Sam
TS Member
Note: if you haven't experienced the Sanctuary, there are some pretty big spoilers here.
The Sanctuary, SW7 and Donald Ewen Cameron
Many people have drawn comparisons between Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Sanctuary, and the theme of the upcoming SW7. But I think there's a much more striking and direct inspiration, drawn from the horrors of real life, rather than the pages of George Orwell's novel. It relates to the murky world of pseudo-psychiatry, and its catastrophic acceptance into mainstream medicine for a brief period in 1960s North America. Alton Towers bill The Sanctuary as having been “closed for new patients for almost 50 years”, corresponding almost exactly with the period when the so-called MKUltra project was at the height of its power. I first heard about the MKUltra experiments in a book called The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. The theme of the book is various attempts to repeatedly shock the human body (and later, entire populations) until it is completely broken down into an empty shell, ready to be remodelled in any way their torturer chooses. I reckon this is also the core idea within the Ministry of Joy and their Sanctuary facility – the eventual aim being to re-build their patients in the image of the frequently mentioned 'social compliance'.
The protagonists in our narratives are two medical practitioners, one real, the other fictional. Donald Ewen Cameron was a well-respected psychiatrist in the mid-20th century. At the end of World War II, Cameron was invited to the Nuremberg trials to assess the mental state of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. As the president of the American Psychiatric Association, Cameron was hired by the CIA in the 50s to conduct experiments for their MKUltra project, which looked into various methods of behaviour control. He set up a facility in Montreal, Canada. At the Allan Memorial Institute, Cameron and his colleagues experimented on members of the public who had arrived with minor complaints such as anxiety issues and mild depression. Many of them left with severe psychotic disorders – their lives shattered, never to be rebuilt.
New arrivals would be subjected to a range of bizarre and ghoulish experiments to try and 'de-pattern' their minds (a concept of Cameron's invention) - to wipe the slate clean. Cameron believed that to re-build them without the 'weakness' of mental illness, the patients first had to be regressed to a state of complete nothingness - a new start. The methods included huge doses of LSD and PCP, electro-convulsive therapy of 150 to 200 volts, full-frontal lobotomies (removal of parts of the brain) and induced comas for weeks at a time. One person was trapped in an 'isolation chamber' for 35 days, Cameron having “soundproofed the room, piped in white noise, turned off the lights and put dark goggles and "rubber eardrums" on each patient, as well as cardboard tubing on the hands and arm”, according to Klein. He would purposefully mix up meal times, serving porridge for dinner and soup for breakfast, to make sure that any link to time was severed for his patients. This wasn't research, it was torture.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCEh9VltC2E&hd=1[/youtube]
Once the patients were reduced to a blank canvas, often forgetting how to walk, talk, or their marital status, the rebuilding phase began. Cameron called this technique 'psychic driving', another concoction of his own. This involved playing the same tape-loop for 16 to 20 hours a day, for anything up to 101 days, with optimistic messages such as "You are a good mother and wife and people enjoy your company", or “People like you. You like people.” The experiments were a complete failure. No positive results were ever observed from the idealistic tape messages. Many of the victims were left with severe mental illness for the rest of their lives, including amnesia and schizophrenia. Some committed suicide.
Both these processes are represented in the Sanctuary together as marmalisation, though of course, where Cameron had several months, Alton have to condense the process down to a minute or two. The harsh brightness and white noise of the marmalisation room represents a complete break-down of time and place, and the sense of self. This is Cameron's 'de-patterning' process. The video Alton have created represents an abridged form of 'psychic driving', bombarding the brain with disturbing messages and imagery. It simulates subliminal messages, and as you experience the marmalisation process in the maze, you feel an uneasy sense of something slipping past your conscious to your sub-conscious. This video can be seen as analogous to Cameron's infinite tape-loops. Similar to the lobotomies performed at the Allan Memorial Institute, a scene in the Sanctuary sees a patient – possibly dead – having recently undergone surgery.
