Typical Rebellious Teenager

Summary

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Project Mind Control – Episode Summary

Podcast: Project Mind Control
Host: Dr. Julia Shaw, Always True Crime
Episode: Typical Rebellious Teenager
Date: March 17, 2026
Main Theme:
This episode follows the harrowing story of Lana Ponting, a teenage runaway in 1958 who became a victim of experimental psychiatric treatments at Montreal's Allen Institute. Dr. Julia Shaw investigates the personal and historical dimensions of psychiatric abuses, mind control experiments, and their intersection with covert government agendas and systemic exploitation.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Lana’s Early Life and Institutionalization

• Lana’s Teenage Rebellion and Family Turmoil

  • At 16, Lana is dealing with a new stepmother, relocation from Ottawa to Montreal, and recurring conflicts, leading her to repeatedly run away.
  • [01:02] Dr. Shaw: “Imagine this...You have a new stepmother...You’re upset and you run away from home. But you get caught and the consequences are life changing.”

• Arrest and Court-Ordered Commitment

  • Picked up by police during her last runaway attempt, Lana’s fate is sealed by Judge Nicholson who sends her to the Allen.
  • [05:53] Lana: “Judge Nicholson. I was told that he was responsible for putting me into the Allen.”

• The Allen Institute: Appearance vs. Reality

  • Ostensibly a prestigious psychiatric hospital, the Allen occupies a foreboding mansion. Its grand exterior belies the grim reality inside.
  • [06:38] Lana’s affidavit: “I did not like the outside of the building. It was scary looking.”

2. The Experimental Regime: Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron

• Profile of Dr. Cameron

  • A highly influential figure in psychiatry, holding top posts internationally, Cameron was not a fringe operator but central to the profession.
  • [07:31] Prof. Andrew Scull: “He rose to be the first president of the World Psychiatric Association...The word of a consultant psychiatrist was God.”

• “Psychic Driving” and the Erasure of Identity

  • Cameron’s theories, rooted in the science fiction ethos of his era (notably, “Brave New World”), aimed to erase and reprogram human minds using drugs and technology.
  • [09:29] Dr. Shaw: “Dr. Cameron had his own theory, remarkably similar to Aldous Huxley’s, all about controlling people’s minds with drugs and new technologies. He called it psychic driving.”
  • [10:14] Prof. Scull: “Now we’re going to wipe it, literally create a Lockean...blank slate on which we are then going to impose this new set of beliefs.”

3. Consent and Betrayal

• Dubious Consent Forms

  • Lana’s father, perhaps deceived or pressured, signed a broad consent that waived liability for almost any harm, indicating the deceptive practices at play in these institutions.
  • [10:50] Dr. Shaw: “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 Allen.”

• Propaganda and Public Perception

  • The image of the Allen as a cutting-edge, humane institution was carefully cultivated by media, possibly influencing families’ decisions.
  • [11:47] 1956 Film Narrator: "The Allen is a rather special kind of hospital...as interested in research...as we are in treatment itself."

4. Descent into Experimentation

• Initial Admission and “Treatment”

  • Lana was diagnosed with “passive-aggressive personality, aggressive type”—a then-legitimate but vague psychiatric label.
  • [14:35] Dr. Shaw: “At 2:45pm on April 3, 1958, she is officially diagnosed with passive aggressive personality. Aggressive type.”

• Immediate Initiation of Drugs and Isolation

  • Lana’s first-hand account underscores the speed and brutality with which treatment commenced: isolation, chemical sedation, and confusion.
  • [16:06] Lana: "Dr. Cameron took me into an office...the next thing I knew, I was put into a room and I was given drugs in the arm."
  • [16:30] Lana’s affidavit: “She put the needle in my arm. I felt funny. I tried to get up, but I could not...And so it started.”

