SHE is the Sixties rock chick who dated Keith Richards as a teen, hung out with Jimi Hendrix and inspired the Rolling Stones hit Ruby Tuesday.
But model Linda Keith’s parents were so exasperated with her wild lifestyle that they put her into psychiatric care aged 23.
It was there that the beauty fell into the clutches of a “monster”; whose treatment regime included zapping patients’ brains with electricity and even performing LOBOTOMIES.
Linda spent six weeks semi- conscious in a darkened “sleep room”; at a hospital, where she got shock therapy to “fix”; her behaviour.
It left her a “zombie”;.
The combination of deep therapy and ECT was a form of brainwashing.
Patients recall “tormented”; bodies that “shuddered and jerked”; and “the scent of burning flesh and hair”; as it was administered.
Later, after Linda had emerged from her own stupor, the man treating her — psychiatrist Dr William Sargant — would try to seduce her.
Three years earlier, in 1966, actress Celia Imrie — then just 14 years old and battling — was placed under the care of the same doctor, who injected her with insulin every day to make her drowsy, weak, sweaty and hungry.
The actress said the side-effects were “startling”;, as her hands shook uncontrollably, she suffered double vision and woke to find clumps of her on the pillow.
Both stars have been swept up in a scandal involving one of the post-war era’s most eminent psychiatrists.
Dr Sargant rubbed shoulders with politicians, spies, artists, aristocrats and actors.
A regular on TV and , he ran the Department of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital in from 1948 to 1972. It was considered an honour to be treated by him.
But behind the psychiatrist’s prominent brow, clipped upper-class voice and pinstripe suits there was another, darker side.
Sargant advocated brutal physical treatments to cure mental illness — electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), insulin coma therapy, deep sleep therapy and lobotomy.
‘Still haunted’
For years, he was fêted around the world — the author of a bestselling book on brainwashing, co-written with war poet Robert Graves. He worked regularly for MI5 and had powerful friends in America, once dining with President Roosevelt.
But today his reputation is in tatters thanks to the courage of his former patients, many just young women when he treated them, including Linda, now 79, and Mamma Mia! star Celia, 72.
When they heard I was writing a book about Sargant, The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal, they agreed to speak out, describing the doctor as a “monster”; whose treatments left them like “zombies”;.
I was appalled by what he had done to his patients.
In 1969, BBC radio presenter Alan Keith had brought daughter Linda back from America to London, where she was subsequently admitted to The Sleep Room.
After for two years, a romance that started when she was 17, she left him for Jimi Hendrix and an increasingly destructive life of sex, and rock ’n’ roll.
By 1969, she was under Sargant’s care. Linda recalls: “My father often used to say to me, ‘You must live within the narrow confines of middle-class society’,”;
They even drove me past Sargant’s house to persuade me what a great man he was.”;
Linda wasn’t helped by her stretch in The Sleep Room. Later diagnosed as bipolar, with an addictive personality disorder, she eventually found peace through Zen meditation.
And she still remembers the out- patient appointment with Sargant, at his private practice at 23 Harley Street, during which he made a pass at her.
“He actually came on to me,”; she says. “Tried to hug me and kiss me on the mouth.
“I ducked and ran, hitting him sideways and he went over. He was lying sprawled on the floor as I made my exit.”;
Meanwhile, Celia revealed she is still haunted by her experiences at Sargant’s hands. She told me: “‘He still features in my nightmares. A proud, incorrigible man with his dark, hard, evil eyes.”;
Sargant, who died in 1988, was one of the first to champion lobotomies — a form of neurosurgery — in the 1940s. “I don’t think he should escape hellfire for all the damage he did,”; forensic psychiatrist Dr Henry Rollin has said.
I vividly recall every sight, sound and smell.
Celia Imrie
As late as 1972, Sargant even suggested that if a depressed woman was married to a difficult man, SHE should consider a lobotomy.
He also once subjected a patient with obsessive compulsive disorder to no fewer than five failed lobotomies in an effort to stop him building fences throughout his house.
The electroconvulsive therapy advocated by Sargant is still a lifesaver for a small number of people, administered in a very modified form, but it is widely criticised by many.
It involves giving an electric shock of 110 volts through the brain’s temporal lobe, triggering a “grand mal”; seizure. Memory loss is unavoidable.
Sargant was initially banned by the then London County Council from giving the treatment, but in 1941 he bought his own “shock box”;.
A few years later, he was administering ECT to hundreds of outpatients at St Thomas’s.
He would sometimes even give it without anaesthetic, just as it was so disturbingly depicted by in 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Not surprisingly, some of Sargant’s early patients were left with fractured vertebrae and dislocated jaws.
‘Work of the devil’
His fondness for barbaric physical treatments culminated in the 1960s in his most notorious procedure: deep sleep therapy combined with ECT.
In 1964, he set up the Sleep Room on Ward 5, the top floor of the Royal Waterloo, a small hospital that had become part of St Thomas’s when the NHS was founded in 1948. It was here he treated psychiatric in-patients.
The Sleep Room itself was a cramped space with six low, divan beds and blinds over the windows.
Women suffering from anxiety, , OCD or psychosis were put to sleep for up to five months with a potent cocktail of sedatives, antipsychotics and antidepressants.
Every six hours, a young student nurse would try to wake them, check their vital signs, spoon some food into their mouths and help them stagger to the bathroom.
Three times a week, they would be given ECT. Celia Imrie cannot remember getting shock therapy, but recalls others receiving it. She said: “I vividly recall every sight, sound and smell.
“The huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange, almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain, she made as her tormented body shuddered and jerked; the scent of burning flesh and hair.”;
Anne White was sent to the Sleep Room in 1970 with depression. “My father was absolutely shattered when he saw me,”; she recalls. “He said I just looked like a walking zombie.”;
To make matters worse, she became resistant to the drugs she was given.
“I just lay there, sedated but awake, in a sort of twilight state of consciousness, surrounded by these other sleeping women.”;
Consent was not sought, let alone given, and the patients had no idea what Sargant had done to them while they slept.
“As a rule, the patient does not know how long he has been asleep, or what treatment, including ECT, he has been given,”; Sargant once boasted.
The Sleep Room also served a more sinister purpose — a form of social correction for “wayward”; daughters.
Another patient, Liz, was asked by Sargant to sit topless for a 30-minute consultation about her depression in 1970.
His predatory behaviour eventually landed him in trouble with the General Medical Council,
They had received a report in the 1980s from another patient alleging he had increased her medication and had sex with her to cure his impotence.
Sargant lived in some splendour on Hamilton Terrace in St John’s Wood, where his dinner parties were notorious affairs.
There were two types of guests: those who left at the normal time, and those who stayed, waiting for the wife-swapping to begin.
A photo was later circulated on the internet of an elderly, silver-haired Sargant stripped to the waist at a sex party, cavorting with topless young women.
It was a shocking image of a once- distinguished psychiatrist.
As he said himself: “Some people think I’m a marvellous doctor, others think I’m the work of the devil.”;
- The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal, by Jon Stock, is out now, published by Little, Brown.
