William Sargant blog

Susannah Phillips has started a blog about William Sargant. This blog is new and I’m not sure what direction Susannah is taking it in but I willingly pass on the baton. You can find it at williamsargant.wordpress.com

Goodbye

This blog has now come to the end of the road. When I discovered that my treatment all those years ago had been experimental, unethical and dangerous I was naturally, I think, incensed. I was determined that the facts of the abuse that Narcosis patients suffered should be widely known and that there would be an understanding of the way in which the doctors responsible had got away with it. I now accept that none of this will ever happen and that I’m flogging a dead horse and making myself very unhappy in the process

Surprisingly even at my age I’ve learned quite a lot about human nature although none of it is very pleasing. Who’d have thought that the suffering and abuse of hundreds of patients at the hands of a coterie of psychiatrists wouldn’t be quite enough to appal people? I doubt that William Sargant and John Pollitt had anything at all to do with British security services but that suggestion adds the frisson that keeps people interested in what happened in the Narcosis Room. A trawl of the internet shows the extent of the disregard for the feelings of Narcosis patients. Trawl is the right word since I am discussing the online activity of a lot of the internet’s bottom feeders. Nonsense about the “illuminati” and sub “Ipcress File” brainwashing plots has done Narcosis patients a great disservice. More disgraceful still is is the company behind the website www.youclaim.co.uk which says that it gets compensation for victims of medical negligence.This company describes the abuse of patients in Narcosis in a way that would lead people to think that they had championed their cause. However the truth is far less heroic. I contacted this company to ask for their help in getting legal redress for my suffering in Narcosis and for the damage done to me. It won’t surprise you to learn that this company emailed me to say that they couldn’t help. Using the case of Narcosis patients to generate interest in your business but then refusing to help those same patients seems unprincipled to me.

Lately I found a very well known firm of Human Rights lawyers who seemed interested in our case but this has come to nothing. It is easy to understand why. It was so long ago, so few of us have come forward and our medical records appear to have been destroyed. Also much to my despair a new medical movement is emerging that claims that ECT is an unfairly maligned treatment and contesting the claims of former ECT patients that their memories have been irreparably damaged by this treatment. The most accessible account of this revised thinking is Shorter and Healy’s “Shock Therapy” published by Rutgers University Press. If I could get enough support I would suggest a book burning outside the Royal Waterloo.

Sadly the failure of Narcosis patients to speak with one voice has also damaged our cause. I understand why we find ourselves in this situation but attempts by individuals to win redress can never succeed. I am fortunate in that I knew my husband and that we were committed to each other before I went into the Royal Waterloo Hospital. I was 22 and many Narcosis patients were of a similar age. My husband knew all there was to know about my illness but those who hadn’t yet met their life partners understandably wanted to keep such a dark episode from new people in their lives. There is still a great deal of stigma surrounding mental illness. I have preferred not to make my identity known and there are only six people plus my online contacts who know that I have had such a long and devastating history of mental illness. I understand that other patients may have the same hesitancy about letting it be known that they were so seriously mentally ill. Also, it is getting on for forty years since I was in the Royal Waterloo. I had no contact with any other former patients until just over a year ago. It was asking quite a lot that so far down the track we would be able to find a way to work together. We all have our own prejudices and have developed our own ways of dealing with things. We just couldn’t work together.

Sargant and Pollitt are dead but many of the doctors and nurses who were in thrall to them are still around and will never have to explain themselves in a court of law and St Thomas’ has failed to explain how it allowed such a controversial and damaging treatment to go on for so long. There are lessons here if anyone has the heart to learn from them. Dr Sargant said that the difference between the insane and the rest of society was that the insane had lost their suggestibility. In this he was right. I have been  just about as far down the path of madness as one can go but I know that no power on earth would have made me treat my fellow human beings in the way that St Thomas’ doctors and nurses treated me. I would never let someone excite such a mixture of fear and deference in me that I would debase myself by doing their bidding. If that truly is the big difference between me and normal people then I’m very glad of it.

