You’d think a sleep room would be cosy, but the one on Ward 5 of the Royal Waterloo hospital in London, back in the 1960s, was dark and airless, a twilight zone where up to six patients – almost always young women – would lie comatose on grey mattresses for weeks, even months on end. They had come in with schizophrenia, anorexia or, in a few cases, a youthful waywardness that their parents hoped could be cured. For William Sargant, the psychiatrist in charge, the cure lay not only in prolonged narcosis but insulin shock therapy, ECT and, if need be, lobotomy. Afterwards, the patients had no memory of what had been done to them. The Sargant method was to wipe their minds clean.
Celia Imrie, later a famous actor, was admitted to Ward 5 in 1966, when she was 14. To her it was “like being in a prison camp” and her recovery “owed nothing” to the “truly horrifying” Sargant and his “barbaric treatments”. Sara (not her real name) was a year older, just 15, and remembers the “hideous cocktail of drugs” that kept her in a zombified state. Linda Keith, celebrated for her relationship with Jimi Hendrix and at the time, in her own words, “a pleasure-seeking, music obsessed drug addict”, had about 50 sessions of ECT on Ward 5: they left her “hugely mentally incapacitated” and unable to read. She also recalls Sargant coming on to her in his private practice.
