Donald Ewen Cameron

Donald Ewen Cameron
circa 1967
Born	(1901-12-24)24 December 1901 Bridge of Allan, Perthshire, UK
Died	(1967-09-08)8 September 1967 Lake Placid, New York, US
Scientific career
Fields	Psychiatry

Donald Ewen Cameron ((1901-12-24)24 December 1901–(1967-09-08)8 September 1967) was a twentieth-century Scottish-American psychiatrist. Cameron was involved in Project MKULTRA, United States Central Intelligence Agency's unsuccessful research on mind control.

Early Life

Donald Ewen Cameron was commonly referred to as Ewen, was born in Bridge Allan, Scotland in 1901, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His Scottish education culiminated in 1925 when he received his diploma in psychological medicine. that same year, at the Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow, he became influenced by Sir David Henderson who, in turn, has been taught by Adolph Meyer - a psychiatrist whose broadened perspective on psychiatry was to influence Cameron for the rest of his life. Sir David Henderson in 1919 would become the director-General of the Red Cross in Geneva and this tie would continue with Cameron throughout his career, in Cameron's and the CIA's ties to the Red Cross. In 1926, Cameron left for America to work with Meyer at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. At the Phipps Clinic he held the Henderson research scholarship in psychiatry for two years until he left for the famous Burghoelizi Clinic in Switzerland to study under Hans W. Meier the successor of Eugen Bleuler, another man who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking.

In Switzerland, Cameron met the principal psychiatrist of the province of Manitoba, A.T. Mathers, who convinced the young Cameron to come to Manitoba, a place not at the forefront of psychiatry in the 1920's, but Cameron managed to have a successful career. Cameron was in charge of the admissions unit in Brandon, Manitoba and he organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the Canadian province. In the city of Brandon and surrounding area, Cameron established ten functioning clinics and this model was utilized as the forerunner of 1960's community health models.

In 1926 he was serving as Assistant Medical Officer, Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital. In 1933 he married Jean Rankine, a competitive tennis player and Lecturer in Mathematics at Glasgow, and together they would have three sons and one daughter.

In 1936, he moved to Massachusetts to become director of the research division at Worcester State Hospital, and from 1939 to 1943 he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Albany Medical College in Albany, New York, and at the Russell Sage School of Nursing, also in the Albany area. During those years, Cameron began to expand on his thoughts about the interrelationships of mind and body, and developed a reputation as a psychiatrist who could bridge the gap between the organic, structural neurologists, and the psychiatrists whose knowledge of anatomy was limited to maps of the mind as opposed to maps of the brain. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became known as an authority in his areas of concentration.

Cameron focused primarily on biological descriptive psychiatry and applied the British and European schools and models of the practice. Cameron followed these schools of psychiatry in demanding that mental disturbances were diseases and are somatic in nature. All psychological illness were thus hardwired and a product of the body and the direct result of the patients biological structure rather than caused by social, societal or family relationships. The characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes, emerging from the brain. It is at this juncture that Cameron began to more and more interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain in order to control and understand the processes of memory. Cameron furthermore, wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging. He believed that the aged brain suffered from psychosis and thus would need to prematurely age brains in order to observe the effect.

In 1936, Cameron published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry. It introduced his lifelong belief that psychiatry should strive to approach the study of human behavior in a rigorous, scientific fashion. Clearly rooted in biology, his theories of behavior stressed the unity of the organism with the environment. He outlines the experimental method and the research design. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method.

World War II

"It is not simply against future conspiracies of evil men which we have to guard ourselves but it is against ourselves, against our weaknesses and faults in our own social order, in our own ways of living against which we have to be on continual guard." - Donald Ewen Cameron (96)

In 1943, during WWII, Cameron returned to Canada. Cameron was invited to McGill University in Montreal at the urgings of the world-famous neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield. There, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, money fro J.D. McConnell of the Montreal Star, and a gift of the mansion of Sir Allan on Mount Royal, the Allan Memorial Institute was founded. For the next twenty-one years, Cameron's vision, determination, and adroit political maneuvering led to the astounding growth of the Institute. Cameron recruited Psychiatrists from Europe and around the world to build the psychiatry program at McGill. The team included psychoanalysts, social psychiatrists and biologists. Cameron developed a network of psychiatric services for Montreal.

In 1945 because of his reputation as a psychiatrists and the success of his instituting of psychiatric programs throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, Cameron was invited to Nuremberg to evaluate Rudolph Hess. This was an opportunity for Cameron to represent the new system and networks of psychiatry that he had instituted in Canada. He was joined at Nuremberg by the Soviets, Krasnushkin, Sepp and Kurshakov, Lord Moran, Rees and Riddoch from England; Lewis, Schroeder and himself from North America; and Professor Delay from France. In Germany, Cameron observed and recorded the methods utilized in the war, such as tortures, authority, powerlessness, individual motivations of prisoners and guards, and that the behaviors could be monitored by social scientists that were brave enough to look at the conditions experienced by those who suffered through torture and murder during WWII and with a concentration on Rudolph Hess' human experiments. Cameron was asked to assess both Hess' experiments and his sanity.

