Who put the LSD in CIA?
September 19, 2010 3:35 PM Subscribe
Know of any good documentaries on CIA funded mind control experiments?
Can anyone recommend a good documentary on MKULTRA or other CIA funded experiments into interrogation methods (Project Artichoke?) and/or mindcontrol? I realize these may not fall under the category of "mind controll" so much as interrogation methods and general psy ops, but "mind controll" sounds catchier. I'm particularly interested in the ways that the government may have funded psychological research, the informed consent or lack thereof of participants, and subsequent repercussions. Bonus points if LSD is somehow involved....
I've been looking to find such a documentary, but all I can find is references to something that may have aired a long time on the Discovery Channel. If there is a particularly good documentary, I would like to look into sharing a clip at school. Dear Mefites, please share any good resources you may have.
Can anyone recommend a good documentary on MKULTRA or other CIA funded experiments into interrogation methods (Project Artichoke?) and/or mindcontrol? I realize these may not fall under the category of "mind controll" so much as interrogation methods and general psy ops, but "mind controll" sounds catchier. I'm particularly interested in the ways that the government may have funded psychological research, the informed consent or lack thereof of participants, and subsequent repercussions. Bonus points if LSD is somehow involved....
I've been looking to find such a documentary, but all I can find is references to something that may have aired a long time on the Discovery Channel. If there is a particularly good documentary, I would like to look into sharing a clip at school. Dear Mefites, please share any good resources you may have.
Best answer: One of the best makers of documentaries around is one Adam Curtis, who has managed to create some of the most striking, entertaining and thoughtful pieces I've seen on a variety of subjects.
In his 1995 series, The Living Dead: Three Films about the Power of the Past, he had an episode about the psychologists who believed they'd discovered mind control, their later CIA funding, and the final abandoning of the project. It is, I think, the finest documentary available on this subject.
One thing that most documentaries about the subject lack completely is context. Adam Curtis is careful enough in this series to cover not only the personal human impact that early experiments (which at the beginning were not funded by the CIA, but were independent) – that is, the toll it took on a lot of the people involved – but also the fact that these experiments were a complete and utter failure. In fact, they almost tore the CIA apart; in the wake of the assassination of JFK, the entire CIA was so taken up with conspiracy theories and fears that the KGB might have discovered effective mind control before them that the organization just about came apart at the seams. The simple fact at the end of all this is that mind control is utterly impossible and completely fantastical; it's just not something that's possible given the organic makeup of our minds. People had an idea in the 1960s that maybe the human brain worked like a computer; but it turns out that's not really true at all, not in the simple sense the CIA wanted it to be true.
Anyhow: Adam Curtis has made all of his documentaries available for free online at archive.org. The second episode – the one about CIA mind control – is called You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough. You can download any episode of the series for free here. If you'd rather just start watching some of it, you can also watch it at Google Video. I think you'll find it's quite interesting and entertaining.
posted by koeselitz at 4:04 PM on September 19, 2010 [5 favorites]
In his 1995 series, The Living Dead: Three Films about the Power of the Past, he had an episode about the psychologists who believed they'd discovered mind control, their later CIA funding, and the final abandoning of the project. It is, I think, the finest documentary available on this subject.
One thing that most documentaries about the subject lack completely is context. Adam Curtis is careful enough in this series to cover not only the personal human impact that early experiments (which at the beginning were not funded by the CIA, but were independent) – that is, the toll it took on a lot of the people involved – but also the fact that these experiments were a complete and utter failure. In fact, they almost tore the CIA apart; in the wake of the assassination of JFK, the entire CIA was so taken up with conspiracy theories and fears that the KGB might have discovered effective mind control before them that the organization just about came apart at the seams. The simple fact at the end of all this is that mind control is utterly impossible and completely fantastical; it's just not something that's possible given the organic makeup of our minds. People had an idea in the 1960s that maybe the human brain worked like a computer; but it turns out that's not really true at all, not in the simple sense the CIA wanted it to be true.
Anyhow: Adam Curtis has made all of his documentaries available for free online at archive.org. The second episode – the one about CIA mind control – is called You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough. You can download any episode of the series for free here. If you'd rather just start watching some of it, you can also watch it at Google Video. I think you'll find it's quite interesting and entertaining.
posted by koeselitz at 4:04 PM on September 19, 2010 [5 favorites]
The Men Who Stare at Goats? (couldn't find a decent link, sorry).
posted by idiomatika at 4:16 PM on September 19, 2010
posted by idiomatika at 4:16 PM on September 19, 2010
Best answer: Seconding Acid Dreams and Storming Heaven which are pretty much two of the most definitive works on this as popular history. These are books not documentaries, but also check out the following:
Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Times Books, 1979.
Dyck, Erika. Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
I'm not sure about a Discovery Channel documentary but there's a decent National Geographic one from 2009 called Inside LSD that I think might cover it. Other good documentaries are the BBC's LSD - The Beyond Within, Hofmann's Potion and the History Channel's LSD episode of Illegal Drugs. You should be able to find them all online.
Why do you want to show the clip at school. If you could let us know exactly what you are researching, I could probably provide more info.
posted by turkeyphant at 4:27 PM on September 19, 2010
Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Times Books, 1979.
Dyck, Erika. Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
I'm not sure about a Discovery Channel documentary but there's a decent National Geographic one from 2009 called Inside LSD that I think might cover it. Other good documentaries are the BBC's LSD - The Beyond Within, Hofmann's Potion and the History Channel's LSD episode of Illegal Drugs. You should be able to find them all online.