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to read my blog tedious though it was. May you never fall into the hands of powerful men.

With all kind regards,

Nardilly

Images of William Sargant

Does anyone know of a photographic image of William Sargant that is not protected by copyright?

Alternatively does anyone know of an image of William Sargant where the holder of the copyright might be sympathetic to the aims of this blog and the associated website?

The more the merrier

It’s been a while but I’m back in action. My new treatment was a big disappointment. After all the trouble that my wonderful consultant went to to get me this new, effective and expensive treatment I had an allergic reaction after the forth injection. I asked if I should try again but she said “if you have allergic shock we might be able to save you or we might not” so that’s the end of that I’m afraid.

The big news is that another ex-patient has contacted me and also that Celia Imrie, that’s right, was a patient on Ward 5 at the RWH. The Daily Mail carried an excerpt from her new book  ”The Happy Hoofer” last Saturday. It seems that she was William Sargant’s patient and may or may not have been in Narcosis but describes seeing women in Narcosis lying asleep on mattresses placed on the floor. A kind reader of this blog emailed me with a link to the Daily Mail’s website otherwise I would never have known about it.

I forgot

When I posted earlier today I forgot to say that I’d been looking at the medical records that I got from St Thomas and discovered that they’d also given me ether abreaction. Apparently in my case they got a “poor result” from it.

You probably know what abreaction is but just to remind you the theory was that it uncovered unhappy and traumatic events  that lay buried in the unconscious mind. Great emotional effort and stress was involved in repressing these memories (once described to me by a psychiatrist as like trying to hold an inflated beach ball under water). This enormous stress could manifest itself in physical and psychological symptoms. Abreaction was supposed to work by bringing these repressed memories out into the open and allowing them to be released. The people that psychiatrists tried this on were sedated with barbiturates and when in a suggestible state they were encouraged by the psychiatrist not just to remember these traumatic events but to relive them. William Sargant used this treatment on shell shocked and traumatised Second World War troops (helpfully!) allowing them to relive the experience of being trapped in burning tanks etc.  Not surprisingly these abreactions were sometimes so violent and terrifying that patients had to be held down. Sargant gave this treatment so that traumatised soldiers could be cured and returned to the front line in double quick time.

What a terrible old fraud William Sargant was. There I’ve said it. You may find this difficult to believe but the evidence and justification that Sargant used for this vile and dangerous treatment is contained in stories like the the one about a soldier with amnesia who had lost the use of his right hand. Subjected to Sargant’s tender ministrations and injected with sodium amytal this soldier apparently recalled the experience of retiring from a battle and finding his brother lying beside a road mortally wounded in the stomach. In order to put him out of his misery the soldier dragged his brother into a field and dispatched him with a single shot. “it was the hand that pulled the trigger that suddenly became paralysed” said Sargant. Now this probably sounds like the most ferocious old guff to you and me, like something from a particularly trite B Picture. But based on such old guff as this Dr Sargant developed the abreaction treatment that was used on me in 1972. Ether was an added refinement since it gave even more violent abreactions.

It’s difficult to know exactly where to start to criticise this treatment so I’ll just say that they don’t do it anymore, that’s how good it was.

Hello again

It’s been a while since my last posting. You won’t want all the tiresome details but I have a degenerative condition that is believed to have it’s origins in the time that  I spent on Ward 5.  Anyway, let’s just say that I’ve degenerated a bit more and I’ve been too mis to think about anything other sorting out some new treatment that will hopefully be better than the last lot of treatment.

Last time I posted I’d just had a letter from Ron Kerr the CE of St Thomas’. I expect that you can guess that Mr Kerr wasn’t writing to say that they’d found a filing cabinet simply bulging with the records of Ward 5 patients. That’s really all I can say because the letter was addressed to me personally. When the Narcosis Action Group writes to Mr Kerr and gets a reply then that will be a different matter.

A letter from St Thomas’ Hospital

On Friday I finally had a reply from Ron Kerr the CE of St Thomas’. I still can’t decide what to do about it.