Before his arrival in Nuremberg Cameron wrote a paper titled The Social Reorganization of Germany. Cameron argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized. His analysis of German culture was that it is comprised of people who had the need for status, that they worshiped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and had a hostile fear of other countries. The paper continued to state that German culture and its people will have offspring that in 30 years from 1945, would be the biggest threat to world peace. As a consequence the West would have to take measures to reorganize German society to prevent the coming of the offspring that would threaten world peace and order. Cameron focused on destroying the social organization of Germany which throughout history had repeatedly given birth to fearsome aggression. Cameron wanted to remove the social order of Germany that continually gave rise to the monstrosities of WWII. His arguments made it precisely a problem particular to the people of Germany and of the German race. Other psychiatric diagnoses of Germany took place at the same time such as Richard Max Brickner's, Is Germany Incurable(1943), Paul Winkler's, The thousand-year conspiracy: secret Germany behind the mask(1943), Fredrick Martin Stern, The Junker Meanace(1945), Sebastian Haffner's, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany(1941) and Sigrid Lillian Schultz, Germany will try it again(1944). Along with Cameron's own testament to the experiences of life in WWII Germany, these texts gave the West both a historical and psychological picture of the Germans and the German race. Brickner asked the newly former United Nations to look at Germany as "the ward of the world". It was Cameron's expertise in biological psychiatric practice that was able to win the interpretation of the necessary measures to enforce against the German people after WWII and to be applied by the allied occupying forces in Germany. Furthermore, it is through Cameron's expertise at the Nuremberg trials and the Red Cross, that we are given the knowledge of the Medical regime in Germany during WWII. Cameron's purpose in Germany was to make sure that the country would never rise as a military threat after the war.

After Nuremberg

After Nuremberg Cameron published the text titled Nuremberg and Its Significance. In this Cameron hoped to accomplish a suitable method to re-instate a form of justice in Germany that could organize society to keep it from recreating the German that was born before and during WWII. Cameron viewed German society throughout history as continually giving rise to fearsome aggression. He came up with the idea that if he confronted the world and the Germans with the atrocities committed during the war, the World and the Germans would refrain from what were their repeated acts of extreme aggression. If the common population of Germany saw the atrocities of WWII they would surely submit to the re-organized system of justice that Cameron had created because the evidence at Nuremberg proved the Germans to be guilty. It was Cameron's expertise in psychiatry that decided both the presence or absence of German psychosis and the world's verdict of the Germans being guilty for WWII and the atrocities committed. Without Cameron and the others on the Nuremberg Jury and Trials, the agents who exactly committed the atrocities would not be clear. Cameron would decide that it was the German who would be most likely to commit the atrocities due to their historical, biological, racial and cultural past and their particular psychological nature. All Germans on trial would be assessed according to the likeliness for committing the crime. All accused were German and Cameron's expertise in understanding the psychiatric nature of Germans was utilized to discover guilt. It was Cameron's responsibility for portraying to the world that the events and atrocities did occur and they were committed by the Germans and it was his expertise that would distinguish between a German, the threat, and non-German, non-threat. Cameron's authority as a psychiatrist allowed him to reveal to the world what had truly happened and it is by his authority that the world is given a picture of WWII. As a result Cameron diagnosed Germany as the race most likely to rise and commit atrocities again because of their inherent nature. Cameron began to develop broader theories of society, developed new concepts of human relations to replace the psychiatric concepts of old that were deemed as dangerous and outdated. These became the basis of a new social and behavioral science that Cameron would later institute through the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations. With results of the Manhattan project, Cameron feared that without proper re-organization of society atomic weapons could fall into the hands of new fearsome aggressors.(97) Cameron argued that it was necessary for behavioral scientists to act as the social planners of society and that the United Nations could act as an conduit for implementing his ideas for psychiatric elements to global governance and politics.

Donald Ewen Cameron is best known for his MK-ULTRA-related mind-control and behavior modification research for the CIA. Cameron was President of the American Psychiatric Association in 1952-1953.

Project MKULTRA

Main article: Project MKULTRA

Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York, and was involved in experiments in Canada for Project MKULTRA, a United States based CIA-directed mind control program which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. He is unrelated to another CIA psychiatrist, Dr. Alan Cameron, who helped pioneer psychological profiling of world leaders during the 1970s.

Naomi Klein states in her book "The Shock Doctrine" that Dr Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture." , and citing a book from Alfred W. McCoy it further says that "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Dr. Donald O. Hebb earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method..

It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–47.

References

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