Truth And Consequences

The results of the Oak Ridge Experiments in terms of human costs...

Last week was a long one, wasn’t it? It was a long one to write, that’s for sure. Now it is time to discuss the reality of the Oak Ridge Experiment. Not the idealized version the perpetrators try to sell. In their minds, they are “gentling psychopaths” by introducing them to a new way of thinking. They deem this a success, though we know that isn’t the case based on the results despite their abject belief to the contrary.

One of the individuals that was brought up a fair number of times is Peter Woodcock. If you look up his Wiki, you will see that he was “diagnosed as a psychopath”. I mentioned in my last post that this wasn’t possible to even consider with Woodcock, and that we would discuss it. Let’s start with his early life:

Peter Woodcock was born in Peterborough, Ontario to a 17-year-old factory worker, Waita Woodcock, who gave him up for adoption after breastfeeding him for a month. Adoption agency records report that the newborn, Peter, showed feeding problems and cried constantly. As an infant, he stayed in various foster homes, unable to bond with any of his foster parents. After his first birthday, he became terrified of anybody approaching him, and his speech was incoherent—described as strange whining animal noises He was also physically abused by at least one of his early foster parents, with a 2-year-old Woodcock having to be given medical treatment for an injured neck after receiving a beating.[4] He was placed into a stable home at the age of 3 with foster parents Frank and Susan Maynard, an upper-middle-class couple with another son. Susan Maynard, who was described as a "forceful woman with an exaggerated sense of propriety", became strongly attached to the maladjusted child who would still scream when someone approached him. By the age of 5, Woodcock remained socially maladjusted and became the target of neighbourhood bullies.

Worried about the child's fragile emotional state, Frank and Susan Maynard would regularly bring him to the Hospital for Sick Children, where Woodcock received extensive treatment. Woodcock was sent to a private school, but again failed to make friends or interact successfully with his peers and remained isolated. By the age of 11, he was described as an "angry little boy"; a Children's Aid Society report on him from that time read:

Slight in build, neat in appearance, eyes bright, and wide open, worried facial expression, sometimes screwing up of eyes, walks briskly and erect, moves rapidly, darts ahead, interested and questioning constantly in conversation. He attributes his wandering to feeling so nervous that he just has to get away. In some ways, Peter has little capacity for self-control. He appears to act out almost everything he thinks and demonstrates excessive affection for his foster mother. Although he verbalizes his resentment for other children, he has never been known to physically attack another child ... Peter apparently has no friends. He plays occasionally with younger children, managing the play. When with children his own age, he is boastful and expresses determinedly ideas which are unacceptable and misunderstood.

Signs of Woodcock's violent fantasies were present at this time also, seen when a social worker was walking with him at the Canadian National Exhibition and Woodcock muttered, "I wish a bomb would fall on the Exhibition and kill all the children". Woodcock was sent to a school for emotionally disturbed children in Kingston, Ontario, and began acting on his strong sexual urges with other children—with Woodcock stating that here he had consensual intercourse with a 12-year-old girl when he was 13. When he turned 15, he was discharged from this school and returned to live with his foster parents, but was soon re-enrolled at his original private school, where he again failed to connect with his peers. At the age of 16, he left the private school again and was sent to a public high school, where children from the neighborhood instantly recognized him and resumed the bullying; he transferred to a private high school six weeks later. While his peers again shunned him, his teachers there remembered him as a very bright student who excelled in science, history, and English, and who frequently scored 100 percent on his tests.

Let’s see all the things that rule him out of being psychopathic or at the very least question that as a conclusion, shall we?

1. He was terrified of people.

2. He suffered physical abuse. This, of course, does not rule a person out of being psychopathic, but it brings head injuries into the equation, and head injuries make the consideration of psychopathy dubious at best.

3. He had a “fragile emotional state”.

4. He was “an angry little boy”. Well, go figure, he’s getting shuffled around, bullied, has emotional dysregulation, no stability, and has been rejected a lot. It sounds like the foundations for reactive attachment disorder, but I am not a psychologist, so that is just a guess.

5. He demonstrated excessive affection for his foster mother. A psychopath wouldn’t do this unless it netted them something out of it. There is no understanding of the need for affection with a psychopath. This does, however, go to my guess about RAD, as this isn’t uncommon in the disinhibited type.