• Depatterning: Electroshock and Drug Cocktails

  • Cameron’s “depatterning” phase broke down patients with excessive electroshock, drug-induced comas, and relentless disorientation.
  • [18:02] Prof. Scull: “He could do whatever he wanted to a helpless patient...giving them 3, 4, 5 electric shocks in a row.”
  • [18:22] Prof. Scull: “He is reducing people to babbling idiots...They become unable to walk, they become unable to talk.”

5. Psychic Driving: The Loop of Brainwashing

• Repatterning Through Repeated Audio Assault

  • Immobilized, patients listened—unable to resist—to recorded looped messages, an effort to overwrite their memories and personalities.
  • [19:50] Lana: “It consistently played and said, you’re a bad girl, you’re a bad girl. And this went on and on and on.”
  • [20:04] Lana: “And then it would say, you’re a good girl, you’re a good girl. And that went on and on as well.”

• Mechanical and Emotional Alienation

  • The process’s dehumanizing, repetitive nature left survivors deeply traumatized.
  • [20:31] Lana: “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...He wasn’t pleasant to Anyone in the building at all.”

• Complicity and Institutional Culture

  • Lana reflects on the roles of not only Dr. Cameron but also staff complicit in the abuses.
  • [21:14] Lana: “Did they not realize that they were brainwashing people?...That’s not a doctor, that’s not a nurse. That’s a hundred little Camerons. Running.”

6. Broader Context: Psychiatric Experimentation and Social Attitudes

• The Institutionalization of Biological Psychiatry

  • The Allen’s trajectory reflected a shift from psychoanalysis to extreme biomedical interventions post-WWII.
  • [22:18] Prof. Scull: “Freud himself was a neurologist and originally thought that he would be able to uncover the physiological basis of madness.”
  • [23:33] Prof. Scull: “After WWII, Freud was roundly denounced...The idea that tort[culture] could cure biology was seen as absurd.”

• Secrecy, Shame, and Silence

  • Many survivors, including Lana, kept their suffering secret for years out of stigma and confusion.
  • [24:55] Lana: “I never told anyone I was in the Allen all my life...How do you explain to people what happened to you?”

• Wider Abuse: Disappeared Children and Orphans

  • The Allen Institute was part of a larger network of abuses involving Indigenous children and orphans, with rumors of secret burials and links to the CIA and Catholic charities.
  • [02:26] Dr. Shaw: “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.”

• The Persistence of Pain and Quest for Truth

  • Survivors continue to search for answers and respect for those lost and exploited.
  • [25:19] Dr. Shaw: “Some even began to search for children they believe are buried on the grounds of the Ellon. There are people that deserve the respect of having their story told, being buried properly…”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Lana’s Anguish and Outrage

  • [00:50] Lana: "Why didn't you stop it? Why did you do this to anybody? That's what I want to know. Why?"
  • [08:09] Lana: "Every time I look at a picture of Dr. Cameron, it makes me very, very angry that he did this to me and he did it to everyone."

• Dehumanization in the Hospital

  • [09:14] Other Survivor: “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.”
  • [09:29] Dr. Shaw: “He called it psychic driving.”

• The Weight of Memory and Its Erasure

  • [03:20] Lana: “I don't even remember how we ate. I don't remember that at all. And that. That bothers me a lot...”
  • [03:42] Dr. Shaw: "One of those people is Lana Ponting..."

• The Scope of the Tragedy

  • [19:50] Lana: "It consistently played and said, you're a bad girl, you're a bad girl. And this went on and on and on."

• Cliffhanger for Next Episode

  • [26:45] Lana: “I got pregnant when I was at the Allen.”
  • [26:48] Dr. Shaw: “Lana had a child to whom she can't remember giving birth now.”
  • [26:56] Lana: “Who by? I don't know.”

