MKULTRA, Mad Psychiatrists & Kidnapped Children
ri...@math.missouri.edu
of scientology, which is the most well-endowed critic of the cruelest
church of all, the church of the status quo, aka psychiatry)
http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol37i1/index.htm
http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol37i1/page03.htm
North Americas Crime of the Century?
Up to 50,000 innocent children may have died or disappeared in
Quebecs psychiatric institutions
Survivors demand justice
By Christine Hahn and Thomas G. Whittle
(Any and all information relevant to abuses or human rights violations
reported in this article should be sent to Freedom to forward its
ongoing investigation.
If you have other data regarding psychiatric experiments upon
children, or the use of violent or coercive psychiatric methods
against them, Freedom also wants to hear from you.
Send full information in writing to Freedom Magazine, 6331 Hollywood
Blvd., Suite 1200, Los Angeles, CA 90028.
E-mail edi...@freedommag.org, call (323) 960-3500, or click here
to Freedom Investigations)
==============
Clarina Duguay remembers what life was like before her mother,
Clara, moved away. The eldest daughter among five children, she
recalls the happy life of a family, cash-poor but rich in love, in
Cap dEspoir, a fishing village on Canadas Gaspe peninsula.
Every morning, with her dog, Coffee, she helped her mother gather
up the eight or nine cows the family owned so they could be milked.
From her mother, she learned many things, including how to bake
delicious bread a skill that today, more than 60 years later, she
still enjoys.
In a rural community where horses were the primary means of
transportation, Clara encouraged Clarinas dream of one day becoming
an airline stewardess. It was a close-knit family, one where each
member supported the others.
The idyllic life ended in 1945, when Clara, stricken by tuberculosis,
moved to a sanatorium.
Clarinas father, Joseph Duguay, a lumberjack frequently away from
home, was persuaded by the family doctor and the parish priest to
send Clarina and her younger sister, Simonne, to an orphanage in
Rimouski, on the St. Lawrence River. He was told they would be well
educated.
But in 1946, shortly after Clarina turned 11, she and perhaps 10
other children from the facility were loaded onto a bus. Told they
were being taken on a tour of Rimouski, they were instead driven
to the town of St. Ferdinand, hundreds of miles away, and through
the gates of the St. Julien psychiatric institution. There, Clarinas
horror story began.
Fraudulent Psychiatric Labels
Many years later, Clarina would learn of the false psychiatric label
mentally retarded that condemned her to St. Julien.
But at the time, she inexplicably entered a hell where she scrubbed
floors endlessly on orders from the institutions staff.
They would plunge our heads into ice-cold water if we did something
wrong, Clarina said, adding that they would be kept immersed almost
to the point of drowning. To this day, she dreads water and fears
she will drown.
For the tiniest infraction, she could be forced to kneel in an
excruciating position for hours, or put in a straitjacket, or locked
to a bed with no mattress her feet tied to the cold steel frame
and her head pinned down by a dog collar around her neck. She
reported being sexually assaulted.
Simonne later joined her at St. Julien, also unknowingly labeled
retarded. With both girls, their father was not informed of their
fate. Letter writing was forbidden at Rimouski and St. Julien;
compounding that barrier, the girls father could neither read nor
write. Presuming no news was good news, he trusted his daughters
were being properly cared for.
And when Clarina cried for her mother, a staff member told her that
Clara had died of syphilis in another psychiatric institution. In
truth, she succumbed to tuberculosis at the sanitarium, unaware of
her daughters plight.
But then it got worse. Clarina remembers the chlorpromazine she and
others at St. Julien were forced to take, an experimental drug at
the time*, but one so powerful its principal pioneer and promoter,
German-born psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann, would later dub it a
pharmacological substitute for lobotomy.1
It made me into a zombie, Clarina said. The drug, known as Largactil
in Canada and Thorazine in the United States, was administered by
injection and by pills, virtually every day. She was told it was
cold medicine.
* Chlorpromazine was not approved for use in the United States by
the Food and Drug Administration until 1954.
Hidden Terrors
Robbed of their childhoods and their educations, Clarina and Simonne
are two among perhaps 3,000 surviving Duplessis Orphans.
Naming themselves after former Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis*,
many of these individuals, like Clarina and Simonne, were in fact
not orphans at all, but had been born to poor families that had
difficulty caring for them, or to unwed mothers. Although no official
tallies were kept, over a span of several decades, it has been
estimated they numbered in the tens of thousands and perhaps as
many as 100,000.
As bad as things were, Clarina and Simonne consider themselves
luckier than most of the Orphans Simonne managed to escape after
several years and, when her family learned of the sisters ordeal,
they freed Clarina on May 8, 1953.
Like many of those who suffered, Clarina chose not to talk about
her experiences, preferring to put the past behind her. She went
to work as a seamstress in Montreal, abandoning her plans of working
for an airline and seeing the world, but grateful to once again
enjoy freedom.
In 1965, she met Rod Vienneau, a singer and songwriter who also
worked as a construction worker and miner. They married in May the
next year. For decades, she kept her terrors at St. Julien a secret
from her children and her husband.
Only after the truth about the Duplessis Orphans began to emerge
in the 1990s did Clarina share her story with her husband and,
ultimately, with Freedom.
