Reckless Doses

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Project Mind Control

Episode: Reckless Doses

Host: Dr. Julia Shaw | Date: April 14, 2026

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Overview of Episode

“Reckless Doses” dives into the murky world of postwar psychiatry in Canada, focusing on the story of Carol, an artist whose journey through mental health institutions led her to become a patient of the famed psychiatrist Dr. Heinz Lehmann. Through the lens of Carol's daughter, Alyssa Rivers, and expert commentary, the episode investigates the intersection of art, trauma, medical experimentation, and the human cost of psychiatry’s drive to "rebuild the mind"—foregrounding the blurred lines between care, control, and abuse. The search for truth becomes complicated by missing records and conflicting narratives, but each revelation exposes the broader, troubling history of psychiatric treatments closely aligned with international efforts like MKULTRA.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Catalyst: Art, Family, and Mental Health

• A Painting That Changed Everything (03:14–06:13)
  • Carol, as a young art student in Montreal, gave her fiancé a self-portrait painted in purples and blacks, depicting herself holding her head, looking melancholic.
  • The painting disturbed the fiancé’s mother, who then insisted the engagement be broken off, setting Carol on a path to emotional crisis and psychiatric intervention.
  • Quote: “The mother took one look at the painting and said, this woman clearly is disturbed. There's no way that you're going to marry her. Cut it off.” — Alyssa Rivers (04:35)
  • Carol’s subsequent drop in academic performance and a suicide threat led to her psychiatric admission.

2. An Introduction to Dr. Heinz Lehmann

• A Storied Psychiatrist and His Methods (07:19–08:30)
  • Lehmann, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, became a pioneer in psychiatric drug therapy at McGill’s Verdun Protestant Hospital.
  • His radical shift to psychiatry and the dissatisfaction of his surgeon father highlighted psychiatry’s marginalized position at the time.
  • Quote: “My father was a surgeon and he was terribly disappointed that I wanted to go into psychiatry.” — Dr. Lehmann (07:45)

3. Carol’s Treatment: Shock Therapy & Memory Loss

• Psychiatric Interventions (08:49–12:35)
  • Carol allegedly received “hundreds of shock treatments to erase my memory,” a practice mirroring Dr. Cameron’s notorious “depatterning.”
  • Alyssa recalls the normalization of this narrative in her family, but begins to question its necessity and intent.
  • Carol herself viewed her treatment as a success, later describing herself as Dr. Lehmann’s “most successful patient.”
  • Quote: "He said, don't worry, Mrs. Freeman. I'll get her back to university in two weeks. But it didn't work out that way. It was a year.” — Carol (11:38)

4. Trauma, Art, and Family Dynamics

• Alyssa’s Perspective & Uncomfortable Memories (13:01–17:43)
  • Alyssa describes how her understanding of her mother shifted as she questioned family stories in adulthood, recognizing signs of trauma and emotional detachment.
  • Alyssa recounts invasive experiences: as a child, her mother would ask her to stand naked so she could study Alyssa’s body for art, a practice she later recognized as harmful and boundary-violating.
  • Quote: “It felt like I was on fire. And I would run out of the bathroom...I guess when I was old enough to realize what was going on, I would run out of the bathroom and I'd run to my father and I'd say, please, please, you've got to tell her to stop. This is not okay.” — Alyssa Rivers (16:11)

5. The Birth of Psychopharmacology and Reckless Experiments

• Drug Discoveries and Experimentation (18:29–24:27)
  • Dr. Lehmann’s advocacy for psychopharmacology is contextualized: postwar stress, the penicillin medical model, and pure chance converged to create an environment ripe for drug experimentation.
  • Lehmann read about the “calming” effects of chlorpromazine (Largactil), initially an antihistamine, and began experimenting on patients, often escalating doses far beyond today’s norms.
  • Quote: “He gets a supply of these drugs, and he starts experimenting on his patients. And when they don't respond, he doubles the dose. And when they don't respond, he doubles the dose again. So eventually, patients are being given doses that these days would be considered quite extraordinary.” — Prof. Andrew Scull, sociological historian (22:22)
  • The chemical lobotomy effect of these drugs revolutionized psychiatric institutions, for better and for worse.

