Published by the Church of Scientology International

Psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann was Neither Healer Nor Hero

Madeleine was rolled into the operating room on a gurney and prepared for surgery, her head shaven. A local anaesthetic was applied to a portion of her scalp. The surgeon cut away a flap of skin and drilled a hole through her skull. Wielding a spatula-type instrument, he made several sweeping incisions through her brain, slicing all the way to the back of her skull. While the surgeon worked, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron stood over the young woman, plying her with questions until he was assured the surgeon had achieved the desired result. When Madeleine stared vacuously and could only grunt in response, the “surgery” ended. Madeleine lived the rest of her life an automaton in the confines of an insane asylum.

adeleine Smith, a 28-year-old newscaster, was just one casualty of the ghoulish experiments conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s under Ewen Cameron at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute.

The experiments were part of the infamous “MK ULTRA” program conducted under the aegis of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and 1960s, exposed in media and United States Congressional hearings in the 1970s. Patients were brutalized and maimed with drugs, shocks and lobotomies as Cameron sought a means to “depattern” and “re-program” the human mind. Canadian survivors still able to seek reparation finally obtained some compensation from the U.S. government in 1988.

Virtually all accounts of this dark chapter in our history have named Cameron, who died in 1967, as the main culprit responsible for such vicious treatment of patients in the country’s mental wards.

“It wasn’t a criminal experiment using people as guinea pigs,” Heinz Lehmann, a psychiatric colleague of Cameron’s, said in a 1984 Montreal Gazette account of his contemporary’s efforts. Lehmann taught at McGill and became the Allan Memorial Institute’s clinical director in 1958, a position he held until 1971. “It was a heroic, very aggressive treatment based on a certain theory which proved to be wrong.”

The treatment Cameron’s patients received was no secret to Lehmann. “I knew ... and I didn’t approve,” he said. “But not for moral reasons. I didn’t believe in his theory.”

	MIND-CONTROL EXPERIMENTER: While most accounts of infamous, abusive psychiatric experimentation in Canada have been attributed to Ewen Cameron alone (pictured), he was not alone, and close colleagues like Heinz Lehmann, who died in 1999, were intimately involved in mind control experiments and never held responsible.

Behind the Facade

Hailed as one of the leading lights of Canadian medicine, Lehmann has been described as a Montrealer who shaped the course of modern psychiatry. He is credited as the first in North America to use so-called antipsychotic drugs on his patients, taking treatment of mental illness beyond the destruction or removal of brain tissue as with psychosurgery or electric and insulin shocks.

The drug said to have made this radical change possible was chlorpromazine, sold under the names Largactil in Canada and Thorazine in the United States.

The German-born Lehmann, who moved to Montreal in 1937, is credited with introducing the use of the drug on psychiatric patients in 1953.

By 1955, chlorpromazine was being used in every major psychiatric institution in Canada and the United States.

Lehmann went on to receive virtually every significant Canadian and U.S. medical and psychiatric award for his work. They included, in 1957, the Annual Award of Merit from the Canadian Mental Health Association and the Albert Lasker Award from the American Public Health Association. In 1976, he received the Order of Canada—the country’s highest civilian honor.

Yet, while Lehmann was lionized in psychiatric circles for supposed dedication to his patients, investigation reveals that several of them suffered horrific deaths during his experiments. Evidence also shows that Lehmann routinely ignored patients’ rights, medical ethics and drug side effects, and while hailed as a hero, this “doctor” did not even hold a valid medical license in Quebec for the 26 years during which most of his work was done.

Further, documents obtained from the Canadian government reveal that Lehmann’s use of chlorpromazine—known as a neuroleptic (“nerve-seizing”) drug—on psychiatric patients was, in fact, illegal. In the 1950s, the drug was permitted for use as a sleep aid and was not licensed as a neuroleptic in Canada until the early 1960s.