Child Victims: Their World Turned Upside Down
Today, Rod Vienneau, as founder of the Commission for Victims of
Crimes Against Humanity, represents survivors who seek to expose
and bring to account the psychiatrists and government officials
responsible for alleged crimes and abuses against the Orphans.
Since 1992, when he obtained Clarinas medical files under Canadas
Access to Information Act, he has investigated abuses against the
Orphans, also leading protest marches, letter-writing campaigns and
other activities to draw attention to injustices at many similar
facilities such as Mont Providence in Montreal, converted from an
orphanage and school to a psychiatric hospital in one day.
At that institution, since renamed Riviere des Prairies Psychiatric
Hospital, Vienneau said, Overnight, they emptied the classrooms,
got rid of the books, and put bars on the windows. They turned the
rooms into cells.
The morning the childrens nightmare began at Mont Providence, the
nuns, instead of wearing their familiar black-and-white habits,
dressed in white a stark sign of conversion to a psychiatric
hospital.
The children had a life before, said Vienneau. There was schooling.
They could play. All of that changed. It was hard labor. No more
learning.
At psychiatric facilities throughout Quebec, he said, They used the
Orphans for the dirty work.
Normal boys and girls in the child welfare system were degraded and
dehumanized, he said, coerced via pain and punishment into becoming
a slave-labor force in the provinces mental institutions. Instead
of learning to read and write, they swabbed floors and hallways,
cleaned the clothes of adult inmates, washed adults incapacitated
by drugs, shocks and lobotomies, and served in other menial, often
backbreaking capacities all for the profit of their psychiatric
overlords.
Stigmatized
As with Clarina and Simonne, relatives who placed children in Quebec
orphanages customarily had been promised they would receive a "good
education if turned over to the institutions.
Instead, for decades, psychiatrists falsely declared thousands of
them to be mentally ill or retarded. The children were moved to
psychiatric asylums or, as at Mont Providence, facilities were
converted to mental institutions. The psychiatric labels enabled
institutions to obtain nearly twice the amount per child, and
sometimes more, depending on how children were classified and where
they were placed.2
Although their poor performance on I.Q. tests stemmed from a lack
of schooling, normal children were stigmatized with such psychiatric
tags as idiot and imbecile false labels that destroyed their lives
and haunt survivors to this day.
Evidence unearthed by Freedom in its ongoing investigation, which
began in 1999, points to the Duplessis Orphans as the largest
instance of institutionalized child abuse in North America.
The death or disappearance of many children and young adults Vienneau
charged that 50,000 innocents were thus victimized drives human
rights advocates to demand a thorough investigation, particularly
of psychiatrists and others who benefited from the mass tragedy.
False Label Brings 25 Years Incarceration
To date, no criminal court or human rights body has examined the
alleged atrocities. Because of the lack of a probe, no psychiatrist
engaged in or connected to alleged crimes against the Orphans
including experiments with brain-damaging drugs, electric shocks
and lobotomies has been charged, despite evidence of duplicity,
misconduct and harm.
On June 22, 1967, for example, psychiatrist Louis Roy examined
Duplessis Orphan Joseph Sylvestre as an outpatient at St. Michel
Archange, a psychiatric institution in Quebec City since renamed
Robert Giffard Hospital. After the examination, Roy failed to change
Sylvestres earlier, false childhood diagnosis.
Years later, in 1991, Sylvestre approached Roy for assistance in
finding a job and subsequently received a letter from Roy in which
the psychiatrist admitted that Sylvestre had never been mentally
ill.
You were never mentally ill and you are fit, Roy reportedly said.
The scandal was reported by the Journal de Montreal in 1992. When
contacted at his office by the Journal, Roy confirmed the facts
concerning Sylvestre my good friend JS, as Roy called him.3
As early as 1962, a Quebec government body known as the Bedard
Commission acknowledged that the Orphans had never been mentally
ill or retarded and that they had been fraudulently labeled.
Despite this, Roy was never charged with wrongful diagnosis or any
other crime, even after admitting in writing that Sylvestre had
wrongfully spent 25 years confined to the psychiatric institution
where Roy was the director.
Roy, now 75 and retired, admitted to Freedom that he had misdiagnosed
Sylvestre, offering as excuses that Sylvestre had already been a
patient when he took over his case and that things were different
back then.
Roy said that no disciplinary action had been taken against him
because Sylvestre had only received psychiatric drugs, not a lobotomy
or electroshock. He refused to comment on whether there should be
a public inquiry into the case of the Duplessis Orphans, but admitted
he saw many abuses when working at St. Michel Archange. Due to his
advanced years, he said, he wants to forget the past.
He may want to forget it, but Roy and other psychiatrists created
evil and destruction, and victims live the nightmare to this day,
said Denis Cot, a spokesperson for the Citizens Commission on Human
Rights** in Quebec. Psychiatry sentenced these Orphans to degradation,
misery and, in many cases, death. After the lid started to come
off, psychiatrists engaged in damage control to protect their own
incomes and reputations. They played no part in helping the survivors.
* Duplessis was Quebecs premier from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to
1959. Due to human rights violations, electoral fraud, use of state
powers against critics and other abuses, Duplessis tenure has been
called the Great Darkness.
