Donald Ewen Cameron

Donald Ewen Cameron (December 24, 1901 – September 8, 1967) was a Scottish-born psychiatrist.

He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

He received an M.B., Ch.B. in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1924, a D.P.M. from the University of London in 1925, and an M.D. with distinction from the University of Glasgow in 1936.

Cameron began his training in psychiatry at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in 1925.

In 1926, he served as assistant medical officer there and was introduced to psychiatrist Sir David Henderson, a student of Swiss-born US psychiatrist Adolf Meyer.

He continued his training in the United States under Meyer at the Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland from 1926 to 1928 with a Henderson Research Scholarship.

In 1928, Cameron left Baltimore for the Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, where he studied under Hans W. Maier, the successor of Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking.

There he met A. T. Mathers, Manitoba's principal psychiatrist, who convinced Cameron in 1929 to move to Brandon, the second largest city of Manitoba, Canada.

Cameron stayed there for seven years and was made physician-in-charge of the Reception Unit of the Provincial Mental Hospital.

In 1933, he married Jean C. Rankine, whom he had met while they were students at the University of Glasgow.

She was a former captain of the Scottish field hockey team, a competitive tennis player, and lecturer in mathematics at the University of Glasgow.

They had four children; a daughter and three sons.

In 1936, he moved to Massachusetts to become director of the research division at Worcester State Hospital only 1 year later.

In 1936, he also published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry which introduced his belief that psychiatry should approach the study of human behavior in a rigorous, scientific fashion rooted in biology.

His theories of behavior stressed the unity of the organism with the environment; the book also outlined experimental method and research design.

Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method.

In 1938 he moved to Albany, New York, where he received his diplomate in psychiatry and thus was certified in psychiatry.

From 1939 to 1943 he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Albany Medical College, 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, developing 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 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 in demanding that mental disturbances are diseases and somatic in nature; all psychological illness would therefore be hardwired, a product of the body and the direct result of a patient's biological structure rather than caused by social environments.

Characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes emerging from the brain.

It is at this juncture that he became interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain to control and understand the processes of memory.

He furthermore wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging, believing that the aged brain experienced psychosis.

In 1943, Cameron was invited to McGill University in Montreal by neurosurgeon Dr Wilder Penfield.

With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, money from John Wilson McConnell of the Montreal Star, and a gift of Sir Hugh Allan's mansion on Mount Royal, the Allan Memorial Institute for psychiatry was founded.

Cameron became the first director of the Allan Memorial Institute as well as the first chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill.

He recruited psychoanalysts, social psychiatrists and biologists globally to develop the psychiatry program at McGill From its beginning in 1943, the Allan Memorial Institute was run on an "open door" basis, allowing patients to leave if they wished, as opposed to the "closed door" policy of other hospitals in Canada in the early 1940s.

In 1945, Cameron, Nolan D. C. Lewis and Paul L. Schroeder, colonel and psychiatrist, University College of Illinois, were invited to the Nuremberg trials for a psychiatric evaluation of Rudolf Hess.

Their diagnosis was amnesia and hysteria, per a short commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Hess later confessed that he had faked the amnesia.

Before his arrival in Nuremberg, Cameron had written The Social Reorganization of Germany, in which he argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized.

In 1946, Cameron introduced the practice of the day hospital, the first of its kind in North America, permitting patients to remain at home while receiving treatment at the institute during the day, thus avoiding unnecessary hospitalization and allowing the patients to maintain ties with their community and family.

He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association (1952–1953), Canadian Psychiatric Association (1958–1959), American Psychopathological Association (1963), Society of Biological Psychiatry (1965) and the World Psychiatric Association (1961–1966).

Cameron was involved in administering electroconvulsive therapy and experimental drugs, including poisons such as curare and hallucinogens such as lysergic acid diethylamide, to patients and prisoners without their knowledge or informed consent.

Some of this work took place in the context of the Project MKUltra program for the developing of mind control and torture techniques, psychoactive poisons, and behavior modification systems.

Decades after his own death, the psychic driving technique he developed continued to see extensive use in the torture of prisoners around the world.

Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allan, Scotland, the oldest son of a Presbyterian minister.

He also organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the province, establishing 10 functioning clinics; this model was used as the blueprint for similar efforts in Montreal and a forerunner of 1960s community health models.