Harming with Impunity

	HOSPITALS OF HORROR: During the 1950s and 1960s, PSYCHIATRISTS EWEN CAMERON, Heinz Lehmann and others conducted brutal and damaging experiments on unsuspecting psychiatric patients. The most notorious of these were carried out by Cameron (at Allen Memorial—top picture) under the auspices of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Its “MK ULTRA” program funded mind control experiments in which patients were brutalized and maimed with drugs, shocks and lobotomies as Cameron sought to “depattern” and “re-program” the human mind. Cameron’s acts were revealed during hearings into intelligence activities in the 1970s and many of his victims were recompensed by the Canadian government in the 1980s, but Lehmann’s contemporary drug experiments at Verdun (Douglas) hospital, some of which were fatal, have gone virtually without comment and the many nameless victims are now dead or lost to history.

Before his work with chlorpromazine, he was involved in lobotomizing, shocking and otherwise invading subjects with various poisons and drugs.

“Our two major therapies were insulin-induced hypoglycemic coma and electroconvulsive shock therapies (ECT) for schizophrenia and affective disorders,” Lehmann wrote. “Paraldehyde and the barbiturates were about our only means to quell agitation and violence in addition to physical seclusion and restraint.... 70 to 80 per cent of patients relapsed.... The treatments were very invasive, cumbersome and often dangerous.”

The latter admission apparently lacked compunction; according to his records, Lehmann neither scaled back his treatment nor sought less harmful methods.

The psychiatrist casually recounts “carrying pure nitrous oxide by inhalation to the point where there was complete loss of consciousness,” injecting “sulphur oil which was painful and caused a fever” and injecting turpentine into the abdominal muscles of a patient to create an abscess to see whether a “strong fever” produced by an infection might drive out a severe pre-existing illness.

Lehmann also administered carbon dioxide to patients, an excruciating “treatment”. Lehmann, however, recounted these tests in an eerily cheerful manner: “It should be noted that the carbon dioxide treatment was so aversive that one chronically mute patient promised he would speak if he would be spared another treatment!”

When his experiments had fatal results, there were no consequences for Lehmann, who operated with impunity upon the faceless, nameless inmates of Quebec’s mental institutions between the 1940s and 1960s.

“You Have to Take Certain Chances”

The official record states that Lehmann introduced chlorpromazine in Montreal in May 1953 while working at Verdun Protestant Hospital (since named Douglas Hospital).

Lehmann and a colleague, Gorman Hanrahan, published an article in 1954 advocating the psychiatric use of chlorpromazine after the drug had been tested on 74 patients. They wrote of the results that spawned their enthusiasm for the drug:

“Patients receiving the drug become lethargic. Manic patients often will not object to rest and patients who present management problems become tractable. Assaultive and interfering behavior ceases almost entirely. The patients under treatment display a lack of spontaneous interest in the environment.... They tend to remain silent and immobile when left alone and to reply to questions in a slow monotone.... Some patients dislike the treatment and complain of their drowsiness and weakness. Some state they feel ‘washed out’ as after an exhausting illness, a complaint which is indeed in keeping with their appearance.”

Lehmann knew the extreme and sometimes deadly effects of the drug, even describing it himself as a “pharmacological substitute for lobotomy.” Despite extensive evidence accumulated in the 1950s and early 1960s of its dangers, he did not slacken his pace.

In 1965, for example, he conducted a study entitled “Skin Pigmentation, a Rare Side Effect of Chlorpromazine” after patients at Verdun developed “slate-blue pigmentation of the face and forearms” from chlorpromazine. He experimented with 15 patients, concluding that a “greyish-brownish- bluish skin discoloration” is found in patients who have received the drug in high dosages for a considerable length of time.

Black and white photos accompanying the study are vivid and disturbing, showing a patient with severe skin discoloration described in the study as a “complexity of violet, grey, brown, blue and yellow.”

In a 1967 study, Lehmann and colleagues experimented on 38 patients, administering doses ranging from 200 to a staggering 3,200 milligrams.

Lehmann later told the Montreal Gazette that he gave up to “five or six times the usual dose” of chlorpromazine, explaining, “you have to take certain chances.... I was lucky my treatment worked out,” he said, “but I was anxious during the first few weeks.”