Typical Rebellious Teenager

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A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy. A very personal and disturbing scene.

Persons of interest, obsessed with role-playing and the occult.

"We're here now. I can smell blood." From Sony Music Entertainment and Em William Phelps LLC, Fatal Fantasy, available now on the range, search for Fatal Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts. Warning. This series includes discussion of inhumane medical experimentation, including on children. Violence, sexual assault, abuse of children, and cultural genocide.

“Why did you stop it? Why did you do this to anybody?”

That's what I want to know. Why? Imagine this. You're 16. You have a new stepmother. You've grown up in one city, but your

father is now asking the entire family to move to another.

You're upset and you run away from home, but you get caught. And the consequences are life-changing. "They came to visit me once and I didn't recognize them. I had no idea who they were, because I was so drunk, I didn't know anything." Now, you're in a place. You mentally and physically kept escape.

"They had people to catch us. We wanted to run, but where was we run to?" This is Project Mind Control. A series about experiments in Canada, the U.S. and the UK, that involved attempting to control people's minds. "People work like zombies in the hallway." "I was cognitive of the fact that I was crazy."

"I said, "You'll be stuck here for the rest of your days." "She threatened to jump out the dorm room window." "What they did, ruined lives, killed people." It is a story featuring secret CIA meetings and shocking allegations of Catholic nuns supplying psychiatric institutions with orphans to be experimented on.

Indigenous children being disappeared and buried in secret in the middle of the night. And thousands of patients, unknowingly, being part of experiments, were they were given recklessly high doses of tranquilizers and electro-shocks. A coordinated effort to build a world where minds could be erased and reprogrammed. I'm Dr. Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist and memory expert.

I'm also Canadian, and this series will take us into some of the darkest moments in Canada's history. With stories of exploitation and suffering, the full extent of which has only recently come to light. "I don't even remember how we age.

“I don't remember that at all, and that bothers me a lot that I can't remember that."”

We're vulnerable people we're used to test dangerous ideas. "And what was he hoping to achieve by erasing the memory?" One of those people is Lana Ponting. "What we were going to be like, we're going to be his puppets and do exactly what he says. All our files were full of lies."

Lana is 85 and lives with her cat. "Her name is Keaches, but I call her little girl. There's some reason there was a song many, many, many years ago when I was a kid called Debbie's little girl." The song she's referring to is by the Mills Brothers. It was released in 1958, the year at all went wrong for Lana.

"Yeah, I remember singing it.

Because my real mom died and my dad married a lady from England."

“Then, her father moved the family from Ottawa to Montreal.”

And Lana did not like Montreal. "I wanted to go back to Ottawa, I kept burning away from home."

"My father and I had issues, but we basically got along."

Lana ran away from home multiple times. And in April of that year, she ran away for the last time. As well as hearing from Lana herself, you'll also be hearing extracts from an affidavit. A statement of fact swore and before an authorized official usually a lawyer. The affidavit was swore in by Lana in 2022 and is voiced by an actor.

"I was a typical rebellious teenager. I got picked up by the police in downtown, and they phone my parents."

“Lana's memories at this time are fractured, and it will soon become clear why.”

But there's one name she vividly remembers. "Judgenical fun. I was told that he was responsible for putting me into the island." The Alan, a prestigious psychiatric institution in Montreal. But why would a teenage runaway end up there?

The Alan Institute is on a hill, surrounded by trees, overlooking the city of Montreal. It is a building that doesn't look like a hospital, because it was in fact built to be a home for a very wealthy Canadian man. Who wanted it to look like a Scottish castle. Think, gray bricks, a green copper roof, and a heavy iron gate. I did not like the outside of the building.

It was scary looking.

“It's a beautiful house, but when Lana was admitted, it was April, which in Montreal doesn't mean flowers and green grass.”

It means big snow banks. Everything has been dead and frozen for months. Things are just starting to thought. But it's still cold and the snow is no longer white and pretty. But dirty and icy.

Inside, I noticed a smell, a strange chemical smell. And then she found herself in the office of a very prominent psychiatrist. Dr. Donald Yuan Cameron was the director of the Alan Memorial Institute. Dr. Cameron was originally from Scotland, then moved to the U.S. and Canada. Cameron was an interesting figure.

