32 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
32 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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created: 2026-06-13
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updated: 2026-06-13
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title: McGill University
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aliases:
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- McGill
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tags:
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- Organization
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- Academic
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- Canada
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- MKULTRA
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- ColdWar
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category: "Private Organization"
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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."
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start: 1821
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location: "Montreal, Quebec, Canada"
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---
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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]
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### Allan Memorial Institute and Subproject 68
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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]
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### Donald Hebb and Sensory Deprivation
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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]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control*. Times Books, 1979, Chapters 8 and 10.
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[^2]: Collins, Anne. *In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada*. Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1988.
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[^3]: McCoy, Alfred W. *A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror*. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
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