print in 1950, in the Miami Daily News, under the byline of Edward Hunter, a man later described as a CIA propaganda operator working undercover as a journalist. Sources disagree on the exact date, but the effect was certain.
Within months, American officials were alarmed by prisoners of war returning from Korea and by behavior behind the Iron Curtain that nobody could explain. Governments wanted to understand it. On April 13, 1953, the CIA approved a program called MK-Ultra to do exactly that. But two years before that approval, the fear had already come to Montreal.
On June 1, 1951, a small group of officials and scientists met in secret at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Among those present were Ormond Solandt, chairman of Canada’s Defense Research Board; Donald Hebb, chairman of psychology at McGill; British defense scientist Sir Henry Tizard; and Carroll Haskins of the CIA. The subject, as recorded, was confession, something the minutes called menticide and psychological coercion. That same year, the Defense Research Board gave Hebb a secret contract titled “Experimental Studies in Change of Attitude.
” What the money bought was a cubicle, eight feet long, four feet wide, six feet high, with a bed, a pillow, and an air conditioner. Paid student volunteers lay inside wearing translucent goggles and cardboard tubes over their hands. They were paid twenty dollars a day and could leave whenever they liked. At first, the longest anyone lasted was three hours.
Eventually, some managed six days. And some began to see and hear things that were not there. Meanwhile, at the Allan Memorial Institute, a different kind of laboratory was taking shape. Its building, a mansion called Ravenscrag, had been given to the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1940 and reopened as a psychiatric institute in 1943.
That July, McGill appointed a Scottish psychiatrist as its founding director. His name was Ewen Cameron. Cameron believed illness lived in patterns, habits of thought worn into the brain. Clear the old paths, he argued, and the mind could be rebuilt along healthier ones.
He called the clearing “depatterning,” and the rebuilding “psychic driving. ” In 1956, he set out the method in the American Journal of Psychiatry. It proposed prolonged sleep under sodium amytal combined with recorded messages played ten to twenty hours a day. The isolation of his patients copied the McGill cubicle almost exactly.
Sight, hearing, and touch were cut back. Talk was limited to two brief interviews a day, and nurses were told not to speak to them at all. Unlike the paid students, they could not leave. Within forty-eight hours, most had become disturbed.
More than half began hallucinating. Cameron published this as progress. It was not. Cameron began psychic driving in 1953.
A year earlier, he was president of the American Psychiatric Association. By 1961, he had founded the World Psychiatric Association and served as its first president. Five presidencies in thirteen years. When a family doctor in Quebec City or Winnipeg wanted the best for a struggling patient, the best was on the mountain in Montreal.
The warnings came earlier than most accounts admit. O. M. Solandt, the Defense Research Board chairman who had sat at the Ritz-Carlton table, later stated in an affidavit that his associate’s wife was treated at the Allan and depatterned.
After seeing her, he decided the board would have no part in that kind of work. In his view, Cameron lacked the sense of humanity a good doctor needed. The second warning came from inside the CIA. In 1957, the agency’s Inspector General reported that some of its activities were professionally unethical and in some instances bordered on the illegal.
Both warnings were filed. The work went on. So who ended up in the sleep room? Not the patients the theory was written for.
Cameron’s published work was framed around schizophrenia, but the court record describes candidates drawn from the general patient population: schizophrenics, but also depressives, neurotics, and alcoholics, with no systematic selection at all. There were twice as many women as men. The selection was produced by convenience. The patients were simply there.
There is no ledger that answers how many people passed through. The Washington Post put the number in the CIA-funded series at fifty-three people treated from 1957 to 1961. A 1962 depatterning paper reported thirty patients averaging sixty-six electroshocks each, nearly two thousand shocks inside a single published study. In November 1960 alone, the Allan administered 766 electroshock treatments to a population of roughly one hundred patients.
Across the year, the commission counted 12,000. The commission found the Allan used more electroshock than any other hospital it studied. The first tool was sleep. Patients were given large doses of sedatives and held in an artificial coma.
The second tool was electricity. The Pageton Russell method used one strong shock to trigger a convulsion, then five more during it. Cameron added up to nine. He gave it two or three times a day.
According to the Cooper report commissioned by the Canadian government, depatterning could run to sixty treatments over thirty days at twenty to thirty times the intensity of a normal course. The third tool was silence. In one case Cameron recorded in 1958, a patient was prepared with thirty-five days of sensory isolation, then given 101 days of positive driving. Cameron’s own note on the outcome says, “No favorable results were obtained.