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Important Timestamps

• 00:50: Lana questions her abusers: “Why didn't you stop it?”
• 05:53: Lana names the judge who sent her to the Allen.
• 08:09: Lana describes her anger towards Dr. Cameron.
• 10:14: Prof. Scull explains Cameron’s ‘blank slate’ ideology.
• 16:06 – 17:15: Lana recalls her first medical treatments and the beginning of experimental procedures.
• 19:50 – 20:31: Lana details the relentless brainwashing messages.
• 24:55: Lana reveals she hid her past at the Allen out of shame.
• 26:45 – 26:56: Shocking revelation about Lana’s lost child and missing memories.

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Episode Flow and Tone

The episode’s tone is empathetic, investigative, and unflinching. Dr. Julia Shaw weaves together first-person survivor testimony, expert academic commentary (Prof. Andrew Scull), and historical context, shining a light on the chilling reality behind mid-century psychiatric experimentation in Canada. Lana Ponting’s voice is raw and direct, providing a powerful, emotional anchor for listeners. The host’s narration is clear and factual, occasionally interjecting with rhetorical questions and candid reflection.

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Summary Conclusion

This episode of Project Mind Control exposes the dark legacy of psychiatric abuse and mind control experiments through the eyes of Lana Ponting—a survivor whose fractured memories illuminate a wider system of institutional brutality, governmental secrecy, and intergenerational trauma. It’s a story of betrayal, silence, and a survivor’s enduring quest for truth.

To be continued in the next episode, where Lana tries to piece together the full extent of what happened during her time at the Allen and confronts the impossible blanks in her memory.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

Your true crime story will start in just a moment, but before it does, have you got your ticket for the Always True Crime live show? Stuart from British Murders, Mike from Murder Mile and Paul, the true crime enthusiast, are teaming up for the ultimate true crime takeover at Crossed Wires Festival. They'll be diving into the details of some gripping cases in a live show that you won't want to miss. Search Crossed Wires Festival now and see all three shows with just one ticket.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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

[Lana Ponting]

Why didn't you stop it? Why did you do this to anybody? That's what I want to know. Why?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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.

[Lana Ponting]

They came to visit me once and I didn't recognize them. I had no idea who they were because I was so drugged. I didn't know anything.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Now you're in a place you mentally and physically can't escape.

[Lana Ponting]

They had people to catch us. We wanted to run, but where would we run to?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This is Project Mind Control, a series about experiments in Canada, the US and the UK that involved attempting to control people's minds.

[Lana Ponting]

People walk like zombies in the hallway.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

I was cognitive of the fact that I was crazy.

[Lana's Testimonial Voice / Other Survivor]

You'll be stuck here for the rest of your days.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

She threatened to jump out the dorm room window.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

What they did ruined lives, killed people.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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 where they were given recklessly high doses of tranquilizers and electroshocks. 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.

[Lana Ponting]

I don't even remember how we ate. I don't remember that at all. And that. That bothers me a lot that I

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

can't remember that where vulnerable people were used to test dangerous ideas.

[Lana Ponting]

And what was he hoping to achieve by erasing the memory?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

One of those People is Lana ponting

[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.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Lana is 85 and lives with her cat.

[Lana Ponting]

Her name is Peaches, but I call her Little Girl for some reason. There was a song many, many, many years ago when I was a kid called Daddy's Little Girl.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The song she's referring to is by the Mills Brothers. It was released in 1958, the year it all went wrong for Lana.

[Lana Ponting]

Yeah, I remember singing it. I used to. I love music then. I still do. But that song stays in my mind because my real mom died and my dad married a lady from England.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Then her father moved the family from Ottawa to Montreal. And Lana did not like Montreal.

[Lana Ponting]

I wanted to go back to Ottawa. I kept running away from home. My stepmother and I had issues, but we basically got along.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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

[Actor Reading Lana's Affidavit]

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

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Lana's memories of this time are fractured, and it will soon become clear why. But there's one name she vividly remembers.

[Lana Ponting]

Judge Nicholson. I was told that he was responsible for putting me into the Allen.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The Allen. A prestigious psychiatric institution in Montreal. But why would a teenaged runaway end up there? The Allen 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.

