The darkened ward held just six patients – all young women, all fast asleep.

The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and filled with the sound of distressing moans. If these women were sleeping, they were likely caught in nightmares.

This was psychiatrist Dr. William Sargant’s infamous ‘Sleep Room,’ a dark ward within a London hospital where he administered horrific ‘treatments’ to hundreds of female patients.

Among those in his care was a 14-year-old girl battling anorexia. In later years, she would rise to fame as a world-renowned actress, but she would never completely heal from the ‘devil’ who treated her.

Another was a Vogue model and self-confessed ‘wild child’ addicted to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. She arrived for her treatment from New York, on a flight paid for by Jimi Hendrix, but by the time she left, she was unable to read, or make even the most basic decisions for herself.

Others came to Sargant with postpartum depression, anxiety or, in one case, were sent to the doctor for the crime of dating a boy her parents disapproved of.

Their stories are told – many for the first time – in the bombshell new book by Jon Stock, The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him.

And some are now asking if the sick experiments he conducted on their vulnerable young minds were funded and supported by the government.

Sargant’s work was based on the firm belief that all psychiatric complaints could be cured with physical treatments such as deep sleep therapy or narcosis – and he was especially enthusiastic about lobotomies. 

It was in his Sleep Room – Ward 5 of London‘s Royal Waterloo hospital – that he tested those theories on his powerless patients nearly 60 years ago.

He would routinely subject them to a potent cocktail of antipsychotic, sedative and antidepressant drugs – often without their own or their parents’ consent.

This treatment regimen, sometimes endured for months at a time, rendered them unconscious for more than 20 hours a day.

They were woken only to be washed, fed and tortured with repeated sessions of violent electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), before being drugged back to sleep.

Most found their memories obliterated and emerged with little sense of who they were or why they’d been there. Many survivors feel the mental and physical scars of their abuse to this day – and some are convinced the doctor sexually assaulted them in their sleep.

‘Sargant still features in my nightmares,’ actress Celia Imrie says in the book. She describes him as a ‘proud, incorrigible man with his hard, dark eyes.’

‘He had a face of thunder, like the devil,’ she says, ‘and had a horrible aura.’

Imrie – star of Calendar Girls and the Bridget Jones franchise – was sent to Sargant suffering from an eating disorder at the age of 14.

She has few memories of her time there as she was heavily medicated throughout, but is haunted by the sight of a woman in the bed next to her being treated with ECT.

‘I vividly recall every sight, sound and smell,’ she says. ‘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 hair and flesh.

‘It was a terrible thing for a 14-year-old to witness.’

She also describes the ghostly presence of the sleeping patients coming and going in the ward.

‘I can picture it so clearly,’ she says. ‘And, although I saw many female patients come back to the ward from there, I never saw anyone emerge from the place awake. You went in asleep and you came out asleep, and you were totally unconscious while inside.’

While she can’t be sure she was personally treated with Sargant’s ‘sleep therapy,’ she says, ‘I must accept the very real possibility that I was.’

She recalls the insulin shock therapy, a now widely discredited and obsolete treatment that saw patients repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin to induce daily comas over several weeks. Sargant often used it, Imrie says, as ‘a precursor’ to his deep sleep therapy.

And there was the terrifying threat of lobotomy should other treatments be deemed unsuccessful.

‘It was in the air, talked about openly on the ward... For all I know, that might have been the next treatment for me,’ Imrie says.

Sargant was known to perform illegal lobotomies and referred patients for them as late as 1977, by which time the medical profession had largely abandoned the barbaric procedure.

Linda Keith, another of his patients, described herself as ‘a pleasure-seeking, music-obsessed drug addict,’ when her parents turned to Sargant to ‘cure’ her wild ways.

‘What they wanted was a tame, house-trained lapdog,’ she says.

The model, who counted Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix among her loves, says that she can’t remember being put to sleep in Ward 5. 

‘All I know is that I didn’t wake up for six weeks,’ she says, recalling a room that was ‘almost in complete darkness.’

