---
created: 2026-06-13
updated: 2026-06-13
title: McGill University
aliases:
  - McGill
tags:
  - Organization
  - Academic
  - Canada
  - MKULTRA
  - ColdWar
category: "Private Organization"
summary: "McGill University is a Montreal research university whose affiliated Allan Memorial Institute hosted Ewen Cameron's CIA-funded MKULTRA depatterning experiments and whose psychologist Donald Hebb conducted the foundational sensory-deprivation research."
start: 1821
location: "Montreal, Quebec, Canada"
---
McGill University is a research university in [[Montreal]], [[Quebec]], chartered in 1821. Its Faculty of Medicine and affiliated teaching hospitals made it one of the leading centers of psychiatric and psychological research in mid-twentieth-century North America, a standing that drew the attention of the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] during its [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]] behavioral-control program.[^1]

### Allan Memorial Institute and Subproject 68

The university's [[Allan Memorial Institute]], its psychiatric hospital, was directed by [[D. Ewen Cameron]], chairman of McGill's Department of Psychiatry and a past president of the American Psychiatric Association. Between 1957 and 1964 Cameron conducted his depatterning and psychic-driving experiments at the Allan with funding routed through the [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]], a CIA front, under MKULTRA Subproject 68. Patients admitted for ordinary psychiatric complaints were subjected to drug-induced sleep, intensive electroconvulsive therapy, and [[LSD]] without informed consent, and many suffered permanent amnesia and disability.[^1][^2]

### Donald Hebb and Sensory Deprivation

McGill psychologist [[D.O. Hebb|Donald Hebb]] carried out the first systematic sensory-deprivation experiments in the early 1950s under a contract with the Canadian Defence Research Board, work that paralleled and informed the interest of British and American intelligence in isolation as a tool of interrogation and attitude change. His findings on the disorganizing effects of perceptual isolation entered the research base later drawn upon in the CIA's [[KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation|KUBARK]] interrogation manual.[^2][^3]

### Footnotes

[^1]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control*. Times Books, 1979, Chapters 8 and 10.
[^2]: Collins, Anne. *In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada*. Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1988.
[^3]: McCoy, Alfred W. *A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror*. Metropolitan Books, 2006.