The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of torture, including physical and psychological abuse, and death.

Naomi Klein meets with Gail Kastner, a now-elderly victim of the CIA-funded electroshock experiments carried out by psychiatrist Dr. Ewan Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in the 1950s. Gail suffers from skeletal fractures and memory loss from being given hundreds of electroshocks, dosed with LSD and PCP, and held in isolation for weeks during these experiments.

In the Shock Shop

Gail went to the Allan Institute when she was a nursing student at McGill, looking for treatment for her anxiety. Over the course of months of treatment, she regressed to a child-like state and became schizophrenic.

The Quest for Blankness

Dr. Ewan Cameron was a leading psychiatrist in the 1940s and 1950s. Cameron believed that to get people to change their destructive behaviors, people needed to be “depatterned,” i.e., return them to a blank slate. He thought this could be done through electroshock treatment, which was known to cause amnesia, along with prolonged periods of vegetative states caused by medications, during which patients would listen to tape-recorded messages he believed they would absorb through osmosis. 

The CIA was interested in studying torture using drugs and psychological techniques, so they funded Cameron’s research with the hopes of learning new insights.