Psychiatric treatment or torture? The Oak Ridge experiment

[Music] the last time jim motherall went through these gates he was a prisoner on his way to ontario's oak ridge psychiatric hospital for treatment what he got instead he says was torture that's where it was right here this is a place that destroyed a lot of lives including mine he's spent the decade since leaving oak ridge with one wish that the doctors who subjected him and other patients to years of abusive treatments here would finally face accountability they're monsters that's exactly what they are you can't do that to that many people over and over knowing that you're doing it to hurt them not help them that they're guinea pigs human guinea pigs and call it treatment because that's the nice word that people want to hear when the real word is torture because that's all it was torture from beginning to end and they got away with it because no one oversaw them no one they weren't accountable to any for 20 years now former oak ridge patients have been trying to hold those doctors to account this past june an ontario superior court judge ruled in their favor calling the treatments flagrant and outrageous normally that would be the end of the oak ridge story but not this time those gates behind me are all that's left of oak ridge long the only psychiatric forensic unit in ontario for about two decades the criminally insane were brought here for what was considered a cutting-edge treatment the mastermind behind it all was dr elliott barker his theory was that the real problem those criminals faced is that they couldn't express their innermost feelings do that dr barker believed and you could cure mental illness we now know that dr barker's treatments were as ineffective as they were harsh and new information uncovered by the fifth estate has revealed that the real oak ridge story is far more bizarre than has ever been reported until now on a june day in 1993 in the town of midland ontario a writer was just arriving at the office of dr barker to discuss a book he was working on he found the doctor setting up a video camera aimed at himself this video obtained by the fifth estate has never been seen before now it provides revealing insights into the mind of the man at the center of this story it's clear that barker's intended audience that day wasn't really the visitor but his many detractors when elliot barker left the oak ridge psychiatric unit in the late 1970s his work was considered avant-garde but over the years journalists and researchers had begun chipping away at barker's legacy and he didn't like it my complaint is that history is being rewritten retrospectively but it pisses me off that uh what at the time was considered i mean not everybody loved it all the time and then patients would get mad but it but it it really was i think legitimately seen as a as a reasonable thing to be doing and and now i resent the time having to answer questions about it or defend it or be accused of doing awful things i just i just it pisses me off the times had indeed changed since dr barker first set out to make his mark on the psychiatric world he graduated in the early 60s a time when new ideas were spreading like infection and the world of psychiatry wasn't immune encounter groups were all the rage in california enlightened couples getting in touch with their deepest feelings john ronson has written a number of bestsellers including the psychopath test which includes a chapter about oak ridge he says elliott barker was deeply influenced by the 1960s personal discovery movement and he put two and two together he thought well if the problem with psychopathy is that the madness is buried deep within maybe we can utilize these um ideas that are happening in california and in london where we would like radically bring all the emotions to the surface and then with the psychopaths hopefully we could cure them but the field of psychiatry was moving in darker directions as the fifth estate was among the first to report at mcgill university dr ewan cameron was conducting brainwashing experiments using lsd and electric shock partly funded by the cia while the public was still in the dark some in the psychiatric community were intrigued dr john dedman graduated just behind dr barker at the university of toronto at the time elliott barker was doing this this was all new fresh stuff i mentioned that i met him on a stag weekend in lake joseph and i can remember he was really quite enthusiastic about all these things and perhaps not as critical as he should have been barker arrived at his new job at oak ridge with an ambitious plan he would set up intense therapeutic treatments that would completely transform psychopaths by teaching them how to be empathetic i think i was more idealistic than i am now in the sense that i thought what we were doing in the earliest years uh really was going to fix psychopaths fixed patients that we were going to just develop the best program in the world and these patients were going to get better the problem was even at institutions like oak ridge little was known about how to treat psychopaths and that lack of knowledge was about to become steve smith's undoing he was just a teenager from northern ontario when he was arrested for stealing a car i had lsd in my pocket would have been maybe maybe the second time i ever had lsd in my life and rather than get caught with it i swallowed it big mistake so why uh well uh lsd would make you look quite crazy actually so being in police custody and high on lsd is not a good thing eventually smith was taken to oak ridge where he joined the ranks of rapists pedophiles and serial killers when did you first meet dr elliot barker after two or three days in this cell he came in was really kind call me by my first name sat be uh sort of kneeled on the floor beside me put his arm around my shoulder and told me that i was a very slick psychopath and needed treatment and they were there to help me and i thought how can that be you know i like i've i've never heard anybody in my life psychopath uh i'm not hallucinating i'm not insane i'm not imagining things and i'm not violent what does he mean by that dr barker's ambitious treatment plans ran headlong into reality not long after he arrived at oak ridge there actually were very few staff members there and most of them were security attendants so the cornerstone of