** The Citizens Commission on Human Rights was established by the
Church of Scientology in 1969 as an independent organization to
investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.
Human Guinea Pigs
Another psychiatrist in the saga is Denis Lazure, president of the
Canadian Psychiatric Association in 1966.
From 1999 to 2001, Lazure headed the Support Committee for Justice
for the Duplessis Orphans an effort that, according to Rod Vienneau,
betrayed those it pretended to help. Vienneau compared Lazures
position on the committee to a fox in the chicken coop.
In his memoirs, Medecin et Citoyen, published in 2002, Lazure wrote
that in 1952, while interning at Hospice St. Jean de Dieu, a massive
psychiatric facility in Montreal since renamed Louis-Hyppolite
Lafontaine Hospital, he and five other interns regularly administered
electroshock and routinely put patients into insulin comas.4
Lazure breezily described how he would start the day pushing the
button on the electrical box that sends a current to provoke an
epileptic-type convulsion in tens of patients who hadnt received
any preparatory medication.5
Then he was off to the insulin coma rooms, half-lit, vile-smelling,
with two dozen patients that wed inject with doses of insulin strong
enough to induce a coma. After several hours of excessive sedation,
theyd receive a glucose injection, which usually brought them back
to consciousness. It sometimes happened that we got the shock of a
patient that failed to reawaken.6
Lazure painted a disturbing picture of St. Jean de Dieu, one in
which psychiatrists played with and destroyed human life. Later in
1952, Lazure left the institution for Verdun Protestant (now Douglas)
Hospital, where he assisted chemical lobotomy pioneer Lehmann in
tests of chlorpromazine.7
Montreal journalist Kristian Gravenor quipped, Lazure went on to
head hospitals and run the provincial health ministry, fried brains
and accidental overdoses not slowing him down one bit.8
Lazures statement that he and Lehmann tested chlorpromazine in 1952
lends credence to claims by Clarina Duguay and others of being
forced to take the drug prior to 1953 the year Lehmann supposedly
discovered how to use it to straitjacket patients and raises
questions regarding how many Orphans may have been exploited as
human guinea pigs.
One St. Jean de Dieu doctor who asked not to be identified estimated
that chlorpromazine was being administered to 500 people at St.
Jean de Dieu in 1952 even though the drug received its first
approval for human use in Canada in 1957, according to Health Canada,
the government agency over such matters.9
Psychiatry Destroys Life
Childrens advocate Carol Rutz, author of A Nation Betrayed, told
Freedom that based on her research, the Duplessis Orphans became
prime subjects for psychiatric testing and abuse.
These children, she said, were defenseless easy prey for ruthless
doctors who inflicted pain and death under the guise of science.
Many boys and girls, she said, had no parents to return home to,
hence the extent of their abuse needed no cover-up. Who would tell?
They could be beaten or drugged into submission.
Orphans at St. Jean de Dieu were selected to receive electroshock,
drugs and other treatments primarily based on whether or not they
had immediate family members who might come to their defense or
protection, said one source who worked at the facility.
Rod Vienneau said Quebec psychiatrists viewed these children, who
most often came from the provinces poorest families, as unwanted.
They emptied Quebecs orphanages, he said, sending the unwanted
children to the psychiatric hospitals where psychiatrists could do
any experiment that they wanted to do on 100,000 children and no
one would know. (See He Had No Brain!.)
Evidence suggests that many boys and girls became victims of a
psychiatric eugenics* program with connections to prominent members
of the U.S. and Canadian psychiatric establishments.
Defectives was the sweeping label that Canadian psychiatrist Charles
Kirk Clarke, a founder of the Canadian Mental Health Association,
applied to immigrants from eastern and central Europe.10 Another
Canadian eugenicist, Helen MacMurchy, a provincial inspector of the
feeble-minded, campaigned for sterilization to prevent certain
mothers from filling the cradle with degenerate babies.11
Freedom addressed this subject in a 1996 cover report in its Canadian
edition entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of the Mentally Unfit
Sterilization in Canada. The authors wrote, The tools of the
eugenicists thus became immigration controls, birth control,
sterilization and finally euthanasia as carried out by the Nazis,
noting that the first three methods had been employed in Canada
resulting in, among other things, the involuntary sterilization of
thousands of women, many of them Canadian Indian or other minorities.12
With fresh allegations now surfacing that many Duplessis Orphans
died or disappeared, the fourth item on the eugenicists agenda,
euthanasia, certainly warrants official investigation.
They Were Allowed to Kill Defenseless Children
Indeed, the bodies of hundreds or even thousands of Duplessis
Orphans, buried near Quebec psychiatric hospitals, may today hold
the key to documenting what survivors have called "organized
psychiatric genocide."
Montreal attorney Daniel Lighter suggested that Quebec officials
permit exhumation of bodies buried on hospital grounds to determine
to what extent Orphans may have been used for psychiatric
experimentation, including lobotomies, electroshock and mass drugging.
"One can certainly argue that a free society has a responsibility
to unearth the good, the bad and the indifferent of its past, Lighter
told Freedom. There is certainly a compelling amount of evidence,
even outside of a courtroom, to justify looking again at this case.