Why do you want to show the clip at school. If you could let us know exactly what you are researching, I could probably provide more info.
posted by turkeyphant at 4:27 PM on September 19, 2010
Best answer: Mind Control: America's Secret War
Control: America’s Secret War is the title of the History Channel’s excellent documentary exposing top secret government mind control programs. This powerful History Channel documentary reveals how for decades, top secret government projects worked virtually non-stop to perfect means of controlling the human mind. Though for many years the government denied that these projects even existed, the details have long been preserved in thousands of pages of now declassified government documents reluctantly released through the Freedom of Information Act.
posted by Rumple at 8:48 PM on September 19, 2010
Control: America’s Secret War is the title of the History Channel’s excellent documentary exposing top secret government mind control programs. This powerful History Channel documentary reveals how for decades, top secret government projects worked virtually non-stop to perfect means of controlling the human mind. Though for many years the government denied that these projects even existed, the details have long been preserved in thousands of pages of now declassified government documents reluctantly released through the Freedom of Information Act.
posted by Rumple at 8:48 PM on September 19, 2010
Response by poster: Thank you all!
I'm interested in possibly showing part of the film at our Psychiatry Interest Group's movie night. We've been discussing the Stanford Prison Experiment and I thought it would be interesting to look at other controversial studies from the 1960s. I wouldn't say I'm researching anything - just looking for films that bring a humanistic and historical perspective to clinical psychiatry or psychology research.
I was thinking that MKULTRA brings up ethical issues of consent, but it looks like it also raises issues surrounding the fundamental concepts of memory, and the dialogue between the Cold War and concepts of mind. Interesting stuff.
Also, one of our professors administers LSD to rabbits to study serotonergic memory circuits, so it all comes full circle.
posted by ladypants at 8:52 PM on September 19, 2010
I'm interested in possibly showing part of the film at our Psychiatry Interest Group's movie night. We've been discussing the Stanford Prison Experiment and I thought it would be interesting to look at other controversial studies from the 1960s. I wouldn't say I'm researching anything - just looking for films that bring a humanistic and historical perspective to clinical psychiatry or psychology research.
I was thinking that MKULTRA brings up ethical issues of consent, but it looks like it also raises issues surrounding the fundamental concepts of memory, and the dialogue between the Cold War and concepts of mind. Interesting stuff.
Also, one of our professors administers LSD to rabbits to study serotonergic memory circuits, so it all comes full circle.
posted by ladypants at 8:52 PM on September 19, 2010
Deep Politics video playlist, scroll down, these are the drones you are looking for.
posted by hortense at 9:23 PM on September 19, 2010
posted by hortense at 9:23 PM on September 19, 2010
Best answer: – I just wanted to come back here and mention: I've just watched that documentary I recommended again, since it was on my mind and since it's free; and I have to recommend it once more, doubly so. It's really very striking and amazing in many ways.
For one thing, one part of this documentary is an extraordinary interview with a woman named Linda MacDonald, who was one of the very first subjects in these "mind control" tests. She sits on a hill of green grass and tells the story of how she was brought to the institute by her family at the age of 26 because she was severely depressed; she says she knows this because she read her casefiles decades later, but she has no memory of it whatsoever. The idea the doctors had was to erase the painful memories people had and to replace them with new, better memories; so they'd give patients like her electroshock treatments several times a day for years on end, until they didn't remember any of it. She describes how she felt after she was discharged: "like an alien," she says, she didn't remember anything about social norms or customs or the way people are supposed to do things: what she should do at a funeral, how she should feel about her children, how she should treat a lover, etc. It's really a striking account, and the amazing thing to me is her ability to be detached about it; at the end of the documentary, she says that in a way she believes she has a gift, because she's notice how much memories often really bother people. Of course, the attempts her doctors had made to replace the nullified memories – which included techniques like playing tapes to her while she was asleep – didn't work. She had to do that for herself.
Another interesting fact that I didn't know about before I watched this was the Russian defector, Yuri Nosenko, who defected shortly after Lee Harvey Oswald had shot JFK. Nosenko was the only person that the CIA ever really tried to use its mind and memory control on; they actually kept him locked up and strung out for three years in order to try to "break into his memory" and "subvert his conditioning." Interesting stuff.
Anyhow, yeah – highly recommend it.
posted by koeselitz at 11:08 PM on September 19, 2010
For one thing, one part of this documentary is an extraordinary interview with a woman named Linda MacDonald, who was one of the very first subjects in these "mind control" tests. She sits on a hill of green grass and tells the story of how she was brought to the institute by her family at the age of 26 because she was severely depressed; she says she knows this because she read her casefiles decades later, but she has no memory of it whatsoever. The idea the doctors had was to erase the painful memories people had and to replace them with new, better memories; so they'd give patients like her electroshock treatments several times a day for years on end, until they didn't remember any of it. She describes how she felt after she was discharged: "like an alien," she says, she didn't remember anything about social norms or customs or the way people are supposed to do things: what she should do at a funeral, how she should feel about her children, how she should treat a lover, etc. It's really a striking account, and the amazing thing to me is her ability to be detached about it; at the end of the documentary, she says that in a way she believes she has a gift, because she's notice how much memories often really bother people. Of course, the attempts her doctors had made to replace the nullified memories – which included techniques like playing tapes to her while she was asleep – didn't work. She had to do that for herself.
Another interesting fact that I didn't know about before I watched this was the Russian defector, Yuri Nosenko, who defected shortly after Lee Harvey Oswald had shot JFK. Nosenko was the only person that the CIA ever really tried to use its mind and memory control on; they actually kept him locked up and strung out for three years in order to try to "break into his memory" and "subvert his conditioning." Interesting stuff.
Anyhow, yeah – highly recommend it.
posted by koeselitz at 11:08 PM on September 19, 2010
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posted by ljshapiro at 3:44 PM on September 19, 2010