The Sleep Room: a 'gripping exposé' of a 'troubled' psychiatrist

Although he is little known today, the psychiatrist William Sargant was once "lauded by the medical establishment as a brilliant maverick", said Ian Sansom in The Daily Telegraph. Long considered a "pioneer of radical psychiatric treatments", he was praised by the BMJ on his death in 1988 as an "iconoclast" and a "brilliant teacher". Yet in "The Sleep Room", the thriller writer Jon Stock's first work of non-fiction, he emerges as a "sadist and a zealot" who "left a trail of broken lives in his wake".

Sargant was a proponent of "physicalist" psychiatry – the idea that all mental problems are at root physical. Dismissive of talking cures, he believed in invasive, aggressive treatments: inducing deep-sleep therapy, or "continuous narcosis"; electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); and lobotomy. While he claimed his approach was "practical", in reality his treatments were "based on little more than faith, bolstered by a messianic conviction in his own methods". And as Stock shows, they did untold damage. Absorbing and meticulous, his book is an "utterly shocking yet all-too-familiar story of medical overreach".

The bulk of his account is focused on the "Sleep Room", which Sargant operated at London's Royal Waterloo Hospital between 1964 and 1973, said Francesca Angelini in The Sunday Times. There, anxious or depressed patients, mostly young women, were sedated for 20 hours a day and were woken "only to be washed, fed and given ECT". Many stayed for months. Sargant claimed the treatment "reprogrammed disturbed minds", but former patients reported suffering severe memory loss and other forms of brain atrophy; one called it a "brutal annihilation of my character". Using interviews and medical records, Stock argues convincingly that the Sleep Room was "home to a scandal that the medical establishment has done its best to forget".

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Stock captures the remarkable extent to which, throughout his career, Sargant was "given a free hand" to do what he liked, said Miranda Seymour in the Financial Times. During the War, he was able to conduct experiments on "disorientated ex-servicemen", injecting them with powerful sedatives to prepare them for "massive jolts" of ECT. Later, although "ugly rumours" spread about the Sleep Room, including charges that sexual abuse took place, no formal investigations were ever made; and Sargant finished his career at the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, treating private patients. A "gripping exposé of a troubling and troubled man", Stock's book is an absorbing – if "chilling" – read.