[sarahowen662]

Whenever i go through one of my periods of depression, i have found that reading helps me greatly (i suddenly develop a real yearning for knowledge). I find a non-fictional subject and read everything i can about that subject and by the time i have thoroughly researched and read all i can, i'm usually feeling better enough to go about my normal routine.
This is my current topic i am reading.
Sorry, its a long read

Named for Maurice Duplessis, the Premier of Quebec at the time whose government was responsible for their plight.
In the 1940's & 50's when poverty was at a high peak in Quebec, Orphans (babies born out of wedlock, from single mothers or genuine orphans) were used to gain more money.
Government contributions were only $1.25 a day for orphans, but $2.75 a day for psychiatric patients.
So under the Lunatic Asylum Act of 1909 (due to undefined rules) a significant number of healthy older children being diagnosed as mentally incompetent and sent to psychiatric hospitals, based on superficial diagnoses made for fiscal reasons.
A commission in the early 1960s investigating mental institutions after Duplessis' death revealed one-third of the 22,000 patients did not belong.
The Bédard report of 1962 put an end to the outdated concept of an "asylum," but by this time. a lot of those children were entering adulthood and allowed to leave.

The Duplessis orphans were subjected to years of mental abuse, sexual abuse and medical experimentations, many of which resulted in death.

Human Guinea Pigs?
The Orphans’ medical records and recollections of the Orphans themselves suggest the children were exploited as human guinea pigs for a new drug, chlorpromazine.
Chlorpromazine was synthesized in France before World War II for use as an anesthetic. In the years since, it has been invested with such epithets as the “chemical billy club” or “chemical lobotomy” because of its mental and physical consequences—including a “complication” known as tardive dyskinesia, a central nervous system disorder that includes involuntary, grotesque facial and body movements.
For the children, the drug submerged them in a nightmare from which they could never awaken. The purpose for the drugging and the extent and consequences of testing, including deaths, are continuing to be investigated by Freedom.

For many people, sitting near a body of water is a relaxing experience. For Clarina Duguay, it inspires terrifying memories from her childhood—memories so painful she can scarcely find words to express them more than 50 years later.
The shy, soft-spoken, 65-year-old Duguay is one of Quebec’s infamous Duplessis Orphans, a group of more than 5,000 children whose parents handed them over to Catholic orphanages during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, promised their children would receive a “good education.
Two years after arriving at her orphanage in 1946, Clarina Duguay was transferred to St. Julien Hospital, an insane asylum more than 1,000 kilometers from her home.
Duguay experienced appalling treatment at St. Julien.
“They would plunge our heads into ice-cold water if we did something wrong,” she said, adding that to this day, water terrifies her. She described being tied to a bed with a collar, and having to scrub floors seemingly without end.
Duguay was told by the nuns that her mother had become psychotic and had died as a patient in another psychiatric hospital. In fact, her mother died of tuberculosis two years after the nuns claimed she had passed away.
Two weeks after arriving at St. Julien, Duguay vividly recalls being given medicine that the nuns said would make her sleep. The medicine, however, did much more than that.
“It made me into a zombie,” she said. “I had no energy, I was always feeling sleepy, had a hard time getting up. I was getting the drug every night. I have a hard time remembering, which I think is because of the drug.”

Francois Lantagne was a frightened, 9-year-old boy in 1946 when he was sent to St. Michel Archange psychiatric hospital. Born out of wedlock, his mother did not have enough money to raise him.
Lantagne was regularly placed in a straitjacket and subjected to ice-cold showers. Like Duguay, he received chlorpromazine every night at bedtime.
Today, Lantagne has been on welfare for 35 years.
“They have wasted my life,” he said.

Joseph Martin was only 5 1/2 years old in 1938 when his parents placed him in Montreal’s Buisonnet Institute. Shortly after that, he was transferred to St. Jean-De-Dieu Hospital, where he remained until 1956. Martin said he was given a variety of “purple and pink pills” and chlorpromazine.

Alice Quinton said she started to receive chlorpromazine when she was 13—three times a day by pill and injection.
“I felt sleepy all the time, like when you get operated on,” she said. “When I woke up, I did not know where I was. I was having nightmares and my heart was always beating fast. I felt anxious.”
The drugging continued behind the walls of St. Julien until Quinton was 23.

Rod Vienneau, Clarina Duguay’s husband, investigated his wife’s past and said that from the early 1990s, when the Orphans began fighting for justice, they all told the same story: from the time they arrived at the psychiatric facilities until they left, they received chlorpromazine.
When they requested their medical records, the early ones—during the period the drug would have been undergoing testing—were not provided to them, said Vienneau.

Vienneau compared the cold water plunges and the drug use to experiments performed on children in Nazi-run concentration camps in Europe.
“This has been a conspiracy of silence from the beginning,” he said. “The province of Quebec was just another Auschwitz.”
Michel Lebel, a former Montreal police officer who specialized in investigating cases against children, said the crimes against the Orphans went far beyond drugging and physical abuse. Lebel has discovered unexplained deaths of hundreds of Orphans and many examples of bogus paperwork in their cases.
When children died, he explained, as yet unidentified persons within the psychiatric system simply came up with phony new identities, fabricating records to replace those deceased so funding could continue. “Some of these kids died and were reborn 10 times,” said Lebel, now a freelance journalist.

