Some of this work took place in the context of the Project MKUltra program for the developing of mind control and torture techniques, psychoactive poisons, and behavior modification systems.
He continued his training in the United States under Meyer at the Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland from 1926 to 1928 with a Henderson Research Scholarship.
[citation needed] Cameron focused primarily on biological descriptive psychiatry and applied the British and European schools and models of the practice.
Cameron followed these schools in demanding that mental disturbances are diseases and somatic in nature; all psychological illness would therefore be hardwired, a product of the body and the direct result of a patient's biological structure rather than caused by social environments.
[13] In 1945, Cameron, Nolan D. C. Lewis and Paul L. Schroeder, colonel and psychiatrist, University College of Illinois, were invited to the Nuremberg trials for a psychiatric evaluation of Rudolf Hess.
In his analysis, German culture was made up of people who had the need for status, worshipped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and had a deeply ingrained fear of other countries.
[citation needed]; if the greater population of Germany saw the atrocities of World War II, they would surely submit to a re-organized system of justice.
Cameron decided that Germans would be most likely to commit atrocities due to their historical, biological, racial and cultural past and their particular psychological nature.
With the results of the Manhattan project, Cameron feared that without proper re-organization of society, atomic weapons could fall into the hands of new, fearsome aggressors.
[17] Cameron argued that it was necessary for behavioral scientists to act as the social planners of society, and that the United Nations could provide a conduit for implementing his ideas for applying psychiatric elements to global governance and politics.
Those with anxieties or insecurities and who had trouble with the state of the world were labelled as "the weak"; in Cameron's analysis, they could not cope with life and had to be isolated from society by "the strong".
He began to develop the discipline of social psychiatry which concentrated on the roles of interpersonal interaction, family, community and culture in the emergence and amelioration of emotional disturbance.
In his 1946 paper entitled "Frontiers of Social Psychiatry", he used the case of World War II Germany as an example where society poisoned the minds of citizens by creating a general anxiety or neurosis.
His focus on children included the rights to protection against outmoded, doctrinaire tactics, and the necessity for the implantation of taboos and inhibitions from their parents.
If we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs in other fields which have greatly contributed to the instability of our period by their propensity for holding up progressIn Cameron's book Life is For Living, published in 1948, he expressed a concern for the German race in general.
[citation needed][21] Although society had established sanctions against the spread of infectious diseases, Cameron wanted to extend the concept of contagion to chronic anxiety.
He demanded that political systems be watched, and that German people needed to be monitored due to their "personality type", which he claimed results in the conditions that give rise to the dictatorial power of an authoritarian overlord.
Cameron stated, "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves – and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them."
[23][24] He is unrelated to another CIA psychiatrist, Alan S. Cameron, who helped pioneer psychological profiling of world leaders during the 1970s and was not associated with the behavioral modification research program.
In addition to LSD, he experimented with various paralytic drugs such as curare and electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power.
[26] His "psychic driving" experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements.
These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression; many were permanently debilitated after these treatments.
[28] His work was inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also involved with the intelligence services (though not with MKULTRA) and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.
[32][2] In her book, In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada,[33] author Anne Collins explored the history of Cameron and Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute.
This was made into a TV mini-series directed by Anne Wheeler in 1998, called The Sleep Room, which also dramatizes the lawsuit of Cameron's ex-patients against the CIA.
[34] The son of one of Cameron's patients noted in a memoir that other than Ed Broadbent and Svend Robinson, no Canadian MP brought up the issue in the House of Parliament.
[35] Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to MKUltra were not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.'
"[36] She then cites Alfred W. McCoy: "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method.