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Mk Ultra Essay

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Would you be comfortable in participating in a CIA run study that involved sleeping for up to a month at a time while being drugged and shocked? What about if your consent was never asked? These seemingly extreme and hypothetical questions became reality for dozens of people who were simply looking for professional help dealing with common mental health issues. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron played a large part in their experiences, although it’s debatable as to whether he ever knew the CIA was involved. By delving into the ins and outs of the sleep room studies with reference to various ethical codes, one can place the blame on the CIA and Canadian government more so than Ewen Cameron and consider their actions and the repercussions that follow …show more content…

Donald Hebb was the director of psychology at McGill at the time and was given $10,000 to study sensory deprivation. His studies began by paying his own psychology students to be deprived of all senses for one day by staying in an isolated room; to find an association between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of cognitive ability he played recordings suggesting anti-scientific ideas such as creationism that most scientifically aware students would reject. At the end of the day, the students emerged suddenly tolerant of the anti-scientific ideas that they previously objected to, these results showed a step in the right direction towards brainwashing. Unknown to Dr. Hebb, his promising results would lead the CIA to further research using sensory deprivation while keeping interrogation and psychological torture techniques in mind.
Five years after the research of Dr. Hebb’s was conducted, Dr. Ewen Cameron picked up where he left off. At the time, Dr. Ewen Cameron was the first director of the Allan Memorial Institute which had opened in 1943 with an “open door” policy allowing patients to leave whenever they wished. In 1946, he set up laboratories, which later became sensory deprivation chambers, in the stables of the Victorian mansion where the Allan Memorial was based. Dr. Ewen Cameron was a world-renowned professor and had an almost god-like status among his academic peers and patients, he also enjoyed gadgets and

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