Upon entering the Sanctuary, Dr Kelman mentions in his introductory speech that the rest of the medical community think him to be mad.“Do I look mad to you?!” he asks his new patients. As Cameron's experiments became evermore cruel and unusual, he found himself increasingly isolated from the psychiatric community. Dr Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill University (which owned the Allan Memorial Institution), called Cameron “criminally stupid.” Cameron developed bizarre and dangerous ideas in his writings. One of these was that mental illness was highly contagious, and would spread through society like wildfire unless mentally ill people were quarantined. Another was that Germans were more likely to commit atrocities than any other race of people. Respected psychiatrist Sir Aubrey Lewis described his electro-convulsive treatment as “barbaric”, while his successor at the Allan Memorial Institute, Dr Robert A. Cleghorn wrote that “the theoretical basis [for his psychic driving experiments] was not only slim but dubious and led ultimately to some unfortunate results”, to put it mildly.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqu2JKw4zJM&hd=1[/youtube]
The goals of the MKUltra project, as listed in declassified documents, were numerous. One was to investigate “substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.” Another was to find “a material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.” A third looks at “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.” Overall, there were 17 such goals. It's obvious what these findings could be used for: extracting information from the enemies of the United States through torture, either on the battlefield or in holding camps, such as Guantánamo Bay.
The above three goals especially link to the idea of social compliance. Compliance implies a correction (#GetCorrected) of deviance. Of course, deviance and compliance aren't universal standards. Deviance is defined against the normalities of the society that we live in. Or the normalities imposed on us by the elite of the society we live in. Here we encounter a bit of confusion over the Ministry of Joy's theme. The idea of social compliance hints at complex goals of minimising deviance, criminality or political subversion. But the concurrent theme about encouraging smiling, the smiling logo, and the name 'Ministry of Joy' imply the aim of the Sanctuary is a simple anti-depressive one. Hopefully, the extra 'canon' in the form of SW7 will clarify this, and the purpose of the ministry will become more concrete.
There's also an assumption among enthusiasts that the Sanctuary/MoJ are government institutions. This seems likely, but not definite. The Sanctuary could be training people to subvert and overthrow a government. It's even possible that the facility is managed by a revolutionary group, possibly Marxist or anarchist, with the aim of creating civil disobedience and political unrest. If Doctor Kelman could somehow find a way to spread 'advocacy' like a virus, without needing each individual involved to enter the Sanctuary, he could launch a coup that could overthrow a government. One man's civil disobedience is another's 'social compliance'. Let's briefly look at how extreme psychiatric techniques can be used to engineer political subversion in human beings.
Patty Hearst is an American socialite, actress, and granddaughter of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. In 1974, she was kidnapped by a Marxist-Leninist group committed to the violent overthrow of the US government, called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The original aim of her capture had been as a bargaining chip to secure the release of prison members, but she soon claimed to have joined the group voluntarily and espoused their far-left ideology – a phenomenon we now know as 'Stockholm syndrome'. It's claimed that during this time she was brainwashed by the SLA, kept in isolation, and possibly drugged. The destructive techniques were probably similar to those used by Cameron. Similarly to Hearst's conversion, some of Cameron's patients were so extremely broken down that they began to believe that institute staff were their parents. Hearst later took part in an armed bank robbery, bearing a semi-automatic rifle. This shows the extraordinary power of various extreme techniques of persuasion or brainwashing – to turn an organisation's victim into its 'advocate'.
Exploring the term 'advocate' more, let's return to MKUltra. A rumoured, but never confirmed, aim of the program was to develop what's known as a Manchurian Candidate. This far-fetched theory probably isn't true, but it has become an essential and dramatic part of the myth surrounding the project, and would be rich pickings for a creative director creating a themed attraction inspired by MKUltra. A Manchurian Candidate, named after a novel by Richard Condon, is a person brainwashed into becoming a secret agent, working for an enemy of the country they live in. For example, it could be an advisor to the US President who is brainwashed by a terrorist group into murdering their boss. Could this be the aim of the Sanctuary? Thus, Manchurian Candidates produced by Dr Kelman could become 'advocates' of the political ideals of the Ministry of Joy, and if their transformation at the hands of the Sanctuary is successful enough, they could be encouraged to kill, maim and participate in violent struggle for those beliefs, as Patty Hearst was.