That's a meritist professor of sociology at UC San Diego, Professor Andrew Skull. He is an expert on the history of psychiatry. Very much an authority figure, somebody who rose to be the first president of the world's psychiatric association, as well as president of the American Psychiatric Association. So, not a fabric figure, somebody at the center of the profession.

In an era where the wood, basically what you call a consultant psychiatrist, was God. This was a man with an international illustrious career. Every time I look at a teacher of Dr. Cameron, it makes me very, very angry that he did this to me. And he did it to everyone.

It was always very fascinated by what the future held for his all.

It was always having a book on science fiction by the bedside. Dr. Cameron's son Duncan spoke with Emory Severtson and Ben Brock Johnson. The hosts of W. B. U. R. Madness back in 2020. Duncan appears relaxed and happy to be sharing the stories of his father. Through laughter, he tells the hosts how much his father loved science fiction.

One of the science fiction books that was popular at the time was Brave New World, a book written by Aldous Huxley. In it, a drug called Soma is provided by the government which pacifies anxiety and doubt. From infancy, the people in this fictional world also undergo hypnopedia, sleep teaching, which shapes their beliefs to be in line with the government's wishes.

He was fascinated with the future in his own field of psychiatry, medicine.

And, you know, government, he was always interested in the future.

If he had a choice, he would have kept living forever.

All about controlling people's minds with drugs and new technologies.

He called it "psychic driving".

“He believed that you could essentially cure someone's mental illness by erasing their memory fully.”

A complete factory reset on someone's brain. And then, building it back up from scratch, however you wanted it. And the underlying logic, such as it is, is that that then allows you to reconstruct the personality from the ground. Professor Andrew Scott. Now, we're going to wipe it literally create a lucky and tabloor raza.

A complete blank slate on which we're then going to impose this new set of beliefs. A blank slate.

Dr. Swartz was based down in a pool of blood.

A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy. A very person and disturbing scene. Persons of interest, obsessed with role-playing and the occult. "We're here now. I can smell blood." From Sony Music Entertainment and Em William Phelps LLC, Fatal Fantasy, available now on the bench.

Search for Fatal Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts. When Lana arrives at the island, the psychiatric wing of the Royal Victoria Hospital. Dr. Cameron asks her father to sign a consent form on behalf of his daughter. Lana actually gave us a copy of the original form, which she herself was only able to obtain recently. In it, her father authorizes the hospital to perform any examinations and treatments, including operations.

A remarkable thing to consent to, for someone who is there for running away from home. He also agreed to not sue them for any damage that Lana might sustain, or, as the consent form says, "Any damage that Lana might pretend to have sustained during her time at the island."

“Now, why would a parent sign a blanket consent form?”

Probably because he trusted that Dr. Cameron would make Lana better. Or, he was led to believe that he had to sign it, or he didn't realize what he was signing. Or, maybe, he'd watched this film. Some people call the island a rest home, and in a way I suppose it is. Others, shall we say the uninformed call it, well, many things.

The uninformed call the island, many things. This is from a 1956 film by the Canadian National Film Board titled, "Back Into the Sun," which was part of a series that, in their words, blended documentary and fiction. It came out two years before Lana was admitted to the island. The island is a rather special kind of hospital.

Special in the sense that we are just as interested in research into the cause and treatment of mental illness, as we are in the actual treatment itself.

“That's why some of the things we do may not fit in with your idea of a mental hospital.”

It begins by showing a woman, Kathy Bowen, who looks like she's about 30. She's attempting to run away from the island. Which doesn't sound like something someone who's having a great time at the institute does. But, in the film, she runs straight into a man who convinces her, not to leave. I don't want you to say you come back with me and tell me about it.

I don't want you to go back. I don't want you. It's just for a minute, just for a little while anyway. Her reason for being at the island, she feels a little overwhelmed by life's tasks. I don't know, Doctor. I just can't seem to get through anything anymore. Things pile up, you know, just the dishes and the meals and the kids' clothes.

It never seems to be any end.