[Actor Reading Lana's Affidavit]

I did not like the outside of the building. It was scary looking.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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 snowbanks. Everything has been dead and frozen for months. Things are just starting to thaw, but it's still cold. And the snow is no longer white and pretty, but dirty and icy inside.

[Actor Reading Lana's Affidavit]

I noticed a smell, a strange chemical smell.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

And then she found herself in the office of a very prominent psychiatrist. Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron was the director of the Allen Memorial Institute. Dr. Cameron was originally from Scotland, then moved to the US and Canada, Cameron

[Professor Andrew Scull]

was an interesting figure.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

That's emeritus professor of sociology at UC San Diego, Professor Andrew Scull. He is an expert on the history

[Professor Andrew Scull]

of psychiatry, very much an authority figure, somebody who rose to be the first president of the World Psychiatric association as well as president of the American Psychiatric Association. So not a maverick figure, somebody at the center of the profession. In an era where the word basically of what you call a consultant psychiatrist was God.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This was a man with an international, illustrious career.

[Lana Ponting]

Every time I look at a picture of Dr. Cameron, it makes me very, very angry that he did this to me and he did it to everyone.

[Lana's Testimonial Voice / Other Survivor]

He was always very fascinated by what the future held for us all. We always have a book on science fiction by the bedside.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Dr. Cameron's son Duncan spoke with Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson, the hosts of WBUR's 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.

[Lana's Testimonial Voice / Other Survivor]

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.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Dr. Cameron had his own theory, remarkably similar to Aldous Huxley's, 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.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

And the underlying logic, such as it is, is that that then allows you to reconstruct the personality from the ground.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Professor Andrew Skull.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

Now we're going to wipe it, literally create a Lockean tableau Araza, a complete blank slate on which we are then going to impose this new set of beliefs.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

A blank slate. When Lana arrives at the ELN, 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 authorises 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 Allen. 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.

[Narrator from 1956 Film]

Some people call the Allen a rest home. And in a way, I suppose it is. Others, shall we say the uninformed call it, well, many things.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The uninformed called the Allen 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 Allen.

[Narrator from 1956 Film]

The Allen 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.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

It begins by showing a woman, Kathy Bowen, who looks like she's about 30. She's attempting to run away from the Allen, 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. Carl, I can't.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

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

[Actress Portraying Kathy Bowen]

I don't want to go back. I don't want to.

[Lana Ponting]

It's just for a minute.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

Just for a little while. Anyway.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Her reason for being at the Allen, she feels a little overwhelmed by life's tasks.

[Actress Portraying Kathy Bowen]

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. There never seems to be any end. And I'm so tired all the time.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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 her troubles is, in fact her inability to stand up to her mother.

[Actress Portraying Kathy Bowen]

I hate her. I really hate. Seems that's all I can do. Say that over and over to myself all day long. It's a terrible thing, isn't it, to hate your own mother?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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

[Lana Ponting]

My father was with the National Film Board.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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 Allen. And at 2:45pm on April 3, 1958, she is 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 Allen. He will deliver on that promise.

[Lana Ponting]

I thought I was going in there to get better. I thought I would be counseled and maybe get over the feeling that I have to live in Montreal because everything has changed in my life. But that didn't happen. That didn't happen at all.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Lana's treatment began on the same day.

[Lana Ponting]

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 given drugs in the arm.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

And in her affidavit, she paints an even more vivid picture of that day again. Here are Lana's words read by an actor.

[Actor Reading Lana's Affidavit]

Cameron took me to a room where I had one pillow, a mattress, sheets and 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. Julia Shaw]

Dr. Cameron's science fiction like theory, the one he called psychic driving, involved three phases. First came depatterning. 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. Depatterning, 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.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

What he realized was that once people were in either an insulin coma or a coma induced by barbiturates, he could do whatever he wanted to a helpless patient. And doing whatever he wanted might include giving them 3, 4, 5 electric shocks in a row.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Professor Andrew Scull.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

So he is reducing people to babbling idiots. They lose control of their bowels and their bladders, they become unable to walk, they become unable to talk.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This, he believed, made the patients minds less resistant to phase 2 re patterning. In order for people to be re patterned, they needed to be placed in isolation.