dr barker's treatment plan was laid we think the patients have really very great advantages as therapists for each other patients would treat other patients at times they would even diagnose them i'm not sure you should put it in the book um i hired a patient to when there were no staff or a patient who could do superb mental statuses better than mine and he would go and see each new admission and write up a beautiful mental status my uh you find them still are you i don't think you should was he the guy who co-authored the uber yeah no this was another patient who we got on staff as a clerk 1-2 uh and worked there for about six months then he uh he ran off with the social worker's wallet and credit cards and whatever but he did mental statuses beautiful ones one of barker's favorite treatments was known as the capsule a concept he said to have cribbed from the u.s military patients often naked locked together in a small windowless room for days no furniture except an open toilet food administered through a tube in the wall an encounter group for psychotics there were no professional staff no doctors it was all being directed by other patients and some really crazy people some some were in fact psychotic and what was so scary about this they had the power to to prescribe drugs mind-altering psychoactive heavy-duty drugs it was known as defense disruptive therapy drugs administered not as a treatment but to force patients to talk truth serums hallucinogens like lsd and the most feared drug of all scopolamine it's delirium inducing and the difference between inducing delirium and killing you with scopolamine is quite re is quite thin difference in south america the drug is called dragon's breath it's considered the most horrendous drug on earth nobody takes this voluntarily it just gives you nightmare visions schizophrenics on the other hand were locked in a room together and taken off their medication their belief was instead of medicating schizophrenia let's let them go through their schizophrenia and act out their fantasies and once they've acted them out it's out of their system and they'll never go into it again that's how we'll cure schizophrenia it was insane however therapeutic dr barker imagined his treatments to be there was one that was never anything but punitive it was called map which stood for motivation attitude and participation or as it's been called since torture [Music] patience tied with restraints forced to sit up with their legs straight in front of them without moving for hours the point of the whole program was to break us down mentally because they believed if they could strip away all our bad defenses that got us into trouble break us now mentally they could rebuild us as better human beings now they knew that was nonsense as much as we quickly figured out it was nonsense nonetheless dr barker's unconventional treatments were drawing attention even praise from all corners journalists doctors university students they all signed up for tours of the facility and wrote glowing reports about what they saw we always felt we were supported right through to the government uh in what we were doing and there's an editorial you should see i if you haven't seen it from the globe and mail saying god on us on the with the worst budget of any hospital in the in the ontario hospital system these people are doing brilliant things and yet by the early 1970s dr barker himself was feeling disillusioned no longer convinced all psychopaths were treatable he took time off set up a private practice at his home and became an expert witness in trials where he and his oak ridge boss dr barry boyd developed a new reputation and boyd and i got known as the hanging psychiatrist because when they were fighting about giving mandatory 25 years we said it's far better than curtailing parole which is what they were doing it's far better to hang a few people even though it's wrong and you can pick out people who are absolutely dangerous and absolutely untreatable and hang them and that caused quite a stir because most psychiatrists and most intelligentsia are kind of liberal about that but i think that's a reality some people are beyond treatment of any treatment we know and if you let them go they'll kill people though elliot barker no longer believed his revolutionary treatments always worked they continued to be used at oak ridge uh well there's no doubt that there's a certain undeclared coerciveness to this place now under the direction of a new doctor gary meyer he didn't have a psychiatric degree but he did have one unusual ability you know gary meyer was even more out of the box than eliot barker was he talked to me a lot about looking into people's eyes and seeing their souls and and i remember he told me a story about how one of one of the psychopaths in the unit had a crush on a man somewhere else in the unit and so he would go out of his body and his spirit would go through the walls and they would their spirits would combine in a cell somewhere and he was talking about this as if it was actually happening not surprisingly perhaps gary meyer the new age doctor had a fondness for lsd treatments but when he decided one day to put most of the ward on a psychedelic acid drip the attendants revolted gary meyer turned up one day to find that all the locks his his uh his key didn't work anymore the locks had been changed and that was the end of the program indeed by the late 1970s there were signs the doctor's radical approach had failed patients were leaving oak ridge only to commit other crimes which makes what former patient steve smith is about to tell you all the more shocking was a parallel program to oak ridge with the women's ward locked uh forensic women's ward in st thomas nearby that exactly mirrored what was going on in oak ridge complete with the map program but here's the kicker here's where it gets really really serious the program was set up by four men that had graduated the program in oak ridge and as you will see after the break it was essentially a case of the inmates running the asylum the st thomas psychiatric hospital outside london ontario is now abandoned but in 1976 it opened the first and then only forensic ward specifically for women in the entire province mentally ill women who committed serious crimes were brought here supposedly for specialized treatment but the treatment they got was anything