6. Unraveling Connections – Missing Records, LSD, and MKULTRA

• Questions of Ethics, Accountability, and Memory (24:27–28:33)
  • Alyssa recounts the challenge of locating her mother’s records, revealing patterns of missing documentation.
  • Lehmann’s studies included the use of LSD, the same drug tied to CIA-sponsored MKULTRA experiments in Montreal.
  • There’s ambiguity about whether Carol participated directly in such experiments, but the overlap in treatments and missing paperwork adds suspicion.
  • Quote: “Now, as one of my friends once pointed out to me, if you don't have the records, how do you know your mother never had lsd?" — Alyssa Rivers (27:17)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “[The shock treatments] worked. You know, it erased the memory of her childhood, which was the intention.” — Alyssa Rivers (09:32)
• “Even after they moved to New York, whenever the family visited Montreal, they would go to Dr. Lehman's for tea. The only thing that I thought was a bit strange was that as my mother explained it, his wife and their son were always in the bedroom.” — Alyssa Rivers (13:42)
• “All my life, until I started asking questions, maybe at 42, I just assumed it was mental illness because that's what people kept telling me.” — Alyssa Rivers (13:01)
• “Lehman tries things on about 100 patients, announces, with no control groups, this works. It's a magic potion.” — Prof. Andrew Scull (23:16)
• “We’ve gone to the box in the archive where these records should be, but they’re not there. We’re really sorry.” — Archivist, relayed by Alyssa Rivers (27:30/02:20)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Content warning: 02:04
• The fateful painting and its consequences: 03:14–06:39
• Carol enters the psychiatric system: 06:55–09:19
• Carol & Alyssa, mother-daughter perspectives: 10:16–17:43
• Lehmann and the era of reckless drug experimentation: 18:29–24:27
• LSD, CIA, MKULTRA links and missing records: 24:27–28:33

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Closing Insights

The episode highlights the distressing intersection between innovative psychiatric treatment and unchecked human experimentation. Carol’s story serves as both a personal narrative and a case study for wider abuses; Alyssa’s search for answers illustrates the generational ripple effects of trauma and institutional secrecy. The missing records and family ambiguity leave many threads unresolved, but the episode poses critical questions about authority, memory, and the ethical costs of “progress” in mental health.

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To Be Continued:
Next time, the investigation expands to Herve Bertrand—a new lead among the vanished children of Canadian asylums, as Project Mind Control continues to peel back layers of overlooked and obscured history.

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Transcript

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[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

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[Dr. Julia Shaw]

warning. This series includes discussion of inhumane medical experimentation, including on children, violence, sexual assault, abuse of children and cultural genocide.

[Alyssa Rivers]

We've gone to the box in the archive where these records should be, but they're not there. We're really sorry.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

We are leaving the Allen, Dr. Cameron and the murky waters of Mkultra to meet one of his associates.

[Alyssa Rivers]

We weren't all the time in Montreal, so when we went to go visit family, we would go for tea at Dr. Layman's apartment.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Another man regarded by many as one of the greats of psychiatry, Dr. Heinz Lehmann.

[Alyssa Rivers]

And everybody in the family would say, oh, Dr. Lehmann was a saint. That was like for some peculiar reason. Oh. Every time somebody would say the word. Dr. Lehmann. Oh, Dr. Lehmann was a saint.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

I'm Dr. Julia Shaw, and this is Project Mind Control.

[Alyssa Rivers]

I think we need to start really from my mother. Actually, my story from my mother.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Alyssa Rivers spoke with us in the summer of 2025. Her mother, Carol, was born in Montreal. She was an artist. Carol's artwork would eventually be exhibited in galleries across Canada and the U.S. and sold to people around the world. But there was one painting from her early days as an artist that changed Carol's life.

[Alyssa Rivers]

So when my mother was 18, she was in Montreal. She was engaged to a guy around 1960. 1959. 1960, around there. And so she was pretty young. Now, I don't know the context of how this painting was produced. I don't know if it was done in a class. But anyway, it was a difficult painting. Okay. And she gave this painting to the man she was engaged to as a gift.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The gift wasn't well received, at least not by her fiance's mother.

[Alyssa Rivers]

The mother took one look at the painting and said, this woman clearly is disturbed. There's no way that you're going to marry her. Cut it off. So being a dutiful son, he cut off the engagement.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The painting is a self portrait.

[Alyssa Rivers]

It's purples and blacks, and she's sort of holding her head like this.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

It's a watercolor. In it, Carol is holding her own face and she's staring almost absentmindedly into the distance. She looks melancholic, sad.

[Alyssa Rivers]

It was a difficult painting, but it was a painting to, like, read into it too much, I think, was potentially problematic.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This reminds me of the short film for the Allen Institute.