At every step of the way, the Orphans treatment was guided by the
hand of psychiatry. Documents obtained by Freedom reveal connections
between the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and Quebec
psychiatric facilities where Orphans were incarcerated. As far back
as 1922, photographs and other evidence show a relationship between
these facilities and the APA.
In 1954, for example, the APA recognized Montreals Verdun Protestant
(now Douglas) Hospital for notable achievements in research. Freedom
asked APA spokesperson Jason Young what this research entailed, but
as of press time, had not received an answer.
The APA imprimatur raises questions as to who benefited from the
Orphans false internment and why, said Lighter.
"Its a very strange link to have the APA accrediting hospitals in
Quebec. Why would that be? he asked. It suggests that the APA was
not only intimately involved but that they were coordinating the
experiments. It certainly begs questions and those questions deserve
answers."
A documentary that aired in September 2004 on Quebec television
station TQS reported there had been roughly 300,000 children in
total; 200,000 of those were adopted, while 100,000 were held in
orphanages, ready for adoption but never taken. These, reporter
Gary Arpin implied, were the Duplessis Orphans.
One Orphan, Jean-Guy Labrosse, 66, today a retired construction
worker, authored a 1964 book about his years in Quebec institutions,
My Dogs Life, which helped to bring abuses to light. "How many of
my fellow [Orphans] have died, and have gone missing? he asked in
an interview with Freedom. And when I say missing, I mean missing
without a trace. In Quebec, they were allowed to kill defenseless
children.
Rod Vienneau estimates that at least half of the Orphans incarcerated
in psychiatric hospitals died or disappeared in those institutions.
If somebody disappeared, its because somebody got rid of the person,
he said. They were killed or murdered.
* British psychologist Francis Galton coined eugenics from the Greek
eugenes, meaning good in stock or well-born. Galtons theories on
eugenics were, in turn, forwarded by psychologists and psychiatrists.
In Germany, for example, Galtons work was used by psychiatrist Ernst
Rudin and others to provide the impetus for racial hygiene and
genocide programs.
Burned with the Garbage
Joseph Martin was 5 1/2 years old in 1938 when his parents, promised
he would receive a good education, placed him in Montreals Buisonnet
Institute. Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to St. Jean de
Dieu, where he remained until 1956.
Upon his arrival at St. Jean de Dieu, Martin said, he and other
young people were stripped of personal belongings, including jewelry,
clothing, pictures of cherished relatives, money and identification.
Martin, today a Montreal cabinetmaker, readily recounts stories of
abuse. He said that in 1941, he witnessed a 10-year-old boy beaten
to death by two guards. Incredibly, said Martin, many of the guards
hired to watch over the children were young criminals who had been
in reform schools. And many guards some of whom he named allegedly
sodomized the youths.
When Martin, after being assaulted repeatedly, complained to hospital
authorities, he received the ultimate warning. The culprits drove
a knife into his left eye, blinding him, and told him that if he
complained again, he would also lose the right eye.
For years, according to Martin, three children each week were victims
of operations during which vital organs such as hearts, lungs,
kidneys and livers were cut out and sold in the U.S. A gray-and-black
refrigerated vehicle transported the organs, he said.
Carol Rutz noted, Their organs could be harvested and sold and no
one would be the wiser. They were the expendables simply because
they were available."
What remained of the bodies, said Martin, would be buried in cardboard
boxes, three children per box, in what was known as the pigsty
cemetery so named because it was where pigs were kept, and where
the remains of dead swine and other animals were also disposed of.
But not all children were buried. In the early 1950s at St. Jean
de Dieu, Martin said, he saw hospital staff carrying the dead bodies
of children as young as 5 to a large incinerator, where they were
thrown in with the hospitals garbage.
The youngest children, Martin charged, were kept out of sight in
cells and cages at the back of St. Jean de Dieu under barbaric
conditions in straitjackets, heavily drugged and befouled by their
own waste.
Powerlessness
Like other Orphans interviewed, Jean-Guy Labrosse has painful
memories. One includes the feeling of utter powerlessness. While
incarcerated at St. Michel Archange, for example, Labrosse said he
was told by psychiatrist Jean-Yves Gosselin that he held all the
cards to the fate of the children.
"Once you come in here, we are the ones who decide when you may be
liberated," Gosselin allegedly told Labrosse.
When contacted by Freedom, Gosselin, who served as president of the
Canadian Psychiatric Association in 1993, said he wouldnt comment
on Labrosses allegation. Currently practicing in Ottawa, Gosselin
said he couldnt remember whether he had treated Duplessis Orphans
or not.
But he admitted that during his tenure as staff psychiatrist at St.
Michel Archange from 1959 to 1963, he had placed a number of patients
on farms. Of note, according to former Quebec Ombudsman Daniel
Jacoby and reports received by Freedom, Orphans placed on farms
were also victimized.
Beatings, Torture, Sodomy
Freedom contacted psychiatrist Denis Lazure for response to allegations
by Joseph Martin and others regarding abuses at St. Jean de Dieu.
In addition to interning at the institution in 1952, Lazure served
as its director from 1974 to 1976. In 2000, he returned to the
renamed facility, Louis-Hyppolite Lafontaine, as a practicing
psychiatrist.
