Sleeping Room by John Stock Review – An Unforgettable Account of Fearful Medical Abuse | A Book of Science and Nature

a The 14-year-old is forced to walk to the stage and towards his underwear. With a small mute beneath a stack of medical students, she is paraded for their benefit by a senior consultant psychiatrist of about 44 years. It is the peak of shaking hedonism, liberalism and youthful counterculture in the 1966-60s, but the locked mental wards of the Royal Waterloo Hospital in London are given unspeakable violations to patients.

The perpetrator William Salgant is the subject of thriller writer John Stock's first non-fiction book. Sleeping Room: Very British Medical Scandal. One of the most notorious figures in British psychiatry, Sarganto initially wanted to become a doctor. He pivoted into psychiatry, suffering from a nervous breakdown, and spent time at the mental hospital himself after one of his early studies met a humiliating reception at the royal medical college. This time – the 1930s – no effective psychiatric treatment existed in virtually. Serious mental illness usually led to lifelong imprisonment in exile. However, the therapeutic nihilism of psychiatry was changing towards optimism. Psychiatrists have begun experimenting with so-called “heroic” therapies, such as putting patients in an insulincoma disaster or administering electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to “reset” the brain.

Sargant firmly believed that the broken brain of the brain is no different from other damaged organs and limbs and is optimally fixed with aggressive physical treatment. For him, it is not a cure for Freud's “sofa merchant” Namby Pamby Chitchat and their false stories. Rather, mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia can all be cured by excessive doses of medication or electricity. Sargant patients were isolated behind a closed door on the top floor of the hospital. The most infamous part of his ward was the six-bed area known as the sleep room. Here, patients, almost all female, were meditated for long-term nuisances and called out of bed only to feed, wash, or administer countless ECTs. Typical “narcotics” treatment consisted of three months of almost thin, unconsciousness, but then patients were reduced to “walking zombies” with persistent memory loss.

Sleeping room It is studded with unforgettable direct accounts of the horrifying treatment at the hands of William Sargant. For example, the aforementioned child, actor Celia Imley, was recognized under the care of Sarganto, as he was almost dying of anorexia nervosa. She was forced to take such a large amount of chlorpromazine from her first antipsychotic drug, chlorpromazine, and dribbled, shaking uncontrollably, finding her hair in a chlorpormazine, a chlorpormazine. She was injected with enough insulin every day to make her sleepy, weak, sweaty, and close to coma. She remembers the other women around her, with a huge rubber plug clogged between her teeth before high voltage electricity from ECT was sent through the temple. Sometimes patients reappeared in the ward with thick heads and bandages, and after being robotized they were barely able to walk. Amidst the moans, screams and the foul smell of old sleep, Imri recalls the nurse reporting her own resistance to medication against Sargant.

To say that these stories are difficult to read is an understatement. As a medical student and someone who learned about the indescribable mid-century epidemic for lobotomy, even permanently suppressing patients by gaugeting some of the frontal lobes, some of the accounts craved my skin. It is a great achievement in stock that he films the patient's testimony center stage and allows several patients to tell their stories at length in their own unedited terms.

Sarganto himself is portrayed as an ominous, full-powered “Simian” monster who ran his ward as a personal territory where he could pursue the assurance that effective treatment had worked by physically erasing and reprogramming the disturbed mind. The darker advantage of his sleep room was the absolute power he gave to his accusations. If rendered unconsciously, patients may be exposed to unconsensual treatments, such as scores and even hundreds of potential ECTs. As Sargant himself said, “What's extremely valuable is that in general there is no memory of the actual length of treatment or the number of ECTs used.” In time, a colleague called him “Bill the Brain Slicer” and “Sargant the Shock.” His appeal to brainwashing techniques led to speculation that he might have worked with the CIA mkrtra Programmed into mind control, but no conclusive evidence of this is provided by the inventory.

At least five of Sarmant patients died during drugs. The risks of artificially prolonged sleep included deep vein thrombosis, pressure pain, infection and intestinal paralysis, all of which are fatal. The disproportionate number of female patients caring for him was not evidence of misogyny in itself, but his treatment of a particular individual finds him firmly in its psychiatric tradition. He was totally pleased to see, for example, female independence as synonymous with insanity and as in need of social correction. One young woman was sent to Sarganto by the father of a wealthy businessman after falling in love with a “inappropriate” man in the 1960s. Sarmouth “helped” the situation by submitting to a few months of narcotics, ECT, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and “true drugs” Amital Sodium. Submission was achieved through the physical erasure of the mind.

Although he does not deny Sarganto's lack of medical ethics and his dependence on dogma, in contrast to his authoritarianism and clinical evidence, Sleeping room He can be presented as a villain almost like a cartoon. With “like a washed black pebble,” “sadomasochistic stubbornness,” and “a phenomenal enthusiasm for pill pop,” he cleans the ward like a dementia demigod and bares orders to the terrifying staff and patients. This portrayal safely flattens a very realistic and complex question about how to best treat serious mental illness. Patient consent – bedrock of all good medical practices – is not always available when a patient's illness means that he or she is not capable of making decisions for himself. Even today, with a modern focus on patient rights, clinician responsibility, and human needs in psychiatry, administered treatment can sometimes be the only way to prevent a grossly indomitable psychiatric patient from hurting or killing himself. For example, ECT is used much less frequently than Sarganto's Day (of course), but it can be a life-saving last resort, like patients with tension depression. With more nuances and less condemnation, inventory could have more enriched interrogation of the complexities of how to treat disorders and life-threatening mental illnesses.

Rachel Clark's latest book The story of the heart (Abacus), He has been in the final selection for Non-fiction 2025 Women's Award