6. He describes himself as “so nervous that he just has to get away”. Nope, not something a psychopath would ever think.

7. Experienced resentment for other children.

This dude was not a psychopath. He was, however, a serial killer, and deserved to be locked away for life. He wasn’t though. Because of this ridiculous experiment, and the ego of those involved, they decided that their radical “treatment” had worked. Woodcock was cured, so cured that he murdered someone that hurt his feelings by not wanting to have sex with him. Leaving aside the fact that a psychopath is not going to get caught up in the emotional ennui of being rejected as we wouldn’t care. Who in their right mind says, “Yeah, I know that he raped murdered children, but we tied him naked to other prisoners and fed him LSD for a long time. Clearly, he’s cured.”

Just… what? A person with a singularly working brain cell should know better than this, but they were like, “Nah, we got this. You’re cured. Go on your little excursion.”

Then they had the nerve to be surprised when he murders someone immediately. Like, this dude had no chill at all. He was out and chopping in less than forty-five minutes. I do not believe for a second that anyone that was actually able to see what was going on with this guy, not pretending that their woo-woo treatments had value and were working when they clearly were not, would have been able to say, “We are never letting this guy out. Like ever ever. He’s dangerous. He wants to kill people and he does it when he gets his fee fees hurt. That’s a hard pass. Dude stays locked up forever. We gave the key to a dragon, he’s hiding it in his keep, it would take a noble knight to get it back, and since that’s not a thing that’s happening, you’re here for life” *slam goes the cell door*.

Let’s go back to Woodcock’s history a bit. All the things that are listed that make him ineligible for psychopathy are also what make this experiment especially cruel. Now, I am not in any way running defense for a serial killer of children. That guy made his choices, and got what he got. However, let’s remove that idea from the mix, and focus just on his childhood. Do you think that he was the only one in that unit with a background like that?

Likely all of them did. Likely all of the people that were subjected to this treatment were abuse victims, neglect victims, and trauma victims. Those things don’t always, or even most of the time make for violent criminals, but a lot of violent criminals have this sort of history. There is a reason for that, and it cannot be dismissed. Consider and remember that while we discuss the next part.

Do you recall the story about the guy that was arrested for stealing a car and ingested a bunch of LSD instead of getting caught for it? In Ronson’s book, it sounds like he isn’t exactly upset about being put into the Oak Ridge Experiment, but that is not the story that you will hear from him directly.

There was a documentary that came out years after Ronson’s book that spoke to this particular former patient. I encourage you to view it:

Psychiatric treatment or torture? The Oak Ridge experiment

I will warn you however, it isn’t a pretty watch.

The young man that was arrested for the car theft was named, Steve Smith, and far from the description given in Ronson’s book that he was rather blase about being in the experiment and wasn’t too bothered about his “buddy” being Peter Woodcock, it had a deep effect on him, and the other people that were put through this.

Remember, he was a teenager, and he stole a car. He didn’t murder or assault anyone. He stole a car and stupidly swallowed his LSD so he wouldn’t be charged with having it. He looked psychotic so he was committed, but nothing in his background suggested that he was a high-risk offender, nor that he was psychopathic in the slightest. They didn’t explain to him what they meant by “psychopath”, and he thought that psychopathy and psychosis were the same or similar things.

His response was, “How can that be? You know? I’ve never hurt anyone in my life. Psychopath? I’m not hallucinating. I’m not insane. I’m not imagining things. And I’m not violent. What does he mean by that?

He had no idea what psychopathy even was, and of course, Dr. Barker did not deign him worthy of it being explained either.

A very interesting aspect of Oak Ridge was the low number of actual staff. Most people in employ at the hospital were security, not clinicians. There was very little oversight. There was so little oversight in fact, that Dr. Barker had another patient diagnosing new intakes. No, this patient was not a doctor, but he wrote up mental statuses well, so Dr. Barker hired him. When he is relaying this story, on a video recording that he set up during an interview for a book that he participated in, he says,

“I don’t know if you should put this in the book, um, I hired a patient to, when there were no staff around, a patient that could do superb mental statuses, better than mine, and he would go and see each new admission and write up a beautiful mental status. You can find them still… I don’t think you should…”

The reporter breaks in asking if this is the same individual that co-authored something called the uber…”

The doctor cuts back in:

“No this was another patient who we got on staff as a clerk 1-2 uh, and worked there for about six months. Then he uh, ran off with the social worker’s wallet, and credit cards, and whatever…but he did mental statuses, beautiful ones…”

All of this is said with a smile. He clearly sees nothing wrong with placing a known criminal in charge of the intake and reporting of mental health for new arrivals, nor allowing him to do diagnostics of them either. He knows that others will see this as unacceptable, which is why he indicates that the person interviewing him shouldn’t include this in the book.