According to a statement provided on Lazures behalf by Jean Lepage,
public relations director for Louis-Hyppolite Lafontaine, investigations
into claims that Orphans had been severely harmed were never proven
and therefore considered unfounded.
Lepage referred to a 1997 report by the then Quebec ombudsman,
Daniel Jacoby, in which the Orphans complaints were documented.
Jacobys report, however, does not state that the Orphans statements
of abuse were unfounded. He did indeed find evidence of such abuses
as psychosurgery, electroshock, ice baths, beatings, straitjacketing,
torture, sodomy and unjustified confinement to a cell sometimes
for months or even years.13
In fact, after the Quebec attorney general announced in February
1995 that no charges would be brought, Jacoby stated, in almost all
cases, the reasons invoked by the attorney general did nothing to
deny the existence of the facts. Neither the statute of limitations
nor the death of a suspect or complainant throw the alleged acts
into question.14
Rejecting Lazures response to Freedom as a pack of lies, Rod Vienneau
pointed to the psychiatrists own memoirs for corroboration of abuses.
I believe Denis Lazure should be the first one to be brought to
court for crimes against innocent children, Vienneau said.
Specific allegations by Vienneau and others, most importantly, have
never been investigated by authorities empowered to bring perpetrators
to justice. With no proper investigation, Vienneau said, one cannot
say claims are unfounded, particularly in the presence of eyewitnesses
and other evidence.
They Became Vegetables
Experiments were not limited to any one institution such as St.
Jean de Dieu. Neurosurgeon Guy LaMarche, for example, admitted that
in the 1950s, each Wednesday, two or three lobotomies were performed
on patients at St. Michel Archange, as prescribed by the institutions
head psychiatrist, even though we had no idea how the operations
would affect the institutions patients. More often than not, they
became vegetables, LaMarche said.15
An official probe can determine how many of the victims may have
been Orphans, said CCHRs Denis Cot. This dark chapter in Canadas
history needs to be aired for all to see in a series of hearings,
he said. I believe it would be best for an independent public inquiry
to examine this.
In its own investigation, Freedom found what appears to be an ongoing
campaign of deception and disinformation designed to derail any
examination of criminal acts or other misconduct against the Orphans
by psychiatrists and others, and to keep those crimes covered up.
Orphans seeking justice, for example, have reported threats and
assaults. Joseph Martin said he was visited at his home by four men
who refused to identify themselves but warned him to shut up. This
occurred a few days after Freedom had contacted Louis-Hyppolite
Lafontaine Hospital for comment regarding allegations by Martin and
others.
As part of any official investigation, witnesses and their families
must be safeguarded.
"I Do Not Know the Doctors Who Gave This False Diagnosis"
For years, Rod Vienneau has asked, "Who is being protected?"
Vienneau suspects that the Roman Catholic Church, vilified as being
responsible because it owned St. Jean de Dieu and certain other
facilities, was itself exploited by psychiatrists who fattened off
money from pharmaceutical companies, intelligence agencies and the
Canadian national government. (See The Chemical Lobotomy.)
In the early 1950s, Canadas national government withdrew funding
from the education field while remaining active in health matters.
It considered Mont Providence, for example, run by the Sisters of
Charity of Providence, to be an educational facility and therefore
ineligible for funding.
The Quebec government under Duplessis, however, felt that as a
re-education and rehabilitation center, Mont Providence should be
considered a health care facility. Although Mont Providence was
affiliated with St. Jean de Dieu, Ottawa held its ground. The Quebec
government subsequently advised the Sisters of Charity to change
the facilitys vocation to benefit from federal funding.
A $3 million agreement was signed in 1954 that converted the school
to a psychiatric hospital, jettisoning its main purpose of educating
and helping children.16
In a written response to Freedom regarding charges of abuse at Mont
Providence, hospital spokesperson Johanne Gagnon readily admitted
that the Orphans had been falsely labeled.
The Sisters of Providence were in charge of the educational development
of these Orphans, Gagnon wrote. They even continued their teachings
after the Duplessis government delegated funds to this establishment,
and ordered that no education was given to these children for they
were mentally crazy (that was the expression used at the time,
referring to those with intellectual deficiency). Mont Providence,
just like many centers, accepted that such labels be given to the
young Orphans. I do not know the doctors who gave this false
diagnosis.
Concentration Camps... Right in Our Back Yard
Vienneau believes many innocent boys and girls came to be used as
human guinea pigs after government officials in Canada and the U.S.
were co-opted by psychiatric interests.
As one index of the dominant psychiatric influence, more than $50
million was spent constructing new psychiatric hospitals in Quebec
between 1952 and 1962. None of these building investments went
toward enhancing the quality of service and care, Quebec Ombudsman
Jacoby noted.17 Meanwhile, the children they housed suffered under
barbaric conditions.
Falsification of records, lies to families and horrific experiments
bear similarities to Nazi psychiatric programs for ridding society
of undesirables, Vienneau said. In this case, the unwanteds were
normal children born out of wedlock, or whose families could not
afford them, or who thought their children would be better taken
care of when turned over to the institutions.
