Drugs, hypnosis, sensory isolation and all that jizz

I used to think I'd had a normal childhood because my parents were mostly kind, mature, responsible adults. There was tension in our household, sometimes, and even periods when my parents didnt speak to each other because of some deep conflict that my twin brother and I were shielded from grasping or witnessing. We lived our lives, did what we were told, followed the rules, had friends who resembled us in their simple minded willingness to just be kids. We thought we were living a Happy Days script in a happy world, built on a Disney model of the Happiest Place on Earth. We didn't know why Mom and Dad often seemed to be less than happy, or less happy than our notion of what happy was since they didnt inform us, or talk openly about whatever was eating them, and when they argued it always seemed to be about something silly, like politics.

Instead of daily family dramas, we had cold periods of silence. I think our mother's grace and serenity made us feel loved and supported when in fact we were caught in a trap devised by warped scientific minds working for the dark side. The only real trouble we experienced was when my dad got put in the Allan Memorial in December 1962, and came home six weeks later much changed and weakened. A human wreck.

From bits of memory, of small incidents amid all the childhood monotony, I have tried to recreate the chronology of the years before and after, and fit it into some recognizable shape that exposes what was really happening in the shadows that I navigated as a kid slowly climbing the ladder of schooling. I think in many ways I was a zombie child, a puppet trying to please my parents who in turn were being puppeted by the psychiatrists at the Allan Memorial, who took orders from their superiors in Washington and London. And since the whole structure was a top secret experiment conducted under a cloak of National Security, the overall goal was secrecy -- nobody was allowed to know the full story, and everyone just obeyed.

I think this also applied to the men at the top who knew more than the peons at the bottom, but also were kept in the dark through their compartmentalized functions and career competition that overruled their morality. Unknowing compliance definitely applied in my family of high-end lab rats trapped in a maze of routines and obligations that we navigated like typical Canadians of that generation. However I think my father had a mind of his own and knew he was being blackmailed, and this was the cause of his bad tempered outbursts at home. So when I say we were a normal family, I'm really skipping over the fact that we tiptoed around our dad, who acted the part of the angry, demanding boss. We felt we didnt need a boss, and got along smoothly under our mother's democratic management where everyone had rights and a voice and a role to play. Meanwhile our dad was in the front lines, holding down a job as a high school teacher in a school board that had signed onto the toxic program of mind control run out of McGill, where Dr Cameron and his bosses ruled.

Things happen to children that are never written down or even acknowledged and can't be grasped by accessing medical records alone. Hypnotherapy can be helpful in sorting out pieces of the past that are lost to memory due to trauma or just a normal process of forgetting. The cure for amnesia is always and above all storytelling.

And yes, records are important and can be life changing even when the files have been gutted. Into 2007 I was shown my emptied childhood Psychiatry file from the Royal Victoria, by a very frightened secretary who spoke in a whisper so her colleagues, who had refused to show me even the folder let alone explain why the contents were gone, couldn't hear her tell me "I want to help you. What do you want?"

I just wanted my childhood medical file from my 1955 bout of pneumonia that had put me in that hospital for two weeks in January or February. Scenes from those two weeks had always been clearly etched in my memory as traumatic and hallucinatory - reinforced by my mother's retelling because it was a terrifying time for her too. That same week she suffered a miscarriage and ended up in a different wing of the same hospital. After they discharged her, she came to find me -- delirious and strapped to my cot in the children's ward of a nearby building. What she wasn't told was there was no children's ward at that hospital, and my pneumonia was being treated by nurses working under Dr Cameron, and this was a secret LSD experiment involving many children. The nurse, whose name was Shirley told my frightened mother, who wondered why I didnt recognize her: "Your daughter almost died."

Do you think there are any records stored anywhere that can prove or disprove this? If anything was written in my file, it disappeared after I requested it in 2007, thinking it would be for Pneumonia -- because when I filled out the request form I had no memory of ever having so much as seen a psychiatrist in my entire life. The the emptied folder with my name Anne McLean and 1955 was labeled PSYCHIATRY.

Now I know my mother was taking advice from the psychiatrists and helping them enact a program in our family. I know this only in retrospect and through research and remembering things she said. And from being shown the folder with my name on the tab alongside the label PSYCHIATRY.

If I had a Psychiatry file dated 1955 (the year I turned 4) it was probably opened when I arrived alone in the ambulance with pneumonia, unconscious from the ether administered by an evil attendant after he slammed the door and we drove downtown where I ended up in Dr. Cameron's "children's ward" in the Allan Memorial. My file probably went missing in triage sometime in the 1970s when all MKULTRA files related to child experiments were ordered destroyed. It may have been among the files that my brilliant friend Kenneth Hertz was able to access in 1978 along with "files on all of us" at the McGill Medical Library before he was afflicted with a mysterious Parkinsonian that slowly paralyzed and finally killed him in 1995.

Bottom line: there are no records. Or very few. They were either destroyed or never existed to begin with because the program was illegal and contravened the Nuremberg Code, Geneva convention and medical ethics of the time. By applying to get your files you simply enable a search and destroy program that has been operating for decades every since MKULTRA was first exposed by John Marks in 1977. I hope certain people who brag about being "certified victims" because they have managed to scrape together a few pages from old files that have been redacted multiple times over the decades since MKULTRA rampaged across America, can get this fact through their thick heads.

Your "records" might, if you're lucky, entitle you to some compensation but they will not restore your damaged life, lost memories and missing time.

Eventually we all have to face that Void. In that light, "stealing stories" is a way out of the devastating loneliness and also a life raft for rescuing others. And don't let anyone with a Kindergarten mind tell you different.

What I'm left with at 74 are my memories of events between 1958 and 1963, which neatly fit the time frame of MKULTRA Subproject 68: subtitled "drugs, hypnosis, sensory isolation" -- all of which I went through, and which made me the person I am today: the former teacher of Creative Writing who "steals stories" - not for a living, but for the sake of recovery.

to be continued