A celebrated psychiatrist who victimised young women for years. Jon Stock in The Sleep Room, exposé of a troubling and troubled men omit Dr William Sargant’s name form its title, reveals how far one of London’s best connected psychiatrists- Robert Graves, his one-time ghost writer, was a close friend- has fallen since the days when private patients thanked him with gifts of Rolls-Royces.

Born in 1907, Sargant first earned his reputation as a medical wunderkind in the 1940s, when he started treating soldiers suffering from PTSD with a high combination of narcotics and electric shocks. Former patients who describe how terrifying it felt to be placed by well-meaning parents under Sargant’s power for up to three months. Sargant’s bizarre psychiatric treatments that were inflicted on hundred of women with mental illeness – among them the actor Celia Imrie, a 14-year-old suffering from anorexia when she began  her stint with Sargant in the attic floor of the Royal Waterloo Hospital. She recalls Sargant as “ a truly horrifying man”. Linda Keith (the model and muse for Keith Richards’ haunting “ Ruby Tuesday”, lost the ability to read, or even to identify her parents after receiving 50 hyper-charged treatments of electroshock bolts, delivered to her drugged body by Sargant’s personally purchased machine. “It was as if my brain and personality were dead” She to Stock. 

Starting in a rat-infested basement nicknamed “Scutari” Sargant swiftly removed his “Sleep Room” operation to the top floor of a  nearby sister hospital, the Royal Waterloo. A handful of survivors believe they were victims of sexual abuse, that rapes were conducted during their chemically extended slumbers. Sargant tried to destroy his case records before leaving the NHS in 1972 to work with mentally troubled private patients at the celebrated Priory Hospital in Roehampton. No formal investigations were ever made, as the truth remains impossible to establish.  Sargant’s sinister, charismatic and hugely influential figure in post-war British society – lauded by Robert Graves and Aldous Huxley as well regularly appearing on the BBC. When Sargant died in 1988, the obituaries were glowing. But since then, women treated without their consent and with often horrific side-effects lasting decades have been campaigning to tell the truth about Sargant. Jon Stock tells these women’s stories as well delving into the murky history of Sargant’s links with the CIA and MI5, both of which took a close interest in his efforts to reprogramme the human mind.  The Sleeping is a gripping medical biography that encompasses sex, drugs, brainwashing, intelligence operations, murder and several scandals, including invasive and reckless interventions inflicted on women in the Sleep Room.The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock, The Bridge Street Press £25, 432 pages.