Creepy, to be sure, the image of narcotized patients suspended in the air in the 1978 movie thriller “Coma,” enough to send a shiver down anybody’s spine, but something more than just a passing chill it made for Celia Imrie, who exited the movie with the shakes but with no idea why. Indeed, it wasn’t until much later that she came to understand why the scene in the film had upset her so much – she’d seen its real-life equivalent years before in the “Sleep Room” of the medical facility where she'd been treated for anorexia.
“Dead-looking women lying on the floor on grey mattresses, silent in a kind of electrically induced twilight,” she recalled of the macabre spectacle she took in as she peered through the portholes of the doors leading into the room, where she wasn’t sure if she’d ever spent any time herself (she’d been pretty drugged), but the room was forever imprinted on her memory.
“You went in asleep and you came out asleep,” she said about the regimen administered there by Dr. William Sargant, the principal medical figure of Jon Stock’s unsettling nonfiction work, “The Sleep Room,” which details how psychiatric patients were kept in extended sleep states and administered psychotropic drugs and hit with electric shocks. And if none of those proved efficacious, there was always the last resort of lobotomies, which were in fact performed with regularity.
At first horrified by the procedure in which holes were drilled into a patient’s skull and the frontal lobes severed, Sargant went on to champion the procedure with the same enthusiasm with which he’d advocated the Sleep Room regimen of insulin coma therapy and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Indeed, not just Sargant, but a good part of the developed world, it seemed, was taken with the procedure, with tens of thousands of people lobotomized in the U.K. and America in the 1940s and 1950s, and it going on to become one of the most popular neurosurgical treatments for mental disorders in the Western world – Sargant even reportedly promoted it as a solution for unhappy wives.
The reality was, of course, something different, with those of us of a certain age recalling all too well the truly awful business cited in the book in which Joseph Kennedy arranged for his 22-year–old daughter, Rosemary, who was afflicted with mood swings, violent rages and seizures, to have a lobotomy, which resulted in her ending up with the mental capacity of a 2-year-old and institutionalized until she died at age 86.
Not just with lobotomies, though, came debilitating consequences but with the lesser treatments of coma therapy and convulsive shocks as well, with nurses noting that women in the Sleep Room (it was almost always women) were “drugged up to the eyeballs” and “we had to clean their teeth for them” and “it was as if they were half dead, half living … the sort of thing you’d expect in Hitler's time.” It felt as if, one said, “that they were almost trying to take over these people … infiltrate them, change them, take over their personalities … change who they were … almost acting like a god.” “Franco would have loved to do these things,” a Spanish nurse said.
And from a patient: “I also have a great sense of having lost a large portion of my emotional range … it's a bit like a musician only having access to one octave of a piano.”
And not just psychic wounds the treatments made for, but physical ones as well from the prolonged inactive states, including “deep vein thrombosis, bladder, bowel and abdominal distension, chest and throat infections, and withdrawal fits.”
“Pressure sores and muscle loss were also a problem,” the book goes on to note. “The biggest threat to life was severe constipation leading to paralytic ileus, a condition caused when the muscles that usually move food through the gut are temporarily paralysed.”
Still, the idea of a sort of tabula rasa that the treatments aimed for in which troubling memories were swept away or eradicated was of great interest not just for the medical community at the time but also for intelligence services, it being the time of the Korean War with talk of brainwashing very much in the air and the movie “The Manchurian Candidate” having brought to the popular imagination the notion of someone being unconsciously directed to do nefarious things.
A direct link between Sargant and intelligence services is hard to tie down, the book notes, but “one thing is certain, psychiatrists such as Sargant lay at the heart of the CIA’s mind control programme,” with a notorious instance of the sort of abuses laid at the agency’s door being when biochemist Frank Olson plunged to his death from a 13th-story window after it was suspected he was slipped LSD without his knowledge (there was a Netflix series about this).
Something of a B-movie villain Sargant emerges in all this, with an imposing, off-putting manner that had patients and nurses alike scared of him, with “a face of thunder, like the devil,” according to Celia, though with such professional self-assurance that he claimed he could tell if a patient was getting better just by the confidence with which he turned the door handle of his consulting room.
The assurance didn’t extend into other realms, though, with his somewhat bizarrely being prone to frequent car crashes and, especially interesting to me as a journalist, his writing leaving something to be desired (“William couldn’t put two words together coherently,” remembered a colleague).
Such details supply welcome enlivening detail to a book which, while for the most part absorbing, occasionally tests reader patience with patient profiles that can become repetitive and psychiatric details that can be somewhat numbing to the layman.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC. I really enjoyed the informative nature of this book, I wish it had felt more personal or had characters that I could attach to. However, I thought the author did a great job with the portrayal of a madman and the horrors these victims had to endure. So grateful psychiatry isn’t like this anymore!