but special the fifth estate has uncovered some startling information which shows that female psychiatric patients at the hospital in st thomas ontario were subjected to some of the same abusive treatments as the male patients at oak ridge were what's more incredibly at least four of those male patients all of them convicted sexual offenders were then sent to the hospital in saint thomas to be teachers for female patients at first glance saint thomas psychiatric hospital would seem a strange choice for an unconventional treatment program [Music] it wasn't known for its cutting-edge approach in psychiatric circles in fact its reputation was downright poor among the lower rated hospitals in ontario uh how shall i put it as we used to say in the navy the [ __ ] of the fleet bringing up the rear bringing up the rear few would have given this place another thought if not for one of the former oak ridge patients bill brennan he'd been convicted of two violent rapes and yet the superintendent of oak ridge asked that he'd be sent to st thomas to join other male oak ridge patients already serving as teachers there brennan died in 2018 leaving behind a trunk of documents which we've obtained they provide clues as to what was going on including the identity of the first inmate sent to saint thomas the man we're calling john he's a sexual offender serving time in a federal penitentiary we won't say which for his protection john was first sent to oak ridge back in the 70s after he was convicted of rape and indecent assault and yet after less than three years at oak ridge staff decided he should be one of the first to set up the new program at st thomas i think that dr meyers thought this kid's okay and he's going to be fine for this environment and basically i had been a poster child for the program because i sucked it all in hook line and sinker you were certified to be mentally ill at that point you were a convicted sex offender and here you were essentially being entrusted as a therapist for a number of mentally ill women totally inappropriate just real bad should never happen we were able to locate a couple of the women who were patients in that unit back in the late 1970s this woman we'll call margaret was a troubled teen who'd stolen a car before court her lawyer laid out her options i had two choices i could go to prison or spend a short easy time at the psychiatric hospital in saint thomas which was closer to my family and she picked the easy time not even knowing what a forensic hospital was she found herself locked up with women with serious mental illnesses let me ask you about a number of of the female patients that you mentioned uh gloria who was she the swallower the swallower meaning that's what she swallowed spoons knives whatever she wanted to swallow and judy judy she was in there for murdering her two children and mary mary poor soul like i said well she was really mentally challenged and she shouldn't have been on that ward and because she spent her whole time in that room sitting on the floor and never getting out of there that room mary was confined to was the map room where women who ran afoul of their oak ridge teachers were sent to be punished and you have to sit there and not move you couldn't speak and it was a cold hard floor and you had to sit with your either leg straight out or if um you didn't meet up to what they wanted you to say or you know follow along with a program you would be on your knees for up to sometimes eight hours a day in the room the teacher called john says attendance and good behavior weren't optional it was understood if somebody didn't want to participate they could be put on cuffs like they did up in oak ridge and forced to come to the group and they'd be tied to somebody else with cuffs and made to to be there uh it it was just it was forced it bordered on saturn masochistic restraining uh it was just on totally unacceptable this former patient we'll call emily says she learned the hard way that participation in group therapy was compulsory too yeah i i told the teachers that i didn't trust them and that they weren't doctors and this program was not was not legitimate and i walked out of the room and they followed me up all the way up to the top of the ward they tied me to a mattress and and they came in periodically to review it was was the map program meant to be a punishment yeah it was it was a punishment all right at st thomas the male prisoners didn't have the power to prescribe medications as they did at oak ridge but they were sometimes consulted a lot of these women were on medications and and ultimately staff would say you know what what do you think so we became advisors to the ward staff and the doctor about each each patient and so again not only are you being asked in your early 20s with the almost sole credentials of being mentally ill and a sexual convicted sexual offender not only are you being asked to lead these group sessions you're also being asked to advise what what what medication should be given they would ask what we would give up north in this circumstance and should we do this and so there would be consultation back and forth away from the patients and it just oak ridge had this patient treating patient mentality we were the therapist and here's another surprise at st thomas the men from oak ridge lived on the same ward as the women in fact the commingling of naked males and females was unavoidable since both genders used the same showers and bathrooms there was no privacy anywhere and the way this ward was structured when you went to sleep at night was there a lock on the door did you feel safe no no there was no lock on the door was that a concern always every night yeah and it was not just me it was a lot of the women they were very like terrified that because because these guys had control total control on that ward like i said the nursing staff very rarely seen them only to administer medications there was in fact one pregnancy we know of this tattered photo is the only one we have of oak ridge patient bill brennan and the st thomas patient we'll call ann it's not clear whether she's pregnant yet but in letters she wrote to him after he was sent away from saint thomas it's evident she's hoping he'll come back for her her letters to bill contained repeated reference to the map program which she was still subjected to during her pregnancy