A child of 14 is forced to walk on to a stage and strip to her underwear. Tiny and mute beneath the stacked rows of medical students, she is paraded for their benefit by a consultant psychiatrist some 44 years her senior. It is 1966 – the peak of Swinging 60s’ hedonism, liberalism and youthful counterculture – but in a locked psychiatric ward in London’s Royal Waterloo hospital, unspeakable violations are being inflicted upon patients.
The perpetrator-in-chief, William Sargant, is the subject of thriller writer Jon Stock’s first nonfiction book, The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal. One of the most notorious figures in British psychiatry, Sargant initially wished to be a physician. He pivoted to psychiatry after one of his earliest pieces of research met with a humiliating reception at the Royal College of Physicians, causing him to suffer a nervous breakdown and spend time in a psychiatric hospital himself. At this time – the 1930s – effective psychiatric treatments were virtually non-existent. Serious mental illness usually led to lifelong incarceration in an asylum. But the therapeutic nihilism of psychiatry was shifting towards optimism. Psychiatrists began experimenting with so-called “heroic” therapies, such as putting patients into insulin comas or giving them electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to try to “reset” their brains.