Vienneau is not alone in drawing parallels between the Quebec
institutions and those in Nazi Germany. Concurrent with the abuses
against the Orphans in the 1950s and 1960s, Montreals McGill
University was the site of Ewen Camerons ghastly work. (See Mind
Control Experimentation Exposed.)
Cameron, infamous for barbarity and a penchant for operating without
patient consent, maimed men and women with electroshock, lobotomies
and drugs that included chlorpromazine and LSD. An international
leading light of psychiatry, Cameron served as president of the
Quebec Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association,
the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric
Association.
In a 1986 review of the experiments Cameron conducted at McGills
Allan Memorial Institute, Canadian physician George Cooper drew the
same conclusion as Vienneau.
We talk about concentration camps. I dont want to make this comparison,
but God, you know, talk about we didnt know it was happening, and
it was right in our back yard," wrote Cooper.18
Some of Camerons victims were compensated by the U.S. Justice
Department in 1988 with an out-of-court settlement totaling $750,000;
in November 1992, the Canadian government announced it would give
$100,000 apiece to victims of his experiments.
According to one source, some Duplessis Orphans may have been treated
at Camerons Allan Memorial Institute, a possibility Freedom is
investigating.
Dreading a Doctor Visit
While many would prefer not to believe stories of horrific abuse,
if they are not believed, then injustice continues and similar
abuses will be repeated, said author Carol Rutz.
Today, surviving Orphans carry false labels of mental illness in
their medical records despite decades of attempts to have them
removed a stigma that continues to haunt them. Clarina Duguay and
others, for example, dread a simple trip to the doctor for any
health problem. The threat of being locked up again looms over their
lives a living nightmare as long as the labels exist.
All of the Orphans who can no longer speak for themselves, who died
a tragic death or were lobotomized deserve to have the truth told,
said Rutz. It takes a lot of courage to look at the truth and not
turn your head away because it is too painful.
Lawyer Lighter echoed Rutz by calling for justice. "There needs to
be a public inquiry once and for all, he said. That is the only way
there is to unearth the history of what happened and the role
everyone played."
A longtime member of the Quebec Parliament, Louise Harel, is among
those who have sought justice for the Orphans. On June 6, 2005, she
became leader of the official opposition in Quebecs National Assembly.
Harel told Freedom that the false labels should be removed and also
expressed concern regarding the large number of lobotomies that had
been performed in Quebec.
After the interview with Freedom, and following her receipt of
detailed information from Rod Vienneau, Harel wrote on the Orphans
behalf to Michelle Courschesne, Quebecs minister of Employment and
Social Programs. In her letter, she mentioned the hardship endured
by the Orphans and encouraged Courschesne to contact Vienneau.
For Vienneau and others, the injustices suffered by innocent children
stand as a powerful reminder and a mandate to keep fighting for
those who perished and those who can no longer fight for themselves.
"When will the Orphans truly be free? Vienneau asked. Hopefully,
before they all die. But as long as they carry this psychiatric
label of mental illness on their shoulders, they will never be free.
Even today, the Orphans live in the era of Great Darkness. We want
justice and we want the truth, finally, to be told.
Anne Hogarth and Sheila MacDonald contributed to this article.
http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol37i1/page08.htm
The Chemical Lobotomy How many innocent children were victimized?
In a 1993 interview in the Quebec magazine, LActualite, Montreal
psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann was asked about the Duplessis Orphans.
Significantly, he said that back in the 1950s, psychiatrists could
distinguish between those who were truly mentally ill and normal
children like the Orphans.19
A Quebec government document20 obtained by Freedom reveals that
Orphans were housed at Verdun Protestant (now Douglas) Hospital,
the psychiatric facility where Lehmann worked for decades, making
it virtually impossible that Lehmann did not know about the Orphans
incarcerated there, and unlikely that he was not involved in their
treatment as psychiatric patients.
Freedom also obtained declassified intelligence agency documents
that reveal the drug Lehmann championed, chlorpromazine, was one
of the substances tested under a top secret project in 1954.
Chlorpromazine brought a bonanza to Lehmann. After working in virtual
obscurity, he found the doors wide open to hundreds of thousands
of dollars in research grants. While three people died under ghastly
circumstances in just one of his published drug tests, involving
eight individuals, Lehmann fattened off pharmaceutical funds and
the intelligence sources that also supported the infamous mind-control
psychiatrist Ewen Cameron. Lehmanns fellow psychiatrists bestowed
upon him virtually every major North American psychiatric award.
In 1954, despite clear evidence of its destructiveness, Lehmanns
chemical lobotomy was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
By 1964, some 50 million people around the world had taken the drug.
Chlorpromazines manufacturer saw its revenue double three times in
15 years.21
A Site of Experiments?
Freedom discovered that the name of Lehmanns close friend and
colleague, Cameron, appeared in the medical files of some Orphans,
implying involvement in their treatment. A medical doctor who worked
at Hospice St. Jean de Dieu (now Louis-Hyppolite Lafontaine Hospital)
confirmed he had seen Cameron and Lehmann at that institution on
various occasions, buttressing the possibility that some of their
experimental work may have occurred there.
Professor Frederic Grunberg of the University of Montreal said that
Cameron was funded by Canadas equivalent of what would be combined
federal and state grants in the United States, called Dominion-Provincial
Mental Health grants, administered by the Mental Health Division
of the Department of National Health and Welfare.