In the scare maze, we first encounter a cook who also seems to be a patient, in charge of the facility's kitchen. While there's no evidence of this at the Allan Memorial Institute, it's been widely used at similar human experimentation and cult-like institutions. At the Gold Base in California, the headquarters of the Church of Scientology, followers are expected to earn their place by volunteering to do menial jobs – at one point in 1994, just three cooks were expected to feed 800 people, three times a day. The religion has also used slave labour for hundreds of construction projects, manipulating their adherent's desires to succeed in the church. Similar to the Sanctuary, Scientology members often visit the church's 'resorts' or their cruise ship Freewinds for multiple-week 'retreats', where they are subjected to a pseudo-scientific psychological onslaught to break them down, and re-build them as perfect Scientologists. Some followers have even been encouraged to 'disconnect' themselves from members of their family who are critical of their new-found 'faith'.
I can't be sure that the creators of the Sanctuary and the theming directors of SW7 have heard of Donald Cameron, or the macabre terror of the Allan Memorial Institute. But the similarities seem striking, and I would guess that they probably have. His house of horror has contributed massively to modern fears and anxieties about psychiatric or mental health institutions, particularly those that are no longer open. The theme is returned to time and time again in horror films, television and scare attractions, such as the Sanctuary and Fuji-Q Highland's Haunted Hospital. Cameron died in 1967, and would have no conception of the modern rollercoaster, and why they are ridden for pleasure. But if he looked at the nightmarish plans for SW7, he may well have seen the intensely twisted rails as the perfect 'de-patterning' device.
Sam Gregory
Further reading
The Tragedy of Dr. D. Ewen Cameron by Richard D. Flavin
1958 article from Psychoanalytic Quarterly on Psychic Driving
Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine
Please feel free to use this article on your own website as long as you
a) keep it in its original form
b) re-host the images
c) credit me and link back to this topic
If the TowersStreet team want to use it on the SW7 mini-site, feel free.
Edit 1: Changed all references to Kenward to Kelman.
The Sanctuary, SW7 and Donald Ewen Cameron
Many people have drawn comparisons between Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Sanctuary, and the theme of the upcoming SW7. But I think there's a much more striking and direct inspiration, drawn from the horrors of real life, rather than the pages of George Orwell's novel. It relates to the murky world of pseudo-psychiatry, and its catastrophic acceptance into mainstream medicine for a brief period in 1960s North America. Alton Towers bill The Sanctuary as having been “closed for new patients for almost 50 years”, corresponding almost exactly with the period when the so-called MKUltra project was at the height of its power. I first heard about the MKUltra experiments in a book called The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. The theme of the book is various attempts to repeatedly shock the human body (and later, entire populations) until it is completely broken down into an empty shell, ready to be remodelled in any way their torturer chooses. I reckon this is also the core idea within the Ministry of Joy and their Sanctuary facility – the eventual aim being to re-build their patients in the image of the frequently mentioned 'social compliance'.
The protagonists in our narratives are two medical practitioners, one real, the other fictional. Donald Ewen Cameron was a well-respected psychiatrist in the mid-20th century. At the end of World War II, Cameron was invited to the Nuremberg trials to assess the mental state of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. As the president of the American Psychiatric Association, Cameron was hired by the CIA in the 50s to conduct experiments for their MKUltra project, which looked into various methods of behaviour control. He set up a facility in Montreal, Canada. At the Allan Memorial Institute, Cameron and his colleagues experimented on members of the public who had arrived with minor complaints such as anxiety issues and mild depression. Many of them left with severe psychotic disorders – their lives shattered, never to be rebuilt.