[Alyssa Rivers]

Carl, I can't.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

What do you say you come back with me and tell me about it?

[Carol (Alyssa's Mother)]

I don't want to go back. I don't want to, really. It's just for a minute.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Just for a little while anyway.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This is from the 1956 film by the Canadian National Film Board. Back into the sun. Someone who looks like a doctor is talking about art as a window to the psyche.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Some of our patients like to finger paint, and sometimes their paintings tell us a good deal about them. This is Kathy's first painting. Look at the dark colors, the thick, heavy clouds. Now, here, a tiny figure. That's Kathy. And over here, the huge dominant one. And we know who that is. The mother figure, although still large, is now facing us.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

With her engagement called off, Alyssa's mother was understandably home, heartbroken.

[Alyssa Rivers]

Then, the story goes, my mother's marks went from straight A's to like failing. Everything sort of fell to shit, pardon me. And she threatened to jump out the dorm room window at Victoria College at McGill. I don't know if she's really gonna jump out the dorm room window. I don't know.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

It's impossible to know whether Carol was showing early signs of mental illness or was a regular teenager suffering from her first heartbreak. What we do know is that the consequences of her suicide threat would change the course of her life.

[Alyssa Rivers]

I like to say, unfortunately, my grandmother was a little too well connected.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Carol's mother was a professor at McGill. She taught social work.

[Alyssa Rivers]

My grandmother looked around, said, well, who's the best psychiatrist to send my daughter to? And from there my mother became a patient of Dr. Lehman's.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

While Dr. Cameron was running the Allen Institute, Dr. Heinz Lehmann was working at a different psychiatric facility affiliated with McGill called the Verdun Protestant Hospital. Dr. Heinz Lehmann was born in Germany in 1911. By the age of 15, he had read all of Sigmund Freud's works and decided to become a psychiatrist, which for him was a radical thing to do.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

My father was a surgeon and he was terribly disappointed that I wanted to go into psychiatry.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This is Dr. Lehman. He is being interviewed for a film that is all about him. It's called Untangling the The Legacy of Dr. Heinz Lehmann and it was released in the year 2000. In it he describes his career in a very matter of fact way, almost as if he's reading his cv, calm and quietly proud.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Right from the beginning, when I studied medicine, he said, it isn't regarded as really a respectable specialty of medicine. Well, I had made up my mind. I wanted to go into it and so I did.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

At the age of 24, he graduated with a medical degree from the University of Berlin. And at the age of 26, in 1937, he fled Nazi Germany and eventually made his way to Canada where he ended up on the faculty of McGill University.

[Alyssa Rivers]

So here my mother would continue on her story and say that she was admitted to with Dr. Lehman to the Verdun Protestant Hospital, I think is what it was called at the time. And she received what she would say. She alleges, I have to say, alleges I haven't seen the documents, but over and over growing up, this is what I was told. She'd say, I've received hundreds of shock treatments to erase my memory.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Dr. Heinz Lehman is not known to have participated in the mind control experiments that Dr. Ewan Cameron was running. But Alyssa would really like us to find out whether there is a connection between them.

[Alyssa Rivers]

And this is, you know, this was necessary or whatever, but this, it worked. You know, it erased the memory of her childhood, which was the intention.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This sounds a lot like Dr. Cameron's DE patterning reversing the brain to a blank slate.

[Alyssa Rivers]

The intention wasn't to erase her memory period. It was the, as it was explained to me, was the erase memory for childhood. Now, my mom's childhood really, I mean, you know, it didn't seem particularly horrid. I mean, it was. Seems to me, pretty average. There's nothing huge in there that you would think needed to be erased or would have called for erasure.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

But the background of Alyssa's childhood was the painting, her mother's self portrait in Blue that got her sent to Dr. Lehman. It always hung in the living room, watching over Alyssa with its sad eyes.

[Alyssa Rivers]

Wherever we traveled to, with my father being a diplomat, every time we moved, this painting was always put in a position of prominence in our house as a reminder of what had happened to her, for her, for us, for everybody to remember.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

According to Alyssa, Carol's treatment never really stopped. She continued to see other psychiatrists as the family moved around, as well as Dr. Lehman all of her life. From Carol's perspective, her treatment had been a success, and she valued her relationship with Dr. Lehman. She would even brag about the fact that. That she was Dr. Layman's favorite patient.

[Carol (Alyssa's Mother)]

Dr. Lehman told me several years ago, before my husband died, that I was his most successful patient. I think he said that because I never gave up.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Here she is speaking in Untangling the Mind. Carol is wearing a pearl necklace and is speaking cheerfully about her time under the care of Dr. Lehman.

