MONTREAL–Janine Huard says she was a young mother of four with mild post-partum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago.
Huard says what happened after that still haunts her today and she will be in a federal courtroom this week seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government for Cold War-era brainwashing experiments carried out on her and hundreds of other patients.
"I was a guinea pig," she said.
On and off for more than a decade at McGill University's renowned Allan Memorial Institute, Huard says she received massive electroshocks and was fed more than 40 experimental pills a day.
Huard, who will be 79 at the end of the month, says she was drugged and subjected to so-called "depatterning," during which repetitive recordings were played in her ear for weeks on end, one of them telling her she was of no use to her family.
"I came out of there so sick that my mother had to live with me for 10 years," Huard says. She says she lost memories and suffered from migraines.
The ordeal came at the hands of Dr. Ewan Cameron, an Edinburgh-educated, New York-based doctor who pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect.
The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited Cameron to experiment with mind control techniques beginning in 1950. The McGill experiments were jointly funded by the CIA and the Canadian government.
Cameron gave patients LSD and subjected them to the massive and multiple electroshock treatments. Some underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation. Others were kept in drug-induced comas for months while speakers under their pillows broadcast messages for up to 16 hours a day.
The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Huard.
The allegations have not been proven in court. A federal court hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday to decide whether to approve a class-action suit.
In 1994, 77 of the mostly unwitting Canadian patients were awarded $100,000 each from the federal government, but only those who suffered "total depatterning," meaning they were rendered to a childlike state.
More than 250 others were denied compensation. In 2004, a federal appeal court overruled that decision and awarded a former patient the $100,000.
Federal lawyers have argued that too much time has passed for patients to appeal a federal panel decision.
Have to look up more about this "depatterning".
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home