New arrivals would be subjected to a range of bizarre and ghoulish experiments to try and 'de-pattern' their minds (a concept of Cameron's invention) - to wipe the slate clean. Cameron believed that to re-build them without the 'weakness' of mental illness, the patients first had to be regressed to a state of complete nothingness - a new start. The methods included huge doses of LSD and PCP, electro-convulsive therapy of 150 to 200 volts, full-frontal lobotomies (removal of parts of the brain) and induced comas for weeks at a time. One person was trapped in an 'isolation chamber' for 35 days, Cameron having “soundproofed the room, piped in white noise, turned off the lights and put dark goggles and "rubber eardrums" on each patient, as well as cardboard tubing on the hands and arm”, according to Klein. He would purposefully mix up meal times, serving porridge for dinner and soup for breakfast, to make sure that any link to time was severed for his patients. This wasn't research, it was torture.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCEh9VltC2E&hd=1[/youtube]
Once the patients were reduced to a blank canvas, often forgetting how to walk, talk, or their marital status, the rebuilding phase began. Cameron called this technique 'psychic driving', another concoction of his own. This involved playing the same tape-loop for 16 to 20 hours a day, for anything up to 101 days, with optimistic messages such as "You are a good mother and wife and people enjoy your company", or “People like you. You like people.” The experiments were a complete failure. No positive results were ever observed from the idealistic tape messages. Many of the victims were left with severe mental illness for the rest of their lives, including amnesia and schizophrenia. Some committed suicide.
Both these processes are represented in the Sanctuary together as marmalisation, though of course, where Cameron had several months, Alton have to condense the process down to a minute or two. The harsh brightness and white noise of the marmalisation room represents a complete break-down of time and place, and the sense of self. This is Cameron's 'de-patterning' process. The video Alton have created represents an abridged form of 'psychic driving', bombarding the brain with disturbing messages and imagery. It simulates subliminal messages, and as you experience the marmalisation process in the maze, you feel an uneasy sense of something slipping past your conscious to your sub-conscious. This video can be seen as analogous to Cameron's infinite tape-loops. Similar to the lobotomies performed at the Allan Memorial Institute, a scene in the Sanctuary sees a patient – possibly dead – having recently undergone surgery.
Upon entering the Sanctuary, Dr Kelman mentions in his introductory speech that the rest of the medical community think him to be mad.“Do I look mad to you?!” he asks his new patients. As Cameron's experiments became evermore cruel and unusual, he found himself increasingly isolated from the psychiatric community. Dr Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill University (which owned the Allan Memorial Institution), called Cameron “criminally stupid.” Cameron developed bizarre and dangerous ideas in his writings. One of these was that mental illness was highly contagious, and would spread through society like wildfire unless mentally ill people were quarantined. Another was that Germans were more likely to commit atrocities than any other race of people. Respected psychiatrist Sir Aubrey Lewis described his electro-convulsive treatment as “barbaric”, while his successor at the Allan Memorial Institute, Dr Robert A. Cleghorn wrote that “the theoretical basis [for his psychic driving experiments] was not only slim but dubious and led ultimately to some unfortunate results”, to put it mildly.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqu2JKw4zJM&hd=1[/youtube]
The goals of the MKUltra project, as listed in declassified documents, were numerous. One was to investigate “substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.” Another was to find “a material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.” A third looks at “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.” Overall, there were 17 such goals. It's obvious what these findings could be used for: extracting information from the enemies of the United States through torture, either on the battlefield or in holding camps, such as Guantánamo Bay.
The above three goals especially link to the idea of social compliance. Compliance implies a correction (#GetCorrected) of deviance. Of course, deviance and compliance aren't universal standards. Deviance is defined against the normalities of the society that we live in. Or the normalities imposed on us by the elite of the society we live in. Here we encounter a bit of confusion over the Ministry of Joy's theme. The idea of social compliance hints at complex goals of minimising deviance, criminality or political subversion. But the concurrent theme about encouraging smiling, the smiling logo, and the name 'Ministry of Joy' imply the aim of the Sanctuary is a simple anti-depressive one. Hopefully, the extra 'canon' in the form of SW7 will clarify this, and the purpose of the ministry will become more concrete.