And I'm so tired all the time. You might say, Kathy has correctly recognized the monotonous and constant expectations placed on housewives, which the Doctor proceeded to pathologize. The film explains that through a combination of group therapy and drugs, which are never actually shown on screen but mentioned,

the young woman comes to realize that the source of retribles is in fact her inability to stand up to her mother.

Say that over and over to myself all day long.

“It's a terrible thing, isn't it, to hate your own mother?”

Notice the repetition in her statement. That's not accidental. And the way the movie is portraying the research undertaken at the island, far, far away from what was really going on behind those grey walls. Incidentally, Lana's father was a producer in the same organization that made the film.

My father was with the National Film Board. He doesn't make the credits list, but perhaps he saw the documentary and believed the picture it painted. That one day, when his daughter was healed, she would get along with her stepmother. Lana is admitted to the island, and at 245 p.m. on April 3, 1958, she's officially diagnosed with passive-aggressive personality, aggressive type,

which, to me, initially, sounded like a fake diagnosis.

“But it turns out, passive-aggressive personality was a recognized diagnosis at the time.”

It was included in the first edition of the North American Handbook for Mental Disorders, the DSM.

According to the diagnostic criteria, having passive-aggressive personality, meant Lana was thought to be irritable, destructive, and resentful. Dr. Cameron tells Lana's father that he'll take good care of her, make her well, that she will be a different person by the time she leaves the island. He will deliver on that promise.

I thought I was going in there to get better. I thought I would be cancelled, and maybe get over the feeling that I have to live in Montreal because everything is changed in my life. But that didn't happen. It didn't happen at all. Lana's treatment began on the same day.

Dr. Cameron took me into an office. I sat there for a while, and the next thing I knew I was put into a room. And I was giving drugs in the arm. And in her affidavit, she paints an even more vivid picture of that day. Again, here are Lana's words, read by an actor.

Cameron took me to a room, where I had one pillow, a mattress, she had a blanket. He told me to stay in the room. The nurse came in with a pole and a bag with something in it. She told me to lie down, and she put the needle in my arm. I felt funny. I tried to get up, but I could not.

“The next thing I remember, it was really awful, and so it started.”

My balance was affected by this medication, and I saw other people walking like zombies in the hallway, and I wondered if I was like them. Dr. Cameron's science fiction-like theory, the one he called psychic driving, involved three phases.

First came deep patterning.

According to the records, patients would be immobilized, rendered intellectually helpless, and prevented from using their regular psychological defenses. In other words, he thought people would inherently resist his methods. Deep patterning, he believed, would forcefully break through this resistance, like a shell around the mind that needs to be cracked open before the true problem inside can be fixed.

Dr. Cameron achieved this by administering cocktails of drugs, and excessive electroconvulsive therapy. What he realized was that once people were in either an insulin coma or a coma, induced by a puppeteer, he could do whatever he wanted to a helpless patient, and doing whatever he wanted by it, include giving them three, four, five electrosharks in a row.

Professor Andrew Skull. So he is reducing people to babbling idiots. They lose control of their balance and their bladders. They become unable to walk. They become unable to talk. This, he believed, made the patient's minds less resistant to phase two.

Re patterning. In order for people to be repaturned, they needed to be placed in isolation. I was put into a place that looked like a cloth. There was nothing in it. Some patients had a football helmet clamped their heads with speakers on the inside.

and drugged so that they would be too weak and disoriented to move.

Speakers. They are very beside the bed. I don't think I was tied to the bed now.

“I think I was so don't doubt that I just went where they put me.”

Either way, they were physically unable to escape what came next. Recordings of things they had said in interviews with Dr. Camernor's colleagues. Their anxieties, beers, or whatever Dr. Camern decided needed to be corrected. He wanted to overwrite old, bad thought patterns with new, better ones. It came for me to play in the gerabag girl.

These negative messages would be played on a loop. Then followed up by positive ones. And then it would say you're a good girl. You're a good girl. And that went on and on as well. The positive messages would be repeated anywhere between 250,000

and 500,000 times. The messages were either spoken by the patients themselves, which Dr. Camern called autocycate driving, or voiced by someone else, heterocycate driving. You're a good girl. You're a good girl. You're a good girl.

