Built around the disturbing image of a ward full of young women drugged into weeks of enforced sleep and woken only for electroshock therapy, Jon Stock’s remarkable and revealing investigation into the discredited British psychiatrist William Sargant weaves together the bleak and the gothic.
Irritated by the rise of talking therapy, Sargant spent the post-war years assaulting the brain with drugs, shocks and lobotomies to force (mainly) women out of depression, anxiety and other conditions.
His results were alarming and often fatal.
Laced with personal accounts, including from the actor Celia Imrie, it’s a portrait of an ethically and methodically flawed doctor with a God complex, obsessed with healing human beings in which he is barely interested.
Stock’s career as a spy novelist helps him unspool the tale with cloak and dagger although he can rely a little too much on unanswerable speculation.
Was Sargant’s persistence “forged at his prep school and in the back wards of Hanwell mental asylum?” We may never know.
Photo credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