‘It was eerie. Silence apart from the moan of sleeping patients, as many as eight of us crammed close together,’ she continues. ‘It was a twilight world and I have a tinge of fear even now as I force myself to think about it – the enormous amount of ECT that I was given.’

By the time she emerged, she says she needed help to complete the simplest of tasks, such as getting dressed or deciding what to eat.

‘Most shockingly of all, I could no longer read,’ she reveals. ‘I recognized letters and words, but they made no sense to me. 

‘I wasn’t happy or unhappy – I wasn’t there. It was as if my brain and personality were dead.’

While visiting Sargant as an outpatient she asked him when she might read again, but he claimed not to know.

‘No one had had as much ECT as me, so he had no frame of reference,’ she recalls.

‘I found this horrifying, but not as much as what happened next – he actually came on to me. Tried to hug me and kiss me on the mouth.’

And Keith wasn’t the only one to accuse Sargant of sexual impropriety. 

One former patient, referred to only as ‘Freya,’ was 22 when she was first admitted to his care after experiencing a psychotic breakdown. She says she was held in the Sleep Room for nine months – three of which she was in isolation.

‘Sargant began by giving me drug-induced narcosis, combined with ECT and insulin coma therapy. My family wasn’t allowed to visit me for the first couple of months,’ she says.

‘When my mum finally managed to come, she said afterwards that she’d looked at the chart at the bottom of my bed and saw that I’d received well over a hundred ECT treatments in two months – almost two a day.’

Her mother also later told her that Sargant had a habit of sending staff away for lunch and spending time with Freya alone.

‘I have no recollection of any conversations with Sargant while I was in bed,’ she says, ‘but I do remember asking the nurses a number of times during narcosis why my genital/pelvic area was very sore and painful. 

‘It was only later, when I was made to go and see Sargant in Harley Street and he repeatedly attempted to take advantage of me, that I began to wonder whether those symptoms were due to abuse that he had perpetrated – and ensured I couldn’t remember.’

Sargant’s influence spread far beyond Britain. He was a regular lecturer in the United States, where he was a visiting professor at Duke University, and a trusted colleague of fellow physician Walter Freeman, another enthusiastic proponent of lobotomies.

It was Freeman who, assisted by Dr James Watts, performed the catastrophic prefrontal lobotomy on John F Kennedy’s older sister, Rosemary, in November 1941.

The procedure left the 23-year-old Kennedy sibling with the mental capacity of a two-year-old and she remained institutionalized until her death in 2005 at age 86.

Some former patients also question whether Sargant’s influence in the US extended further – asking if their treatment was funded by the CIA as part of its investigation into methods of brainwashing and mind control.

In one classified report from October 1951, seen by the author, the British psychiatrist was singled out as someone who ‘could be trusted by the US intelligence community to safely ‘join forces’ on a top-secret project to control and influence human behavior.’

That project became the infamous MKUltra which was found to have dosed people with LSD without their knowledge in an attempt to reprogram their minds.

Sargant’s former patients tell Stock that MKUltra bore a striking resemblance to the treatment they endured – and allege that the Sleep Room might have been ‘psychiatric experiment’ funded bythe government.

Anne White, another of Sargant’s patients, says, ‘I was particularly shocked by the similarities between what the CIA had done to innocent members of the American public and the medical treatment that we’d been subjected to in the Sleep Room. 

‘Reading about MKUltra brought it all back to me: the drugs, the ECT, lying there on Ward 5 for days on end in a distressing, semi-awake state, deprived of all senses. To me the whole thing suddenly slotted together.’

Sargant died in 1988, but Keith still sometimes wonders what she’d say to him if she were to see him in again. Though, she says, it would likely be the same as what she uttered to his face years ago in a street encounter.

‘He thought he was being very friendly and that I’d be thrilled to see him, but I called him a monster – to his face. I said it to the person walking past me too. ‘This man is a monster.’ And then I walked on.’

The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him by Jon Stock is published by Abrams