The documentary skips to a new section here, discussing The Capsule. This is where the psychopaths were stripped naked and kept together for days on end in a windowless, furnitureless room with an open toilet, and tubes coming out of the walls for sustenance. Here the documentary also states that this is an encounter group for “psychotics”, but then cuts back to Steve Smith, who we already know is there as a “psychopath”, not a psychotic. It seems that this was a mixed group as Steve explains:

“There were no professional staff, no doctors, um, it was all being directed by other patients. And, some really crazy people. Some were in fact, psychotic, and what was so scary about this, they had the power to, um, to prescribe drugs. Mind-altering psychoactive heavy-duty drugs.”

The drugs that he is describing were not used to treat these patients, they were used to make them talk. Things like scopolamine were employed as a truth serum, as well as LSD.

Steve:

“It’s delirium inducing and the difference between inducing delirium and killing you with scopolamine is quite… a thin difference. Um, in South America the drug is called Dragon’s Breath. It’s considered the most horrendous drug on Earth. Nobody takes this voluntarily. It just gives you nightmare visions.”

Another aspect of The Capsule was taking schizophrenics, locking them in a room together, and removing them from their medication entirely. There was a belief, apparently, that if the people with schizophrenia were allowed to go into their schizophrenia and act out their fantasies they will get it out of their system and the problem would disappear. Why anyone thought that this was the case is beyond me. Medication for schizophrenia was not something that had been around for very long, and schizophrenia had existed for far longer than it had been. For this to have been a viable solution, there would have been texts that described people with the condition self-healing in the past. That… was not the case, and they should have known that.

In the Capsule there was a concept called MAP.

Motivation

Attitude

Participation

There was nothing about this that anyone could lie to themselves and believe that it was helpful to the patients, though based on the egos involved in the two main people that made the Oak Ridge Experiment possible, I imagine that they found a way to do so. MAP consisted of patients being tied sitting upright with their legs straight out in front of them without moving for interminable lengths of time. According to a former patient Jim Motherall:

“The point of the whole program was to break us down mentally because they believed if they strip away all our bad defenses that for us into trouble, break us down mentally they could rebuild us as better human beings. Now, they knew that was nonsense as much as we quickly figured out it was nonsense.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Barker’s program was gaining steam gathering looky-loos who wanted to see this “brilliant” program. It wasn’t long after this that Dr. Barker decided to jump ship. He says that he was feeling disillusioned, and that he came to the conclusion that not all psychopaths could be cured so he left. The documentary says that he took a break, but he bailed. He set up a private consulting firm, and he and his boss from Oak Ridge became expert witnesses for trials. I can’t imagine how many people he decided were “psychopaths” and sent up the river.

Wow, so I just got to the next clip where he is describing that time. He states:

“…and Boyd and I got known as the ‘hanging psychiatrists’ because when they were fighting about giving mandatory twenty-five years we said it’s far better, uh, than curtailing parole which is what they were doing, it’s far better to hang a few people even though it’s wrong, and you can pick out people who are absolutely dangerous, and absolutely untreatable, and hang them. And that caused quite a stir because most psychiatrists and most intelligentsia are kind of liberal about that, but I think that’s a reality. Some people are beyond treatment of any treatment that we know and if you let them go, they’ll kill people”

Now we get to Gary-boy Maier, and his opening gambit in this documentary is a quote from what appears to be the seventies, in which he says:

“Uh well, there’s no doubt that a certain undeclared coerciveness to this place…”

Not off to a good start Gary-boy. Guess what we also find out? Gary-boy is not a psychiatrist, but they state that he is a doctor. Is he? I wonder. I wonder if he was that patient that wrote beautiful mental statuses and ran off with the social worker’s identity? I jest, but I wouldn’t be surprised either.

This part of the documentary speaks about the Mr. Walk Through Walls to Rape a Fellow Inmate story, and it is Jon Ronson retelling this part. He states that Gary-boy seemed to actually believe that this soul rape was taking place, and that it was a beautiful thing. I have questions for Dr. Maier, but I also am not certain I want to hear the answers to those questions.

Oooo guess how Gary-boy got fired? They changed the locks and didn’t tell him. He didn’t just get fired, he got all the fired.

Now here is where it gets super messed up. There was a mirror program happening at a women’s forensic hospital down the road with all the accouterments that Oak Ridge had, but, and here is the really f*cked up part, it was being run by Oak Ridge PATIENTS. It was set up and run by four “graduated” from Oak Ridge. What the actual hell? Who on Earth thought this was acceptable?

The place where this took place was called St Thomas Psychiatric Hospital, and all four of the “graduates” of Oak Ridge were sex offenders. They sent convicted sex offenders to a forensic hospital filled with mentally ill women and thought this was going to be a good idea. They should be arrested for endangerment.