Cameron also received money from Sidney Gottlieb of U.S. intelligence,
architect of the various mind control programs that utilized coercive
psychiatric methods in efforts to control human behavior. A dominant
figure in the psychiatric world, Cameron, following his 1952 American
Psychiatric Association presidency, became a prime beneficiary of
Gottliebs covert funding.
1953 marked the supposed discovery of chlorpromazine for use in
subjugating patients, as promoted by psychiatrist Lehmann. A review
of Lehmanns experiments revealed that in 1953, he conducted clinical
trials of the drug at Verdun Protestant Hospital.
In its investigation, however, Freedom learned that Duplessis Orphans
were given chlorpromazine, with horrible effects, as early as 1947,
six years prior to Lehmanns official discovery. One doctor who
worked at St. Jean de Dieu in 1952 estimated that 10 percent of its
inmates or 500 out of 5,000 were on chlorpromazine at that time,
long before the drugs 1957 approval by the Canadian government.
This doctor told Freedom that he was provided with samples of the
drug, and started taking them to see what the effects might be. He
stopped after just a few days due to adverse effects that included
tremors and akinesia a loss or reduction of normal abilities to
move the body.
An Ongoing Conspiracy of Silence 2001 settlement thwarted probe of
crimes, advocates charge
In 1999, Quebec Ombudsman Daniel Jacoby criticized the Quebec
governments ongoing conspiracy of silence and labeled its settlement
offer to the Duplessis Orphans unfair and humiliating.22
After comparing settlements in similar cases in other Canadian
jurisdictions, Jacoby suggested a compensation package equal to $56
million in U.S. currency roughly $700 per patient for each year
he or she spent in an institution as a result of a wrongful diagnosis,
with an additional indemnity for physical or sexual abuse.
The social context of the time cannot justify their internment in
asylums for reasons more financial than medical, just as it cannot
justify physical and sexual abuse, wrote Jacoby. Todays society has
a duty to officially recognize the harm done. Official apologies
on the part of the government [and] the medical establishment...would
undoubtedly be a good place to start.23
On September 26, 2001, the Quebec government approved a settlement
of $10,000 (Canadian) person, plus $1,000 per year of wrongful
incarceration in mental institutions. No provisions were made for
sexual or other abuse. If an Orphan refused to sign the agreement,
he or she forfeited the right to the compensation.
Many Orphans were arbitrarily considered ineligible and hence
received nothing. In an interview with Freedom, Rod Vienneau pointed
to Paul St. Aubin as an example of those unjustly barred from the
settlement.
Deprived of an education, St. Aubin, now 53, worked between the
ages of 11 and 17 as a virtual slave on a Quebec farm. He then spent
18 years in the provinces mental institutions, where he received
chlorpromazine, electric shock and at least two lobotomies.
Vienneau and others consider the 2001 settlement as nothing more
than a means to block any genuine probe into crimes and misconduct.
The settlement itself remains a subject of Freedoms investigation.
In the late 1990s, a group of Orphans commissioned a study by
Professor Leo-Paul Lauzon of the University of Quebec in Montreal.
Lauzon found that certain institutions earned between $70 million
and $100 million (Canadian) by fraudulently holding the Orphans.
That figure is supported by a letter from Maurice Duplessis himself,
dated April 12, 1954, in which the Quebec premier agreed to pay one
psychiatric facility alone, Mont Providence, $6 million over a
three-year period. At least 13 institutions housed the Duplessis
Orphans for several decades.
$100 million, of course, would be worth far more in todays currency
values.
"He Had No Brain!"
How extensive might the experimentation in Quebec foster care
facilities have been? The case of a 63-year-old retired racehorse
trainer, Sylvio Albert Day, provides insight.
Orphaned at birth, Day worked at hard labor outdoors as a teen,
often under brutally cold conditions, and then toiled for years
inside psychiatric institutions a normal young man compelled to
work in a savage world where, every day, the threat of straitjackets,
injections with brain-damaging drugs, and even lobotomies loomed.
Day described one three-month period when he transported the bodies
of 67 dead Orphans boys and girls, young men and women from
operating and electric shock rooms at a Montreal institution to the
basement. There, he washed the bodies some as young as 5 in
preparation for sale to local universities.
St. Jean de Dieu was the site, but it could have been any of two
dozen or more Quebec institutions where such abuses are reported
to have occurred.
Day told Freedom he witnessed the deadly effects of restraints,
beatings, electroshock and lobotomies. He observed children and
youths exploited as slave labor, the routine, massive use of
mind-ravaging drugs and, quite possibly, the aftermath of experimental
brain operations.
One day, for example, he was asked to remove a dead youth from an
operating room. He transported the body to the morgue and took off
the hospital robe, socks and cap.
"Thats when I jumped! he said. He was lying there on the sink and
when I took off his cap, he had no brain! I could see the hole.
Day washed the body as instructed and, a short while later, was
summoned again to the operating room. Another Orphan lay dead.
This person had large holes drilled into his head.
Shaken, he was summoned yet again this time to a cell where an
Orphan had hung himself.
