Donald Ewen Cameron
Donald Ewen Cameron | |
|---|---|
 circa 1967 | |
| Born | 24 December 1901[1] |
| Died | 8 September 1967[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychiatry |
Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901[1]–8 September 1967[1]) was a twentieth-century Scottish-American psychiatrist. Cameron was involved in Project MKULTRA, United States Central Intelligence Agency's unsuccessful research on mind control.[2]
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 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.
During the WWII in 1943, 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 monstrosity of the WWII. His arguments made it precisely a a problem particular to the German People.
In 1933[3] he married Jean Rankine, a competitive tennis player [4] and Lecturer in Mathematics at Glasgow, and together they would have three sons and one daughter.[5]
In 1926 he was serving as Assistant Medical Officer, Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital.[6] 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
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.[7]
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." [8], 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..[9]
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.[10]
References
- ^ a b c d "Obituary Notices". British Medical Journal. 3 (5568): 803–804. 1967-09-23. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 1843238.
- ^ Ross, Colin. Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality Disorder by Psychiatrists. Manitou Communications. ISBN 978-0970452511.
- ^ Collins, Anne (1988), In the sleep room: the story of the CIA brainwashing experiments in Canada, Lester & Orpen Dennys, p. 64
- ^ "Scottish Championships". The Argus. Melbourne, Vic. Monday 26 August 1929.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ "D. Ewen Cameron, M.D., F.R.C.P.{C}". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 97 (16): 984–986. 1967-10-14. ISSN 0820-3946. PMC 1923436.
- ^ Journal of Mental Science. 72: 304. 1926. ISSN 0368-315X.
{{cite journal}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - ^ Released Cia Interrogation Tapes!
- ^ Klein, N., "The Shock Doctrine", p. 39, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2007
- ^ Klein, N., "The Shock Doctrine", p. 41, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2007
- ^ Marks, John (1979). The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. New York: Times Books. pp. 140–150. ISBN 0-8129-0773-6.