St. Thomas was not a good hospital, to begin with. It was a poor hospital that was not held in high regard by anyone. One of the former Oak Ridge patients that was involved with this women’s “program” was Bill Brennan, who left behind a large number of documents after his death in 2018. Bill Brennan was convicted of two violent rapes prior to being assigned to St. Thomas by the director of Oak Ridge. The CBC, who made the documentary, were able to obtain the left-behind documents. Through them, they were able to interview some of the so-called teachers that were sent to St. Thomas. They interview one in silhouette. He is a convicted rapist and he is called John for the interview.

He was only at Oak Ridge for three years when he was sent to set up the program at St. Thomas. he had this to say:

“I think that Dr Maier thought this kid’s okay and he’s going to be fine for this environment and uh, basically I had been a poster child for the program because I sucked it all in, hook, line, and sinker.”

The reporter asks:

“You were certified to be mentally ill at that point. You were a convicted sex offender and here you were essentially being entrusted as a therapist for a number of mentally ill women.”

He answers:

“Yes, um totally inappropriate. Just real bad. Should never happen.”

They found a woman that had served in St Thomas, for, get this, stealing a car as a teenager. I am starting to have some serious issues with Canada’s treatment of their teen offenders. It’s a car theft, not serial murder, and she goes to a forensic unit? How does that work?

Anyway, they interviewed her about her experiences. She is also in silhouette and explains what her lawyers told her her option were:

“ I had two choices, I could go to prison or um, spend a short easy time at the psychiatric hospital in St. Thomas, which was closer to my family and…”

She had no idea what a forensic hospital even was. She was locked up with very serious mentally ill individuals. She describes a number of them, including a woman that murdered her two children, and another that was mentally challenged and spent all of her time in the MAP punishment room sitting on the floor.

“…and you have to sit there, and not move. You couldn’t speak and it was a cold hard floor. And you had to sit with either your legs straight out or if um you didn’t meet up with what they wanted you to say or, you know, follow along with the program, you would be on your knees for up to eight hours a day in the room.”

Participation was not optional. The former “teacher” John had this to say:

“It was understood that if somebody didn’t want to participate they could be put on cuffs, like they did up in Oak Ridge and forced to come to the group and they’d be tied to somebody else with cuffs and made to be there. Uh, it was just, it was forced, it bordered on sadomasochistic restraining. Uh, it was just, it was totally unacceptable.”

Another patient details how she told the “teachers” that she didn’t trust them, that their program was illegitimate, and that the “teachers” weren’t doctors. She walked out, and for her trouble, she was tied to a mattress.

The male teachers at St. Thomas were not allowed to prescribe medications, as they were allowed to at Oak Ridge, but the doctors would consult them and ask their advisement regarding the women’s medication. Also, the men lived on the ward with the women, sharing the bathrooms, the communal showers, and without any locks on the rooms of the women. They had no privacy, and no protection from sex offenders. There was a pregnancy of one of the patients. It appears that the father was Bill Brennan. Just as relationships between prison guards and inmates can never be consensual, as the power dynamics do not allow for it, neither can this one.

Once she became pregnant, Bill Brennan’s stint at St. Thomas was over, but the patient still wrote to him believing that he would come back for her. Her letters are interlaced with many references to the MAP program. Interestingly, Bill Brennan was sent to a US prison in violation of prisoner treaty agreements and against his will. I don’t know what the full details of that are, but it struck me as odd. The child was put up for adoption.

Patients treating patients is a pipe dream. There is nothing about it that should have been considered sensical.

“John” was soon released, and he received a call from one of the female patients:

“A woman that I had gotten fairly close to understanding her situation called me just after I got out and uh wanted to talk. I was eating at my family’s place and I said, could you call back? She didn’t call back and one of the staff, a woman, an older woman I ran into about two months later and she said this woman had committed suicide. I felt like everything that I had been through was a fraud. That it was just false and, and that you know, that I was supposed to save her. I felt like I was responsible for her death. I was the person she came to, and u, we should never have been put in that position.”

The program shuttered in 1983 at both hospitals.

We already know that the programs were both failures.

In 2006 twenty-eight former Oak Ridge patients filed a lawsuit against the facility, and the case dragged on for so long that eight of the former patients died waiting for a resolution. The case has since been decided and the appeal has been denied. An article about the case had this to say:

“The provincial government and two doctors have failed to convince the Supreme Court of Canada to re-examine a multimillion-dollar decision in favour of psychiatric patients who endured experimental and cruel treatment at Penetanguishene’s maximum-security psychiatric facility during the height of the psychedelic era.

