McGill University

McGill University is a research university in Montreal, Quebec, chartered in 1821. Its Faculty of Medicine and affiliated teaching hospitals made it one of the leading centers of psychiatric and psychological research in mid-twentieth-century North America, a standing that drew the attention of the CIA during its MKULTRA behavioral-control program.¹

Allan Memorial Institute and Subproject 68

The university's Allan Memorial Institute, its psychiatric hospital, was directed by D. Ewen Cameron, chairman of McGill's Department of Psychiatry and a past president of the American Psychiatric Association. Between 1957 and 1964 Cameron conducted his depatterning and psychic-driving experiments at the Allan with funding routed through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front, under MKULTRA Subproject 68. Patients admitted for ordinary psychiatric complaints were subjected to drug-induced sleep, intensive electroconvulsive therapy, and LSD without informed consent, and many suffered permanent amnesia and disability.¹²

Donald Hebb and Sensory Deprivation

McGill psychologist Donald Hebb carried out the first systematic sensory-deprivation experiments in the early 1950s under a contract with the Canadian Defence Research Board, work that paralleled and informed the interest of British and American intelligence in isolation as a tool of interrogation and attitude change. His findings on the disorganizing effects of perceptual isolation entered the research base later drawn upon in the CIA's KUBARK interrogation manual.²³