There's also an assumption among enthusiasts that the Sanctuary/MoJ are government institutions. This seems likely, but not definite. The Sanctuary could be training people to subvert and overthrow a government. It's even possible that the facility is managed by a revolutionary group, possibly Marxist or anarchist, with the aim of creating civil disobedience and political unrest. If Doctor Kelman could somehow find a way to spread 'advocacy' like a virus, without needing each individual involved to enter the Sanctuary, he could launch a coup that could overthrow a government. One man's civil disobedience is another's 'social compliance'. Let's briefly look at how extreme psychiatric techniques can be used to engineer political subversion in human beings.
Patty Hearst is an American socialite, actress, and granddaughter of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. In 1974, she was kidnapped by a Marxist-Leninist group committed to the violent overthrow of the US government, called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The original aim of her capture had been as a bargaining chip to secure the release of prison members, but she soon claimed to have joined the group voluntarily and espoused their far-left ideology – a phenomenon we now know as 'Stockholm syndrome'. It's claimed that during this time she was brainwashed by the SLA, kept in isolation, and possibly drugged. The destructive techniques were probably similar to those used by Cameron. Similarly to Hearst's conversion, some of Cameron's patients were so extremely broken down that they began to believe that institute staff were their parents. Hearst later took part in an armed bank robbery, bearing a semi-automatic rifle. This shows the extraordinary power of various extreme techniques of persuasion or brainwashing – to turn an organisation's victim into its 'advocate'.
Exploring the term 'advocate' more, let's return to MKUltra. A rumoured, but never confirmed, aim of the program was to develop what's known as a Manchurian Candidate. This far-fetched theory probably isn't true, but it has become an essential and dramatic part of the myth surrounding the project, and would be rich pickings for a creative director creating a themed attraction inspired by MKUltra. A Manchurian Candidate, named after a novel by Richard Condon, is a person brainwashed into becoming a secret agent, working for an enemy of the country they live in. For example, it could be an advisor to the US President who is brainwashed by a terrorist group into murdering their boss. Could this be the aim of the Sanctuary? Thus, Manchurian Candidates produced by Dr Kelman could become 'advocates' of the political ideals of the Ministry of Joy, and if their transformation at the hands of the Sanctuary is successful enough, they could be encouraged to kill, maim and participate in violent struggle for those beliefs, as Patty Hearst was.
In the scare maze, we first encounter a cook who also seems to be a patient, in charge of the facility's kitchen. While there's no evidence of this at the Allan Memorial Institute, it's been widely used at similar human experimentation and cult-like institutions. At the Gold Base in California, the headquarters of the Church of Scientology, followers are expected to earn their place by volunteering to do menial jobs – at one point in 1994, just three cooks were expected to feed 800 people, three times a day. The religion has also used slave labour for hundreds of construction projects, manipulating their adherent's desires to succeed in the church. Similar to the Sanctuary, Scientology members often visit the church's 'resorts' or their cruise ship Freewinds for multiple-week 'retreats', where they are subjected to a pseudo-scientific psychological onslaught to break them down, and re-build them as perfect Scientologists. Some followers have even been encouraged to 'disconnect' themselves from members of their family who are critical of their new-found 'faith'.
I can't be sure that the creators of the Sanctuary and the theming directors of SW7 have heard of Donald Cameron, or the macabre terror of the Allan Memorial Institute. But the similarities seem striking, and I would guess that they probably have. His house of horror has contributed massively to modern fears and anxieties about psychiatric or mental health institutions, particularly those that are no longer open. The theme is returned to time and time again in horror films, television and scare attractions, such as the Sanctuary and Fuji-Q Highland's Haunted Hospital. Cameron died in 1967, and would have no conception of the modern rollercoaster, and why they are ridden for pleasure. But if he looked at the nightmarish plans for SW7, he may well have seen the intensely twisted rails as the perfect 'de-patterning' device.
Sam Gregory
Further reading
The Tragedy of Dr. D. Ewen Cameron by Richard D. Flavin
1958 article from Psychoanalytic Quarterly on Psychic Driving
Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine
Please feel free to use this article on your own website as long as you
a) keep it in its original form
b) re-host the images
c) credit me and link back to this topic
If the TowersStreet team want to use it on the SW7 mini-site, feel free.
Edit 1: Changed all references to Kenward to Kelman.