That means 27 patients — 19 of whom are still alive — will finally receive compensation for “degrading and inhumane” experimental treatments conducted between 1966 and 1983. The awards for the patients range from $1,000 to $2.7 million each, totalling more than $9 million.”

I don’t know why there is a discrepancy between the number of patients that sued according to the article versus the documentary.

Another quote from the article reads:

“The largest amount, $2.7 million, was awarded to the family of Danny Joanisse, who was taken to the Penetanguishene facility when he was 15 years old. During his time there, the slight boy was made to spend several days in “the capsule” with a convicted pedophile killer.

The capsule, an invention specific to Oak Ridge during this period, consisted of an eight-by-10-foot soundproof room that was constantly lit. It was described in court documents as a windowless room that had an exposed toilet and no furniture. Patients, who were made to strip naked, ingested food and water from straws protruding from holes in the walls and were subjected to sleep deprivation.

Joanisse spent “horrific” teen years undergoing the psychologically painful programming at Oak Ridge. The trial judge found Joanisse was humiliated, degraded and deprived of any sense of security at Oak Ridge. He underwent treatments that caused lasting harm that effectively prevented him from reintegrating into society until the last decade of his life and extended his paranoia, anxiety and mental anguish for the rest of his life.

Although he testified during the case, Joanisse died during the trial judge’s deliberations and never saw the outcome of the case.”

Fifteen years old, considered a psychopath, and put through this treatment.

The same law firm that garnered this victory is also representing former female patients from St. Thomas in a class action, multi-million dollar suit. Hopefully, they win. Do you recall this quote from my last post:

“He’s been the subject of much criticism, of course, for his idea and methods and frequently has had malpractice suits against him. Yes, you guessed right, psychopaths from the program looking to make a lot of money.”

Yeah, that fifteen-year-old boy was certainly one devious little bastard, wasn’t he? Pretending that his whole life was messed up after the perfectly normal and reasonable treatment that he so kindly received at the hands of other patients in Oak Ridge. Yup, what a psychopath.

Good lord, the cope in that statement. Anything to protect the state, anything to protect the profession, and anything to deny personal responsibility. Unbelievable.

For a moment, let’s pretend that every single person that was put through this program was actually psychopathic. Does that somehow negate the atrocity that the program was? No, of course it doesn’t. The ethical issues that are applicable to neurotypicals are also applicable to psychopaths. It may not have been psychologically dangerous, but LSD and other such things can have long-term health effects. The statement basically says, yeah, the program itself was criticized for how ethical it was, but we did this to “psychopaths”, so it’s okay.

No, it isn’t. You don’t get to choose a certain group of people and determine them to be less than, and therefore fodder for whatever experiments you want. The mentality of, “Yes, you guessed right, psychopaths from the program looking to make a lot of money.” is a perfect example of a lack of empathy. No, the people in the program, psychopathic or not, are seeking recompense for the abuse that was inflicted on them. It not being psychologically damaging is not an excuse for the behavior in the first place. That’s like justifying raping a coma patient. They don’t know it happened, so that somehow makes it morally okay? Pretty sure that’s not how any of this works.

Dr. Barker had this to say at the end of the documentary:

“Psychopaths are marvelous at letting you think that they think the world revolves, that their world revolves around you. They are marvelous at making you like them and uh if you believe that, and sort of bask in that glory, and then you find one day that you don’t mean any more to them, even though they have given you all the signals that you’re so important in their life and the greatest thing since sliced bread you find one day that they sort of deal you off like that *snaps fingers* or stick a knife in your throat, not literally, but they just, that you’ve meant nothing to them emotionally.

Then many people are hurt and hate psychopaths when that happens to them, and anybody that works with psychopaths, that happens because they’re very, they can read you like a book and they know you better than you know yourself in about ten seconds, and they know how to play with you, how to work you. It’s marvelous. It’s absolutely an astounding skill.”

This is true of psychopaths, but do you know how this works? It’s pretty easy actually. We let you talk about you. It’s amazing how much people want to talk about themselves, how much they want to be seen and heard. All we have to do is sit there, and listen. What amazes me even more is the total lack of insight by the doctor in his own statement. Someone like him, they like to talk about themselves. They like to believe themselves to be very very important.

Dr. Barker has dementia now, but his final comments in the documentary regarding his former job at Oak Ridge were rather telling of his opinion on the matter when he gave the interview in 1993:

“It’s like this. You’ve got your head halfway down in a forty-five-gallon drum of sh*t and you’re, you’re molding the surface and you’re getting all excited about the shapes that you’re creating, but that’s where you are.”

and he laughs.

So lovely of him.

Peter Woodcock

'Historic day': Supreme Court won't examine Oak Ridge abuse lawsuit