”
The fourth tool was the voice. In negative driving, a patient’s own words about herself were played back to her. Statements like “You are selfish. ” Negative driving could last up to sixty days.
Then came positive driving. “You are lovable. ” The messages were repeated between a quarter of a million and half a million times. The tool built to write turned out to be the one that failed.
The tools built to erase worked exactly as intended. Some patients wore football helmets wired to tape recorders that repeated a phrase for hours on end. The fifth tool was chemistry. To keep patients still during driving, Cameron used curare, a paralytic, injected at doses up to 150 milligrams.
Patients were also given Sernyl to block sensory input. None of these tools replaced the one before it. They were stacked. When one failed, another was added on top.
There is a popular version of this story in which the CIA designed the sleep room. The dates say otherwise. Psychic driving began in 1953. The money arrived in 1957, when a CIA officer named John Gittinger read Cameron’s paper and told a colleague to ask Cameron for a grant application.
The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was a front. In February, the agency approved $38,180. In March 1959 came $19,090. In August 1960, a final $4,775.
The same project memo carried a further instruction: agency staff would not contact, visit, or discuss the work with Cameron except under extreme circumstances. The agency did not invent the method. It bought a share of something already underway. The people behind the numbers have names.
Louis Weinstein was a prosperous Montreal businessman who went to the Allan for a mild depression. According to his son, he came out with no memory and no life, and lost his business and everything that went with it. Gail Kastner was a McGill nursing student. Decades later, the writer Naomi Klein found her in an old age home in Montreal, cut off from her family.
Velma Orlikow was admitted after the birth of her daughter. She later said she was given LSD fourteen times over two years without knowing it. Her daughter says she thought Cameron was God. She sued the CIA for one million dollars.
The case dragged on for eight years. Velma Orlikow died in 1990. The CIA stopped paying in 1960, but Ottawa’s grant for prolonged repetition ran until 1964. The Canadian government was still paying for psychic driving four years after the spy agency had walked away.
On November 16, 1992, the federal government issued an order authorizing payments of $100,000 to people depatterned at the Allan between 1950 and 1965. The payments were ex gratia, legal language for paying someone without admitting you owe them anything. 332 people applied. 77 were paid.
What Ottawa gave Cameron to do the work was about $162,000. What Ottawa paid the survivors it accepted was 7. 7 million. The end did not come as a single event.
In 1963, Cameron admitted to the American Psychopathological Association that his research had taken a wrong turning. He said patients could be exposed to a few short sentences half a million times and still be unable to repeat them. The whole method rested on the idea that repetition could write something into an emptied mind. Its author was now telling his colleagues the words had not even been remembered.
In August 1964, Cameron left Montreal. His successor ended the experiments immediately. He then commissioned the first follow-up study of Cameron’s former patients. Sixty percent reported a persisting amnesia stretching back anywhere from six months to ten years.
Seventy-five percent were judged to have an unsatisfactory or impoverished social adjustment. They left the building. They did not get their lives back. On September 8, 1967, Ewen Cameron died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in New York State.
He was sixty-five. No charge was ever brought against him or anyone else. Nobody was tried and nobody was sentenced. For a decade after Cameron’s death, the sleep room was simply part of the Allan’s past.
Then, in the summer of 1977, the silence broke by accident. Financial records connected to MK-Ultra that had escaped the destruction order turned up. On August 2, 1977, The New York Times ran the story on its front page. It named Cameron.
The next day, two Senate subcommittees held a joint hearing. On August 4, the question reached the Canadian House of Commons, where a member of Parliament asked whether the government knew the CIA had used Canadians for brainwashing experiments. The Secretary of State for External Affairs answered first with a joke about personality changes caused by the opposition benches. Since then, the legal fight has stayed alive.
A class action filed in January 2019 was authorized on July 31, 2025 by the Quebec Superior Court against the government of Canada, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and McGill. As of 2019, none of the institutions involved had a formal apology. The Sleep Room was one of 149 MK-Ultra subprojects, one entry in a pattern that ran through hospitals, universities, and prisons on both sides of the border. Today, the building still stands at 1025 Pine Avenue West.
The tower remains, gray stone and solid, standing over the main entrance as it did in 1863. It was built to watch ships come in. It watched patients come in instead. It watched them leave without their years.
You can still stand on Pine Avenue and look up at it. The oldest witness to everything in this story, and the only one that was never asked to prove anything.