Now 62 years old, Marc Boudreau has come to accept that he will likely never find peace, or be able to live a normal life, after a childhood spent in institutions.
Many days are a struggle for Boudreau, who still finds it difficult to talk about his past.
"It was a stolen childhood, because we were children and we were innocent," he said. "We were defenceless."
In a motion to be authorized to launch a class action lawsuit, Boudreau alleges that his mother handed him over to a Catholic-run organization as an infant. After some time in foster care, Boudreau spent most of his early years in orphanages and psychiatric hospitals in Quebec.
In the motion, he claims that physical and sexual abuse in those institutions left him with long-term scars — both physical and emotional — and that prevented him from forming stable relationships or finding steady work.
"I didn't have comfort, affection, love or tenderness," he said.
Boudreau's motion alleges a story that would be familiar to many of the Duplessis Orphans: He claims he was made to work, left in isolation, drugged and forced to undergo experimental electroshock therapy.
The motion alleges extreme beatings, which he said left him with permanent damage in his left eye and contributed to a disease that causes plaque build-up in his arteries.
"It's worse than a nightmare. I've watched horror films and that's nothing compared to what we lived through, endured and suffered," he said.

Donald Ewen Cameron
Some of the Orphans interned at St. Jean-de-Dieu Hospital remember being treated by Ewen Cameron, the psychiatrist who conducted appalling and inhuman experiments on human subjects at Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University as part of the notorious “mind-control” programs of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from the late 1940s through the early- to mid-1960s.
Cameron was known to use chlorpromazine in his experiments, combining drugs, electric shock, lobotomies and other savage incursions on patients.

One of the darkest chapters of Canadian history surely has to be the CIA-funded mind control experiments done at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal back in the 1950s and 60s. You don’t have to be a senior citizen to have heard of the infamous “Dr.” Ewen Cameron and his “de-patterning” experiments done at the Allen Memorial Clinic, that gothic structure on the hill above downtown Montreal, attached to the Royal Victoria.
He had developed the novel idea, which the CIA liked for its possible application in brainwashing enemies, that the best way to treat mental patients was to totally destroy their personality and attempt to remake them.
To this end, he gave massive doses of electric shock to individuals to destroy their memories and then placed modified football helmets upon their still breathing corpses that would play endless loops of Cameron’s recorded instructions or other nonsense. He also had a penchant to put some patients on massive doses of barbiturates or LSD and throw them in a sensory deprivation tank for a month.

In the 1940s, only 13.4% of orphanage residents in Quebec were in fact true orphans; 21.8% still had both parents living, and the remainder had only one.1
Since there was no room in the orphanages, thousands of illegitimate children between 6 and 12 were placed in foundling homes whose programs were designed for 0 to 6 year olds.
According to Health Department statistics for 1945, 7,730 children were living in the foundling homes that had a total capacity of only 3,723 beds.
Little more than four walls and a roof, these were the places where ‘overflow’ orphans were incarcerated, and they were run like factories.
Life was systematized, standardized, and scheduled down to the minute. Everything happened at the same time. The children got up together, had their diapers changed together, had baths together, ate in silence together in the room that generally served as their living space, play area, classroom, etc.
These throw-away children received little intellectual stimulation or affection, no physical tenderness and no individual contact, and they didn’t even have the most basic of human rights allowed to them – the right to say “no”.
They were forcibly put into psychiatric hospitals or reform schools, not because they were mentally ill or a problem, but to be used as guinea pigs for research experiments, for plain old slave labor and for the oldest of motivations – GREED.

In 1943, mandatory schooling to age 14 was introduced. But it was not until 1946 that orphanages, reform schools and trade schools were required to comply with the teaching requirements set by the Council of Education. Even then, this was really only lip service, the Council had no idea whether they did or didn’t comply because they exercised no control whatsoever over what was taught.
They could be be teaching bed-making and calling that ‘complying’ with providing the children’s educational needs, for all anyone knew.
Clearly they weren’t spending any real time devoted to bettering the minds of these children, in fact quite the opposite. They were retarding them, and that was intentional on their part for these were ‘bad’ children, children born in sin.
By 1946, the religious and scientific communities had acknowledged that especially the foundling home operation was causing significant lags in childhood intellectual and social development. They had become “factories of the mentally ill.“1
In 1950, journalist Gerard Pelletier found that 80% of illegitimate children became mentally retarded, their capacity for normal development decreasing the longer they remained institutionalized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplessis_Orphans
https://monitortelegram.com/duplessi...ec-government/
https://monitortelegram.com/victims-...e-experiments/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/21/w...ue-quebec.html
http://lunamoth1.blogspot.com/2009/0...-hospital.html
https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com...rphan-scandal/

[RUTHIE7]

Wonderfully researched!

Thank you so much. It was a very interesting read. You should become a journalist. Open your OWN 'YouTube' journalist Chanel and do your own thing on past and current events.

You have a great talent!!

[shadowstein]

Its frightening to think that we are capable of such cruel indifference

[flailingmeatmech]

i can't really imagine how horrible it would be to be locked in a sensory deprivation tank on a ton of acid. that's straight up demonic.