The Zombie Ward: 'Depressed' Women Were Put To Sleep For Months In An NHS Hospital Room

‘The worst time was when I started not to be asleep. I was awake, but couldn’t move or speak. It was torture, lying there for hours in the darkness.’

Sargant, a founding member of St Thomas’s department of psychological medicine, who advocated the use of drugs to treat mental illness, operated his ‘sleep room’ for ten years until 1973.
Four patients are known to have died there and yet no one stepped in to stop him.

A Cambridge medical graduate, obsessed with making a name for himself, he used high doses of tranquillisers and administered ECT up to twice a week on Ward 5 and every other day in the Narcosis Room.

At the heart of his treatment was his belief that the brain could be ‘repatterned’ to erase bad memories.

His fame - due to TV and radio interviews and best-selling books - ensured a steady stream of patients. He was friends with authors Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves.

Actress Celia Imrie was 14 when she was treated by Sargant on Ward 5 and given huge doses of drugs and ECT.

In her 2011 autobiography, The Happy Hoofer, she recalls sneaking out of bed to peer into the sleep room. She describes ‘dead-looking women lying on the floor on grey mattresses, silent in a kind of electrically induced twilight’.

But to this day, she is unsure if she had treatment in the sleep room because patients were drugged on the ward before being carried there.
‘You went in asleep and you came out asleep. So maybe I was in the Narcosis Room. I could not possibly know,’ she says.

The secrecy surrounding Dr Sargant’s work has even led to claims he was being bankrolled by British intelligence and the CIA. He certainly had links to the military in World War II, working at Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence biological and chemical weapons research base.

But long before he died in 1988, Sargant destroyed all his records, which might have shed light on his sinister treatments.

According to Hilary Jameson, who arrived at the Royal Waterloo in 1970, being admitted to Ward 5 was ‘like falling into the jaws of hell’.

As a 17-year-old A-level student in Oxford, she stopped eating after her parents’ divorce, though she insists she was far from anorexic.

‘People were talking about this marvellous man in London who could work miracles,’ says the 61-year-old, now a psychotherapist.

‘He was stern, a tall, cold man with very dark eyes. He didn’t speak to me. He just told my mother that if I wasn’t admitted then I’d die.’

Within half an hour of arriving, Hilary was injected with largactil - a powerful anti-psychotic drug.
‘It was impossible to rebel because you were constantly drugged,’ she says. ‘It was an unreal world and I was frightened and disorientated.’

Forced to eat huge amounts of carbohydrates so that she put on weight, Hilary had an ever-present threat of ‘narcosis’ hanging over her if she did not show signs of improvement. ‘We used to see the women in the sleep room being taken to the bathroom or to be fed and they were like ghosts. It made you feel very worried. I couldn’t make sense of what was going on around us.’

Hilary was forced to undergo ECT and displayed to medical students by Sargant as he taught them ‘how to deal with anorexic girls’.

Stephanie Simons, a 78-year-old Sussex artist, visited Sargant’s private rooms in London’s Harley Street in 1967 suffering from depression. She sheds a more sinister light on the bias towards women, recalling how he asked her to strip to the waist so he could examine her before administering anti-depressants.

‘He didn’t ask me to get dressed again,’ she says. ‘He told me to sit in a chair, naked to the waist, and talked to me for nearly an hour like that.

‘He was stern and professional, so I didn’t dare say anything.’
Today, Sargant’s reputation as a serious psychiatrist is in tatters, but there is still interest in his mind-control books.

A copy of his brainwashing title Battle Of The Mind is said to have been found at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

As for the Royal Waterloo, it closed as a hospital in 1976 and is now owned by an American university. Sargant’s sleep room is a student bedsit.

But for the women who fell into his hands, his legacy lives on. ‘He damaged us,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He destroyed our potential.’

After being discharged from Ward 5, she was unable to cope with her career in marketing and took jobs as a supermarket shelf-stacker and a cleaning lady.

‘It changed me. I lost interest in things,’ she says. ‘There was no way back to my old life. I am angry about what I feel I missed out on. I’ve lost chunks of my memory. And I can’t lay down new memories.’

Hilary adds: ‘It dulled me an awful lot. It knocked the spirit out of me. Taking so many drugs had a bad effect - by the time I was 26 I had ovarian cysts.’

In Australia and Canada, where Sargant’s methods were disastrously emulated, dozens of narcosis patients died. Those who survived were eventually compensated.

Survivors of the Royal Waterloo Hospital have been told by lawyers that the lack of paperwork and the amount of time that has passed makes it unlikely they will ever be similarly compensated.
But above all, women like Elizabeth and Hilary want to be acknowledged. They want to know how Sargant can have been allowed to get away with such monstrous behaviour.

‘People talk about the sleep room as if it was something from another world,’ says Elizabeth.
‘But we’re still alive. We’re still here. We’re still suffering from what he and his colleagues did to us.’