[Lana Ponting]

I was put into a place that looked like a closet. There was nothing in it.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Some patients had a football helmet clamped to their heads with speakers on the inside. Others were simply placed in a bed with speakers on either side and drugged so that they would be too weak and disoriented to move.

[Lana Ponting]

Speakers? Yeah, right beside the bed. I don't think I was tied to the bed. No. I think I was so doped up that I just went where they put me.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Either way, they were physically unable to escape. What came next? Recordings of things they had said in interviews with Dr. Cameron or his colleagues. Their anxieties, fears, or whatever Dr. Cameron decided needed to be corrected. He wanted to overwrite old bad thought patterns with new, better ones.

[Lana Ponting]

It consistently played and said, you're a bad girl, you're a bad girl. And this went on and on and on.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

These negative messages would be played on a loop, then followed up by positive ones.

[Lana Ponting]

And then it would say, you're a good girl, you're a good girl. And that went on and on as well.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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. Cameron called autopsychic driving, or voiced by someone else, heteropsychic driving.

[Lana Ponting]

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, you're a good girl, you're a good girl. He didn't act like a doctor that I could see. He was. He was an evil person that I can remember. He wasn't pleasant to Anyone in the building at all.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Dr. Cameron was driving the experiments. But Lana also has no sympathy for the other doctors or the nurses.

[Lana Ponting]

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 Camerons. Running.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

These procedures were highly experimental in nature. Which begs the question, why would McGill, a prestigious university, allow patients to be treated this way? According to contemporaneous letters between staff at McGill, they wanted it to be a place of pioneering research.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

Psychoanalysis obviously came on the scene in the late 1890s and the first couple of decades of the 20th century, principally as developed by Sigmund Freud.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Sociological historian Andrew Skull.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

Freud himself was a neurologist and originally thought that he would be able to uncover the physiological basis of madness.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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 Oedipus Complex.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

To some degree, the emphasis on the sexual origins of the conflicts in the psyche was something that caused people to recoil.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Psychoanalysis was incredibly popular, but also had a major backlash. One of the problems was the psychoanalysts

[Professor Andrew Scull]

were very reluctant to produce any kind of evidence beyond their own testimony.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

And after World War II, Freud was

[Professor Andrew Scull]

roundly denounced by most of the medical profession. The idea the mental illness was widely seen as biological. The idea that tort could cure biology was seen as absurd.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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. Dr. Cameron was actively doing research on biological interventions. 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 Ellen. 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.

[Lana Ponting]

I never told anyone I was in the Allen all my life. I never told anyone because I thought if I tell people that happened to me, they're going to 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?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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 Ellon. 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 did Dr. Cameron's idea spread? Just like, oh, yeah, you know, the sky's blue, grass is green. Your mother had a few hundred shock treatments to erase your memory.

[Lana's Testimonial Voice / Other Survivor]

They tried a new kind of lobotomy. They called it reversible lobotomy. They put a stick and a towel in your mouth and you're tied up and they send an electrical shock in your head. And him, he became crazy.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Next time on Project Mind Control. Lana tries to piece together what really happened to her at the Allen.

[Lana Ponting]

What else happened?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

And makes a shocking discovery in her medical records.

[Lana Ponting]

I got pregnant when I was at the Allen.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

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

[Lana Ponting]

Who by? I don't know.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. Project Mind Control was presented by me and written by me and my producer, Simona Rata. The executive producers are Elsa Rochester and Louisa Adams. Sound design by Craig Edmondson. Lana's affidavits were read by Martine Richards. Project Mind Control is an always true crime production.

[Podcast Host]

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