MK-Ultra: The shocking Cold War psychiatric experiments hidden by the CIA

In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA ordered the creation of a secret programme intended to find ways of mind control. Psychiatric institutions across the United States and Canada were funded by the CIA to perform experiments on patients using psychedelic drugs, sensory deprivation, electroshock treatment and more. The programme was known by its now infamous code name: MK-Ultra.

Video by Adrian Hartrick & Dominika Ożyńska

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Per Lanterna:

MK-Ultra: The Shocking Cold War Experiments Hidden by the CIA (BBC REEL) is a concise, effective short documentary that lays out the CIA’s secret mind-control programme with particular clarity on its deep entanglement with psychiatry.

In the early Cold War, fearing Soviet and Chinese “brainwashing,” the CIA poured money into psychiatric research and institutions across the United States and Canada. Patients in psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, and ordinary people were subjected—often without knowledge or consent—to high-dose LSD and other drugs, sensory deprivation, prolonged induced sleep, and extreme electroshock. One strand, Operation Midnight Climax, used safe houses and prostitutes to dose unsuspecting men while CIA observers watched from behind two-way mirrors. The most destructive work highlighted in the film took place at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute under Scottish-American psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. Patients admitted for relatively common conditions such as postpartum depression were given aggressive drug combinations, massive electroconvulsive therapy far beyond therapeutic levels, and Cameron’s techniques of “depatterning” (systematic erasure of personality and memory) followed by “psychic driving” (endless looped tape messages played for hours or days). The result was lasting harm: people left unable to recognise family, perform basic tasks, or reclaim ordinary lives.

The video makes plain that this was not fringe quackery conducted in isolation. It was institutional psychiatry—respected hospitals, leading figures, and professional networks—funded and steered by intelligence priorities. Psychiatry supplied the methods, the settings, the vulnerable subjects, and the scientific cover. The CIA provided the money and the secrecy. That partnership produced experiments that amounted to medical torture under the banner of treatment and research. The short runtime keeps the account focused and avoids sensational excess, yet the psychiatric dimension remains unmistakable: when a profession charged with healing becomes an instrument of state power without effective ethical restraints or independent oversight, the damage falls hardest on those least able to refuse. The film serves as a compact reminder of why rigorous scrutiny of psychiatric power and its institutional alliances remains necessary.