[Carol (Alyssa's Mother)]

In 1959, Carol. I was 17. I had a severe psychotic breakdown. I knew I was crazy. My mother knew Dr. Lehman. They had worked together professionally. He came to my house in the middle of the night. It was a real emergency. And he was amazed that I was cognitive of the fact that I was crazy. He said, don't worry, Mrs. Freeman. I'll get her back to university in two weeks. But it didn't work out that way. It was a year. I'm a manic depressive, but I cope very well. And it's not my fault that I'm a manic depressive. I didn't go about, you know, committing adultery or stealing. It's not a moral problem. And yet my mother never accepted me till I became quite well known as an artist. Only when she could praise my paintings could she accept me as A human being, my sister, it's the same thing. My daughter doesn't accept me either.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The daughter she is referring to is Alyssa. So if Carol didn't consider her treatment to be damaging or abusive, why are we talking about it?

[Alyssa Rivers]

It's a story of art and abuse. You know, it's a story of my big trauma in life.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Because Alyssa's experience of her mother was very different from what is being portrayed in the clip.

[Alyssa Rivers]

All my life, until I started asking questions, maybe at 42, I just assumed it was mental illness because that's what people kept telling me. And that this, these series of shock treatments that she had received to erase her memory of her childhood was something that was just like necessary, not abnormal, not the question, just like, oh, yeah, you know, the sky is blue, grass is green. Your mother had a few hundred shock treatments to erase her memory.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Even after they moved to New York, whenever the family visited Montreal, they would go to Dr. Lehman's for tea.

[Alyssa Rivers]

We weren't all the time in Montreal, so when we went to go visit family, we would go for tea at Dr. Lehman's apartment. The only thing that I thought was a bit strange was that as my mother explained it, his wife and their son were always in the bedroom. So I never actually met on the number of times. Now, in retrospect, I can see that there was something wrong. I mean, I knew there was something wrong. I moved out when I was 15 because there was something wrong. And I think that my mother exhibited a lack of empathy. She had difficulty in that department.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

And at some point, Alyssa also began to wonder just how normal or necessary these treatments her mother had received really were.

[Alyssa Rivers]

But I've asked people since, relatives, you know, did my mother show any signs of mental health issues before this? And the answer is always no. So that's why I just again, was she treated for the right thing? Did they cause the damage?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

It is entirely plausible that repeatedly administering shocks, especially the kinds of high voltage shocks that were being used by people like Dr. Lehman and Dr. Cameron, could have caused permanent damage to her brain. Alyssa is still trying to make sense of her childhood and the way her mother treated her.

[Alyssa Rivers]

It was inappropriate. It wasn't like, you know, typical sexual abuse, I suppose, but it was an inappropriate thing that happened. But I guess this is the part that comes down to it. You know, when I was a kid, my mother believed like everything was in the service of great art, right? So when I was a little kid, my mother decided, I suppose, and made an agreement with my father that she would be allowed to look at me naked, to study my body so she could become better at life drawing. And this went on until I hit puberty. And I'll tell you, it's extremely invasive, right? This is. She. She would sit on the toilet clothed, and I was standing in front of her naked, teeny, tiny little thing, like a little reed, you know, and she would, with her jerky motion, you know, hold me like this. Looking, looking, looking carefully, like down to the pore, you know, it's more invasive than an X ray, having an artist look, examine every bit of you. She wasn't examining my private parts, by the way, but I'm just telling you that this was naked studying of my body, and it felt like I was on fire. And I would run out of the bathroom. I guess when I was old enough to realize what was going on, I would run out of the bathroom and I'd run to my father and I'd say, please, please, you've got to tell her to stop. This is not okay. I hate this. He would say, your mother. My father is very proprietor. Your mother and I have made an agreement that until you hit puberty, she would be allowed to do this. And so you go back. And I would dutifully go back into the bathroom and then just like, I don't know, space out, right? Just space out while she would continue doing this. This went on, as I recollect, every single day until I hit puberty. It's a drag, you know, because my mother had great followers, you know, people who think she was wonderful. And in a lot of ways, she was wonderful. And when she talked about art, she was, like, compelling and charismatic and interesting, and it was as if there was nothing wrong with her. When she spoke about art, it was really great. But what happened in the home was a bit different.