Day said that cadavers were sent from St. Jean de Dieu to the
University of Montreal and McGill University, where body parts were
removed. He was informed about the disposition of the bodies by a
local embalmer, who warned him not to speak about their horrible
condition.
The man made it clear, Day said, that if I talked, I would have
serious problems. And thats why I stayed quiet.
No ceremonies marked the deaths, with many children reportedly
interred on the St. Jean de Dieu grounds in the pigsty cemetery
described by Joseph Martin.
Day confirmed that the Orphans were placed in cardboard boxes and,
in his words, "buried like dogs in unmarked graves, one atop another.
Punished with Drugs
Day recalled complaining to a St. Jean de Dieu psychiatrist about
working in the morgue, known among Orphans as "Dead Peoples Hall."
The psychiatrist threatened Day with serious repercussions if he
did not return to his grisly assignment.
Threatened with pills strong enough to put down a horse and confinement
in a secret operating cell where he would be subjected to one week
of treatments, Day complied.
All told, Day said, he saw eight Orphans with their heads cut wide
open. Troubled about what he perceived as experimental brain
operations, Day approached St. Jean de Dieus Camille Laurin, an
influential psychiatrist who later became a Quebec cabinet minister.
When Day complained to Laurin about the brain operations, the
psychiatrist allegedly punished him by administering a powerful
drug that rendered him senseless. Day said that he fell unconscious
and slept like a vegetable."
He believes the drug was chlorpromazine.
"Mind control" experimentation exposed
After psychiatrist Ewen Camerons destructive activities vicious
brain-damaging experimentation on unsuspecting patients were exposed
and condemned in U.S. Congressional hearings in the 1970s, the
psychiatric industry promoted the notion that he had acted alone.
Investigation by Freedom, however, proved this to be false. Indeed,
other psychiatrists, including William Sargant of the United Kingdom,
while publicly decrying Camerons work, were secretly performing
similar tests.24
Colin Ross, M.D., an authority on mind control experiments and
author of such books as Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple
Personality Disorder by Psychiatrists, pointed out that Cameron and
Sargant were two of the four founders of the World Psychiatric
Association.
Ross told Freedom that psychiatrists carried out a deliberate
campaign of deception in Camerons wake to limit the damage to
psychiatrys reputation. The disinformation, he said, conveyed that
Ewen Cameron and his brutal work had been just an isolated incident,
that it happened a long time ago back in the 50s, and that there
were different ethical standards back then.
But Ross noted that while Camerons research completely violated the
ethical standards of the time, his experiments were far from isolated
from his fellow psychiatrists.
And although books, documentaries and films such as The Manchurian
Candidate have exposed the exploitation of adults in mind control,
and the victims of his well-publicized intelligence agency-funded
experimentation were compensated by the Canadian federal government,
little has been communicated about the use of such coercive methods
on children, as with the Duplessis Orphans.
References:
1. Christine Hahn, A Legacy of Shattered Lives, Freedom, Volume 34,
Issue 1, pages 12-16.
2. Quebec Ombudsman Daniel Jacoby, The Children of Duplessis: A
Time for Solidarity, January 22, 1997, page 6.
3. Michele Coud-Lord, Un Psychiatre SExcuse Auprs dUn Orphelin de
Duplessis (A Psychiatrist Offers an Excuse to a Duplessis Orphan),
Journal de Montreal, September 5, 1992, page 7.
4. Denis Lazure, Mdecin et Citoyen, (Montral: Boral, 2002), pages
80-81.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., page 81.
7. Kristian Gravenor, New Golden Era, Montreal Mirror, January
13-19, 2005.
8. Lazure, Mdecin et Citoyen, page 82.
9. E-mail from Sharon Kealey, information officer, Therapeutics
Products Directorate, Health Canada, to Freedom, April 7, 2005.
10. James H. Marsh, Eugenics Driven by Pseudo-Science, CanWest News
Service, November 19, 2004.
11. Ibid.
12. The Ethnic Cleansing of the Mentally UnfitSterilization in
Canada, Freedom, 1996, pages 2-7.
13. Jacoby, The Children of Duplessis, page 15.
14. Ibid., page 21.
15. Guy LaMarche, M.D., Les Lobotomises de Duplessis (The Duplessis
Lobotomies), Le Devoir, March 2, 1993, page A-8.
16. Jacoby, The Children of Duplessis, page 14.
17. Ibid., pages 5-6.
18. Appendices to the opinion of George Cooper, Q.C., Regarding
Canadian Government Funding of the Allan Memorial Institute in the
1950s and 1960s.
19. Yanick Villedieu, 55 Ans de Revolution Psychiatrique (55 Years
of Psychiatric Revolution), LActualit, May 15, 1993, page 13.
20. Decree 1153-2001, September 26, 2001, published in Gazette
Officielle du Quebec, October 24, 2001, pages 7,359-7,361.
21. A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries, Drug for Treating
Schizophrenia Identified, PBS, 1998.
22. Associated Press, Ombudsman Spurns Offer to Abused Orphans,
March 8, 1999.
23. Daniel Jacoby, The Children of Duplessis: A Time for Solidarity,
January 22, 1997.
24. Gordon Thomas, Inside the Sleep Room, Freedom, Volume 36, Issue
2, pages 18-25.