after ann became pregnant bill brennan's days as a teacher were over he was transferred to lewisburg prison in the u.s against his will and in violation of prisoner treaty agreements their baby girl was put up for adoption they damaged people they damaged people physically emotionally mentally and all for what they didn't accomplish anything but it was a total failure i don't see how anybody could have expected uh convicted criminals helping other people like i just don't get it and and i just will never understand it i guess less than a year later john was paroled and his time as a therapist was over at least that's what he thought a woman that i had gotten fairly close to is understanding her situation that called me just after i got out and wanted to talk i was eating at my family's place and she i said could you call back she didn't call back and one of the staff a woman older woman i ran into her vote two months later and she said this woman had committed suicide i felt like everything that i had been through was a fraud that it was just false and and that you know if i'm i was supposed to save her i felt like i was responsible for her death i was the person she came to and we should never have been put in that position in 1983 oak ridge stopped sending prisoners to st thomas to be teachers in fact the programs first developed by dr barker ended at both hospitals i hadn't really seen him much after that but he was feeling that this work had been a failure that was the impression i got from my contacts with him and that sense of failure was confirmed scientifically in the 1990s with the publication of a study that estimated the likelihood prisoners would reoffend psychopaths who didn't go through barker's therapeutic program were 60 likely to reoffend those who did go through it were eighty percent likely to reinvent anyway you know another cure for pentaten we do a good job here as gary meyer later said it seems we were running a finishing school for psychopaths as elliott barker reflected on his career that day he shared with his visitor one of the bittersweet lessons he had learned the hard way about treating psychopaths psychopaths are marvelous at letting you think that they think the world evolves around that their world revolves around you they're marvelous at making you like them and if you believe that and and sort of bask in that glory and then you find one day that you don't mean any more to them even though they've given you all the signals that you're so important in their life and the greatest thing since sliced bread you find one day they sort of deal you off like that or stick a knife in your throat not literally but they just that you've meant nothing to them emotionally then many people are hurt and hate psychopaths when that happens to them and anybody who works with psychopaths that happens because they're very they can read you like a book and they know you better than you know yourself in about 10 seconds and they know how to play with you how to how to work it's marvelous it's absolutely an astounding skill in 2006 28 former patients at oak ridge filed a lawsuit against the government of ontario and the two doctors the case has dragged on for years eight of the patients have died waiting then finally last june a superior court judge ruled in favor of the former patients saying the treatment they received amounted to assault and battery the government and the doctors have since filed an appeal we've asked for interviews they've refused those plans to appeal came as a surprise to steve smith back in 1998 he returned to oak ridge in search of some sort of closure when i first came into this room this is the spot i would have sat right here it's so much smaller now shortly after he filed his own lawsuit against the government and the doctors they settled with him quietly for an undisclosed amount [Music] i got hurt badly in this room my question really is how can they settle with me and appeal the rest of this why how it just doesn't add up steve smith has since moved on with his life built a successful company even written a book about his experiences at oak ridge and in his spare time he's gathering documents about the program at st thomas let me say this if the ontario government wants another trial go ahead i invite you to have another trial but things will come up in the second trial that the judge did not get to hear in the first trial and the ontario government will not like this i assure you as the oak ridge lawsuit worked its way slowly through the courts jim motherall never gave up hoping that one day it would all be behind him sadly a cancer diagnosis took away that chance on his deathbed in 2018 he had a final message to share but i want people to know that even if i fail in this fight and i go into a coma or go under or can't respond or i have no quality of life what i wanted through the whole thing is this to be done i wanted them to know that the fight never ended if i don't make it if i fail it wasn't because i gave up it's because i couldn't go on there's a difference i want people to know that jim mother all died not long afterwards [Music] dr elliot barker is now suffering from dementia unaware of his latest rebuke but on that june day in 1993 his mind still sharp and no longer burdened by idealism he offered this cynical description of his former job at oak ridge it's like this you've got your head halfway down in a 45 gallon drum of [ __ ] and you're you're molding the surface and you're getting all excited about the shapes you're creating but that's where you are [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: The Fifth Estate

Views: 170,497

Rating: 4.8268228 out of 5

Keywords: Oak Ridge, psychiatry, psychiatric hospital, doctor, mental health, mental illness, prisoner, prison, forensic psychiatric facility, forensic psychiatric hospital, psychopath, sexual offender, 1970s, 1980s, 1960s, St. Thomas, therapist, therapy, Dr. Elliott T. Barker, Dr. Elliott Barker, Bob McKeown, CBC, CBC News, The Fifth Estate, torture, treatment, St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital, Oak Ridge Psychiatric Unit, Penetanguishene, Midland, Ontario, Canada

Id: _zawytiPcH4

Length: 32min 5sec (1925 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/BrianArmstro]

That’s the stuff nightmares are made of. That psychiatrist is about as smug and evil as you can get.