[Brooke Devard]

Hello? Hello, it's Brooke Devard from Naked Beauty. Join me each week for unfiltered discussion about beauty trends, self care journeys, women, wellness tips, and the products we absolutely love and cannot get enough of. If you are a skincare obsessive and you spend 20 plus minutes on your skincare routine, this podcast is for you. Or if you're a newbie at the beginning of your skincare journey, you'll love this podcast as well. Because we go so much deeper than beauty, I talk to incredible and inspiring people from across industries about their relationship with beauty. You'll also hear from skincare experts. We break down lots of myths in the beauty industry. If this sounds like your thing, certainly search for naked beauty on your podcast app. And listen along. I hope you'll join us.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Doctor Layman believed that psychopharmacology was the future of psychiatry. Through the use of drugs. He would, in quotes, free the psychiatrists from the old work of preventing disturbed patients from breaking down doors. He would skip past the boring part of aggressive and resistive patients to get right to the fundamental work on the mind. There was a very specific confluence of factors which allowed the psychopharmacological revolution to take off. First, there was a history defining medical discovery in 1928, the advent of real

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

magic bullet called penicillin.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This is sociological historian Professor Andrew Scull.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

The things that it led to were really transformative developments for medicine, but they were also transformative for the drug companies because it meant people became used to the idea of specific diseases cured by a specific pill.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Then there was the psychological toll of World War II, which involved weapons the likes of which humanity had never seen. Soldiers struggled to process the devastation, what

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

was then called combat neurosis or combat fatigue. You know, among American troops, for example, Psychiatric casualties were two to three times as high in World War II as in World War I.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, nurses and military personnel were coming back from the war with post traumatic stress disorder. There simply weren't enough therapists. And then there was coincidence.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Whether we speak of antidepressants or antipsychotics, as we now call them, or major tranquilizers, as they were first known, their introduction to the treatment of mental patients was purely serendipitous. There was a drug that had been synthesized in the German chemical industry, and nobody could figure out a use for it. But a French company named Rome Palin picked up this drug. It was an antihistamine, and thought, you know, maybe we could find a use for this.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

You heard that right, an antihistamine, the kind of thing you take for allergies. Then they started to wonder, what if the side effects were the main effects?

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

An obscure lieutenant in the French navy gets hold of a bunch of these pills because they're being handed out. Here, try these. And he's going to use them on his surgical patients. But he notices something, that they become sort of emotionally numb. They don't care anymore that they're about to have surgery.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The word chemical lobotomy was being used to describe the effect of making patients calmer, easier to manage.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Hans Lehmann is practicing at Verdun Protestant Hospital in Canada. And as I've said, it's an era where it's complete free for all.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

One particular Sunday, Dr. Lehmann was in his bathtub, reading academic journals, when a particular paper caught his attention. It was in French. It described the effects of a new drug on excited and agitated mental hospital patients. It was the antihistamine, the one made by the French manufacturer. The drug was in its early phases of testing, so Dr. Lehman decided to run his own controlled trial.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

He gets a supply of these drugs, and he starts experimenting on his patients. And when they don't respond, he doubles the dose. And when they don't respond, he doubles the dose again. So eventually, patients are being given doses that these days would be considered quite extraordinary.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Reckless doses.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Reckless doses.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The drug was chlorpromazine, known by the brand name largactyl. Chlorpromazine acts on the central nervous system. Today, it is still used to treat schizophrenia and other psychoses, particularly paranoia, mania, anxiety, agitation, and violent or dangerously impulsive behavior. According to the package leaflet, Chlorpromazine is also used for prolonged periods of hiccups.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Lehman tries things on about 100 patients, announces, with no control groups, this works. It's a magic potion.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Or, as Lehmann himself. Within days, some of the patients had stopped hallucinating, and within two weeks, a few were in remission and ready to leave the hospital. I assumed we were seeing flukes, perhaps resulting from an extremely strange selection in the sample. It seemed almost as improbable as winning $1 million twice in a lottery. This is the Dr. Lehman that everybody knows, the man who revolutionized psychiatry.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

Two years later, 2 million patients are on the drug in the United States. The whole introduction of phenothiazines, modern antipsychotics, was the result of similar kind of uncontrolled human experimentation, of which Lehmann was

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

a principal architect, the principal architect of this new world of biological interventions, but certainly not the only one.

[Alyssa Rivers]

Now, at one point, my mother said later on that she may have been at the Allen very briefly with Cameron and then switched over to Lehman. But in any event, the medical records are missing.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

We don't have access to Alyssa's mother's medical records, but what we do have is a substantial number of academic publications.

