The Sleep Room is a 1998 Canadian television movie about experiments on Canadian mental patients that were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s by Donald Ewen Cameron and funded by the CIA's MKUltra program. It originally aired as a miniseries and is based on the book In The Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Brainwashing Experiments in CanadabyAnne Collins.
Dr. Ewen Cameron, as the head of the Allan Memorial Institute in Quebec, Canada, was interested in the repatterning of the brains of those with mental illnesses. He hypothesized that mental illness could be attributed to learning the wrong responses to situations. Cameron's study aimed to de-pattern the brain into an essentially infantile state, before re-patterning the brain to learn the correct responses to situations. The infantile state included a loss of the ability to speak, walk or control one's bowels and was generally irreversible.
Cameron's primary method of de-patterning the brain was to place patients in a medically induced coma for several weeks at a time, while delivering powerful electric shocks used to further disorient the brain. This effectively wiped the minds and memories of many of his patients and is one of the greatest ethical dilemmas of this study.
