Others came to Sargant with postpartum\u00a0depression<\/a>, anxiety or, in one case, were sent to the doctor for the crime<\/a>\u00a0of dating a boy her parents disapproved of.<\/p>\n Their stories are told – many for the first time – in the\u00a0bombshell new book by Jon Stock, The Sleep Room<\/a>: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him.<\/p>\n And some are now asking if the sick experiments he conducted on their vulnerable young minds were funded and supported by the government.<\/p>\n Dr William Sargant was an enthusiastic fan of lobotomies<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was in his Sleep Room –\u00a0Ward 5 of\u00a0London<\/a>‘s Royal Waterloo hospital –\u00a0that he tested those theories on his powerless patients nearly 60 years ago.<\/p>\n He would routinely subject them to a potent cocktail of\u00a0antipsychotic, sedative and antidepressant drugs – often without their own or their parents’ consent.<\/p>\n This treatment regimen, sometimes endured for months at a time, rendered them unconscious for more than 20 hours a day.<\/p>\n They were woken only to be washed, fed and tortured with repeated sessions of violent electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), before being drugged back to sleep.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n ‘Sargant still features in my nightmares,’ actress Celia Imrie<\/a>\u00a0says in the book. She describes him as a ‘proud, incorrigible man with his hard, dark eyes.’<\/p>\n ‘He had a face of thunder, like the devil,’ she says, ‘and had a horrible aura.’<\/p>\n Imrie – star of Calendar Girls and the Bridget Jones franchise – was sent to Sargant suffering from an eating disorder at the age of 14.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n ‘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.<\/p>\n Celia Imrie starred alongside Colin Firth in the Bridget Jones franchise<\/p>\n Imrie described Sargant as a ‘proud, incorrigible man with his hard, dark eyes’<\/p>\n ‘It was a terrible thing for a 14-year-old to witness.’<\/p>\n She also describes the ghostly presence of the sleeping patients coming and going in the ward.<\/p>\n ‘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.’<\/p>\n 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.’<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And there was the terrifying threat of lobotomy should other treatments be deemed unsuccessful.<\/p>\n ‘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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Linda Keith, another of his patients, described herself as\u00a0‘a pleasure-seeking, music-obsessed drug addict,’ when her parents turned to Sargant to ‘cure’ her wild ways.<\/p>\n ‘What they wanted was a tame, house-trained lapdog,’ she says.<\/p>\n The model, who counted Rolling Stones guitarist\u00a0Keith Richards<\/a>\u00a0and Jimi Hendrix<\/a> among her loves, says that she can’t remember being put to sleep in Ward 5.\u00a0<\/p>\n Linda Keith was ‘a pleasure-seeking, music-obsessed drug addict’ when her parents sought out Sargant to ‘cure’ her wild ways<\/p>\n A top model, Keith dated Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist, who wrote the hit song Ruby Tuesday for her<\/p>\n Keith says she didn’t wake up for weeks<\/p>\n ‘All I know is that I didn’t wake up for six weeks,’ she says, recalling a room that was ‘almost in complete darkness.’<\/p>\n ‘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 \u2013 the enormous amount of ECT that I was given.’<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n ‘Most shockingly of all, I could no longer read,’ she reveals. ‘I recognized letters and words, but they made no sense to me.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘I wasn’t happy or unhappy \u2013 I wasn’t there. It was as if my brain and personality were dead.’<\/p>\n While visiting Sargant as an outpatient she asked him when she might read again, but he claimed not to know.<\/p>\n ‘No one had had as much ECT as me, so he had no frame of reference,’ she recalls.<\/p>\n ‘I found this horrifying, but not as much as what happened next \u2013 he actually came on to me. Tried to hug me and kiss me on the mouth.’<\/p>\n And Keith wasn’t the only one to accuse Sargant of sexual impropriety.\u00a0<\/p>\n One former patient, referred to only as\u00a0‘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.<\/p>\n ‘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.<\/p>\n ‘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 \u2013 almost two a day.’<\/p>\n Her mother also later told her that Sargant had a habit of sending staff away for lunch and spending time with Freya alone.<\/p>\n ‘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.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘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.’<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It was Freeman who,\u00a0assisted by Dr James Watts, performed the catastrophic prefrontal lobotomy on John F Kennedy’s older sister, Rosemary, in November 1941.<\/p>\n![\"Dr](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100779301-14955587-William_Sargant_was_an_enthusiastic_fan_of_early_lobotomies-m-17_1753906472214.jp.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Celia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100780529-14955587-image-a-4_1753904842087.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Imrie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100779299-14955587-image-a-3_1753904828092.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Linda](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100779297-14955587-image-m-9_1753904946105.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100779291-14955587-A_top_model_Linda_dated_Keith_Richards_the_Rolling_Stones_guitar-a-1_175398284788.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Keith](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100779295-14955587-image-m-12_1753904982122.jpg\")
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![\"Sargant's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100806201-14955587-image-a-14_1753968436742.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Rosemary](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/100779777-14955587-image-m-14_1753905025870.jpg\")
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