You're a good girl. You're a good girl. He didn't act like a doctor. That I could see. He was an evil person. That I can remember.

He wasn't pleasant to anyone in the building at all. Dr. Camernor was driving the experiments. But Lana also has no sympathy for the other doctors or the nurses.

“Did they not realize that they were brainwashing people?”

They not realize what they were doing with all the drugs they were giving to people. What kind of person would do that? That's not a doctor. That's not a nurse. That's a hundred little Camerns running around. These procedures were highly experimental in nature,

which begs the question, why would Miguel, a prestigious university, allow patients to be treated this way? According to contemporaneous letters between staff at Miguel, they wanted it to be a place of pioneering research. The psychoanalysis obviously came on the scene in the late 1890s

in the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

Presently as developed by segment Freud. Sociological historian Andrew Skull.

“Freud himself was an neurologist and originally thought that he would be able to uncover”

the physiological basis of madness. Freud developed a specific type of talking therapy called psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a way of understanding people's mental well-being, by exploring their unconscious mind. Picture yourself lying on a couch, with someone seated next to you,

asking questions about your childhood, or the lasting impact of potentially traumatic experiences. Or more stereotypically, telling you that perhaps the anxiety you feel today is because as a child, you wanted to have sex with your dad, which Freud called the EdaPus Complex.

To some degree, the emphasis on the sexual origins of the conflicts in the psyche was something that caused people to recoil. Psychoanalysis was incredibly popular, but also had a major backlash. One of the problems was...

The psychoanalysis were very reluctant to produce any kind of evidence beyond their own testimony. And after World War II... Freud was roundly denounced by most of the medical profession. The idea that mental illness was widely seen as biological,

the idea that talk could cure biology was seen as absurd. The people who founded the Allen believed the future of psychiatry was defined not by conversations on couches, but by biological intervention. They saw psychiatry as more closely tied to neuroscience,

and they wanted to be the first to establish a department that would reflect that.

So in 1943, he was appointed as the head of the Department of Psychiatry. But over the following two decades,

“his treatment methods would get increasingly dangerous.”

And as he would later say about this period of experimentation, we took a wrong turning and continued to walk without a glint of success for a long, long time. For years, Lana didn't know exactly what happened while she was at the Allen. What she did know was that she had had psychiatric treatment

and that she had these fragments of dark memories. Memories of bad things happening to her. And this, she kept a secret.

I never told anyone I was in the Allen.

All my life, I never told anyone. Because I thought, if I tell people that haven't given me, they can look at me and say, "Well, you're a crazy person."

“And how do you explain to people what happened to you?”

How do you explain that? And Lana is not alone. There are others who remember being patients at psychiatric institutions where doctors were running experiments and exploiting patients. Some even began to search for children,

they believe are buried on the grounds of the Allen. There are people that deserve the respect of having their story told, being buried properly and not being a guinea pig, and being tested on unknowingly unwillingly, and very disrespectfully. How far the doctor Cameron's ideas spread?

Just like, "Oh, yeah, you know." The sky's blue. Grass is green. Your mother had a few hundred shock treatments. The racer memory.

You know what I mean? You tried a new kind of love to me. They called it "reversible" about me. They put a stick in a towel in your mouth, and you tie it up,

and descend an electrical shock in your head. In him, he became crazy. Next time on Project Mind Control, Lana tries to piece together what really happened to her at the Allen. Oh, it all happened.

And makes a shocking discovery in her medical records. I got pregnant when I was at the Allen.

“Lana had a child to whom she can't remember giving birth.”

Now, who buy I don't know? I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. Project Mind Control was presented by me, and written by me and my producer, Simone Arata. The executive producers are Elsa Rochester and Louisa Adams.

Sound design by Craig Edmonton. Lana's affidavits were read by Martin Richards.

Project Mind Control is an always true crime production.

Dr. Swartz was based down in a pool of blood, a renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy. A very gruesome and disturbing scene. Persons of interest obsessed with role-playing and the occult. "We're here now. I can smell blood."

From Sony Music Entertainment and Em William Phelps LLC, fatal fantasy, available now on the bench, search for fatal fantasy wherever you get your podcasts. Want more true crime? This podcast and loads more

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