The Sleep Room by Jon Stock: The top actress who was sedated and given electric shock treatment to cure anorexia

An airless hospital dormitory in perpetual semi-darkness, day and night. A musty smell of sweaty slumber and human breath. Occasional moans of bewilderment.

Eight young women, some as young as 14, lie in a state of drug-induced sleep for weeks at a time, 20 hours out of every 24. They’re known as the ‘Sleeping Beauties’.

Every six hours, they’re chivvied awake by nurses and led stumbling to the lavatory.

Without their knowledge or consent, they’re given frequent bouts of electro-convulsive therapy, causing them to jerk and twitch, rubber plugs jammed between their teeth.

This is not science fiction. It really happened, to hundreds of patients (most of them girls and young women) in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the Sleep Room in Ward Five of the Royal Waterloo Hospital. The theory was that ‘deep sleep therapy’, or ‘continuous narcosis’, combined with ECT, would ‘upset patterns of behaviour and re-programme troubled minds’.

The doctor who ran this dystopian hellscape was William Sargant, the tall, striking physician in charge of psychological medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital, of which the Royal Waterloo was an annexe.

He believed that mental ill-health was a physical condition, which needed to be treated as such. He had no time for Freudian talking therapy, or what he called ‘sofa merchants’.

His control over the sleeping patients was total. With the ‘Sleeping Beauties’ safely in their sedated state they wouldn’t be in a position to protest.

Who would send a daughter to such a place? The answer was middle-class mothers at their wits’ end when their daughters refused to eat, or get rid of an ‘unsuitable’ boyfriend; or who was stubbornly recalcitrant, wayward or depressed.

Sargant promised parents that his treatment would be like a re-set of their daughters’ brains. Sometimes it worked for a short time, but Sargant had no interest in long-term results. Often, there was a relapse.

‘Sargant still features in my nightmares,’ says the actress Celia Imrie, one of six former Sleep Room patients who provide their raw testimonies in Jon Stock’s horrifying exposé of Sargant’s Sleep Room.

Imrie was sent to Ward Five by her mother in 1966, aged just 14. She was suffering from anorexia that had started when, after applying for a place at the Royal Ballet School, she had discovered a rejection letter on her mother’s desk, saying she was ‘too big ever to become a dancer’.

She was so heavily drugged with the antipsychotic Largactil (which so dulled the senses that it was known as ‘liquid cosh’ or ‘the chemical straitjacket’) that she had double vision and couldn’t stop shaking.

‘I was injected with insulin every day, too,’ she says. ‘I think I had what was called “sub-coma shock treatment” – you weren’t given enough insulin to induce a hypoglycaemic coma, but it was enough to make you drowsy, weak, sweaty and hungry.’

Once, Sargant took her with him to a hospital lecture theatre, to be his exhibit. ‘I had to take my clothes off so students could see how thin I was.’

She has tried to find her hospital records, but they have ‘vanished’ or been destroyed. So she’s not sure whether she had ECT, though she guesses she did.

She was powerless under the treatment of the 58-year-old Sargant, with his piercing eyes ‘like washed black pebbles’. He was treated like a god, breezing in through the swing doors, worshipped and obeyed by everyone.

She realised the way to get out was to eat. ‘My recovery had nothing to do with him or his barbaric treatments.’

‘I didn’t wake up for six weeks,’ recalls Linda Keith, whose parents checked her in to Ward Five in 1969 when she was a 23-year-old Vogue model. ‘My parents always referred to me as being “ill” rather than the more accurate description of me: a pleasure-seeking, music-obsessed drug addict. What they wanted was a tame, house-trained lapdog.’

Read More

What they got, after submitting their daughter to Sargant’s treatment, was a woman ‘without a mind. I’d been rendered completely helpless.’ During the narcosis, Linda was subjected to 50 sessions of ECT.

The result was that she could no longer choose anything and needed help with the simplest tasks. ‘I wasn’t happy or unhappy. I wasn’t there.’

She had also forgotten how to read. After being discharged, she went to see Sargant at 23 Harley Street, and asked him when she might read again. He said he didn’t know. Then, she recalls, ‘he came on to me. He tried to hug me and kiss me on the mouth. I ducked and hit him so he went over onto the ottoman pouffe.’

Before being sent to Ward Five, Linda had an affair with Keith Richards (who would later write the song Ruby Tuesday about her) but left him for Jimi Hendrix.

A few years after Sargant had stopped treating her, she bumped into him in Bond Street and called him ‘a monster’ to his face.

To read this disturbing book is a stifling experience. Stock powerfully evokes the eerily subdued atmosphere of the Sleep Room and brings out the sinister creepiness and the arrogance of Sargant.

He discovers that Sargant himself had been admitted to Hanwell Asylum in 1934 for depression. It was here that he became convinced that ‘insanity’ would one day be perceived as a series of physically treatable disorders.

He wanted to save people from being incarcerated in asylums for months or years (that was an admirable aim) and he believed that a short, sharp, 12-week shock would do the trick. All very well in theory – but as this book shows, the results could be disastrous.

Another patient, 15-year-old ‘Sara’, suffered terrible memory loss, a kind of ‘severe Alzheimer’s’, and the antipsychotic drugs left her with a permanent Parkinsonian tremor.

Stock also suggests that Sargant shared his research with, or might even have been partly funded by, Porton Down, the MI5, MI6 and the CIA. In the 1950s, Porton Down conducted LSD experiments on young corporals, who took part in exchange for a bit of money. The aim was to disorientate people so that they ‘forgot how to lie’.

It’s all very murky, and Stock doesn’t quite nail Sargant’s involvement.

By far the most memorable aspect of this disturbing book is the unforgettable image of those drugged, sleeping girls incarcerated in the top floor room overlooking Waterloo station.