[Alyssa Rivers]

My mother very proudly would say that, you know, oh, you know, Dr. Lehman says I don't fit into a regular category of mental illness. That's a question there, but. And he wrote me up in a journal article, and she was so proud of this journal article that Dr. Lehman had wrote. If you could find that, that would be pretty groovy. I'm pretty sure I could tell you, if you found it, like I would recognize her, even if he's using a pseudonym or initials. Because I know her story.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

I tried finding it. Like, I really tried. I looked through the archives for all of Dr. Lehman's academic research papers, of which there are more than 600. But of course, his patients are anonymized and the data aggregated, so I couldn't find anything with her name. But I did find four studies that might have included her. In one of these studies, Dr. Lehman gave LSD to his participants. We know the CIA was also using LSD, as came to light when there were questions asked about Dr. Olson, the scientist who fell to his death after jumping through a closed window on the 10th floor of a hotel. Dr. Cameron's mind control procedures were also strongly associated with. With the drug.

[Carol (Alyssa's Mother)]

He actually gave me lsd. I have it in my file that I got from The Allen that Dr. Cameron physically did give me LSD. LSD does not kill people, but the effects from it are bad. Really bad.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Regarding the connection between Dr. Lehman and Dr. Cameron, Alyssa told us.

[Alyssa Rivers]

I recall now a dinner conversation at some point where my parents were discussing the experiments.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Alyssa is referring to Dr. Cameron's experiments. Her parents wondered whether Carol had been a participant.

[Alyssa Rivers]

They called Dr. Layman and he assured them that. That it was not part of these experiments because those experiments were LSD experiments. Now, as one of my friends once pointed out to me, if you don't have the records, how do you know your mother never had lsd?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Alyssa has tried in many different ways and for several years to get a hold of her mother's medical records in an effort to understand what happened.

[Alyssa Rivers]

All right, so first, you know, we made requests through my mom's psychiatrist at the time. And finally I got a phone call back and I was told, well, we've gone to the box in the archive where these records should be, but they're not there. We're really sorry. This was after they accidentally gave me the record of somebody else who had, like, a similar name, I guess, but was not my mother. And it was a very short record. It had nothing to do with her, but I guess they really tried. And there's nothing in the box. That's what they said.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

She hasn't been able to locate them.

[Alyssa Rivers]

Of course, my mother wasn't the only one. Of course, you know, So I don't know who else Dr. Lehman might have been doing this with. Was my mother the only one? What would Occam's Razor say about that? Right? I don't know. I can't say. I don't know, maybe she was. Maybe it was an anomaly.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Is there anyone else who can help us to unlock these secrets? Next time on Project Mind Control.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

She said they're going to label you mentally ill. You won't be able to do anything. You'll be stuck here for the rest of your days.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

We open up our search for answers even wider and Alyssa gives us another name. Herve Bertrand, one of the many children who found themselves in orphanages turned overnight into psychiatric institutions. Hello, I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. Project Mind Control was presented by me and written by me and my producer, Simone Aratta. The executive producers are Elsa Rochester and Louisa Adams. Sound design by Craig Edmondson. Project Mind Control is an always true crime production.

[Alyssa Rivers]

Hello?

[Brooke Devard]

Hello, it's Brooke Devard from Naked Beauty. Join me each week for unfiltered discussion about beauty trends, self care journeys, wellness tips, and the products we absolutely love and cannot get enough of. If you are a skincare obsessive and you spend 20 plus minutes on your skincare routine, this podcast is for you. Or if you're a newbie at the beginning of your skincare journey, you'll love this podcast as well. Because we go so much deeper than beauty. I talk to incredible and inspiring people from across industries about their relationship with beauty. You'll also hear from skincare experts. We break down lots of myths in the beauty industry. If this sounds like your thing, search for Naked Beauty on your podcast app and listen along. I hope you'll join us. The new WeGovy pill is now available through Weight Watchers. Powerful GLP1 results in a simple pill at the lowest price available. And with Weight Watchers you can get doctor support and personalized nutrition process programs. See if you [e-mail] adnot reviewed or approved by Novo Nordisk.

[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

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[Farnoush Tarabi]

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[Henrik (Fall Asleep with Henrik) / Various Narrators]

ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com

[Always True Crime Announcer]

want more true crime this podcast and loads more are part of the Always True Crime Network. It's packed with box sets to binge and twisted tales you won't find anywhere else. Find your next podcast obsession@always truecrime.com.