The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him

The shocking account of the women tortured by a legendary psychiatrist in his infamous “sleep room,” and the survivors fighting for change in the system

Dr. William Sargant was one of the most revered figures in postwar psychiatry. He had a lucrative private practice in London and a bestselling book on brainwashing, and was a household name. He was also a regular lecturer in the United States, where he was a visiting professor at Duke University and had close connections with the CIA. But he was best known for the apogee of his career: the Sleep Room in Ward Five on the top floor of the Royal Waterloo Hospital in London. In this twilight world, Sargant’s patients were subjected, often without their consent or that of their families, to continuous narcosis. They would be kept asleep for more than twenty hours a day for months at a time, roused only to be washed, fed, and given sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. Sargant believed in aggressive physical interventions: If the brain was sick, it needed to be splinted like a broken leg.

Between 1964 and 1972, hundreds of women were treated in the Sleep Room, emerging with little sense of who they were or why they were there. Now in their seventies and eighties, they have come forward to share their stories. They also want answers: Who funded their dangerous treatment, and were they the unwitting victims of state-sponsored experiments? The Sleep Room is thriller writer Jon Stock’s rigorous investigation into Sargant, the disturbing world of Ward Five, and the twisted science of the psychiatry that lay behind it.