Transcript of Nuns and Orphans New

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Warning: this series includes discussion of inhumane medical experimentation, including on children—violence, sexual assault, abuse of children, and cultural genocide.

I'm not saying that I forgive her for it because it's still here and in my body, and I remember it physically. But at the same time, I understand, and I, I can't say I don't blame her because she was there, she was doing it, because it's her. But at the same time, you know, it's kind of Is she really fully responsible for this?

Our story takes us down another dark and foggy road. A road involving unethical nuns and orphanages in the French-speaking part of Canada, Quebec.

[SPEAKING FRENCH] They sent me to a room. In that room, is where all the kids who were recalcitrant and didn't listen to their sisters were sent. And they were sold, $10 each, to make experiments on them.

I'm Dr.

Julia Shaw, and this is Project Mind Control.

I'm a composer and audio engineer with a particular interest in the preservation of oral histories.

That's Alyssa, who we also spoke to in the last episode. She works in mixed media, blending theater, film, and technology with music and composition. She has worked for CBC, Canada's public broadcaster, for many years.

You know, when I started work on this project, the thing that actually interested me It was coercive persuasion.

Coercive persuasion is sometimes used as an alternative term for brainwashing. According to the American Psychological Association, it is defined as a controlled program of social influence to bring about substantial changes in behavior and attitude in members of a group. While researching coercive persuasion, she stumbled on a piece of Canadian history that is little known. Even to Canadians like herself.

I have questions. I wonder, does anybody else in Quebec allege that they were also abused by psychiatry? And so I did Google, and boop, up comes the Duplessis orphans. And 5,000 of these individuals were falsely diagnosed as mentally deficient and interned in psychiatric hospitals across the province.

This was in the 1950s. And children were reclassified as mentally ill, specifically as idiots and seniles. This was happening at the same time as Dr. Lehman was doing his chemical lobotomies and Dr. Cameron came up with his theory of psychic driving. It was a wild time in psychiatry.

Je suis né à Montréal. I was born in Montreal, in the Lower Mainland, close to Main Street.

That is Hervé Bertrand.

Mon père, il a raconté— My father met a young woman from New Brunswick, and she was seeing my father, but she was already married because her husband has left for the war. So I don't know if that's the reason, But 2 days later, they put me in a nursery.

Hervé's parents gave him up. He is part of a group of people referred to as the Duplessis orphans. 2-day-old Hervé was put in a basket and taken to the Crèche de Youville, an orphanage for abandoned newborns created and run by the Sœurs Grises, the Gray Sisters, Catholic women. Nuns. As far as he knows, his parents walked up to the front door, rang the doorbell, placed little Hervé on the steps, and walked away. Hervé spent 6 years with the Gray Sisters, from 1944 to 1950.

[SPEAKING FRENCH] In 1950, I was sent to another institution. Called Mont Providence.

Mont Providence would come to haunt Hervé and many others, in the same way that the Allen Memorial Institute haunts Lana. Hervé is in his 80s now, married with children and grandchildren.

It was an orphanage back then. We went to school. The only thing I didn't like, we were always praying. The sisters, you know what they're like. We were praying in the morning, between meals, at noon, at dinner, before to go to bed. On top of that, every night, At 7 o'clock, they would turn on the radio like everybody else in Quebec and listen to the Cardinal Léger reciting the rosary. In the name of the Father and of the Son, you know, every single night.

This period in Quebec's history is sometimes referred to as the Great Darkness. It lasted until 1959, It was when Maurice Duplessis was the head of the government of Quebec, the premier, a man known to attend church before work at 6 AM while his bodyguard waited outside. [SPEAKING FRENCH] This is from a documentary about him published by the Champs de Québec. A channel dedicated to the political and cultural history of Quebec. He is shown standing in a dark suit behind a wall of big silver microphones. He uses his right hand like an angry conductor. He was widely called "le chef," French for "the boss." Once in power, Duplessis tightened the grip of the Catholic Church over public institutions. The Catholic Church had a dark preoccupation with unwed mothers and their babies, coercing families into placing the children into care. Which takes us to the Misericorde Hospital. The name may sound familiar to you. It's where Lana was when she gave birth. And here's what she said to us about it.

I don't even remember what happened to me in the Misericord, except that it was run by nuns. Here's Lana again. It was the place where pregnant women go. And we were not, far as I can remember, we were not treated very well by the nuns at all.

Not at all. The Misericord Hospital was set up in 1853 by the Sisters of Misericord. Which translates to the Sisters of Mercy, to take care of unwed mothers and their children. In episode 2, we told you that there's no mention of the child's name on the birth certificate, nothing about who the father is. But it turns out that Lana has run her own investigation and has come to the belief that the child she gave birth to was a boy. Here she is telling us what she believes about her son.

He was in the hospital for 3 weeks after he was born because of the injections of dope and everything that they were giving me. It went into his system and he was in the hospital for 3 weeks.

Lana believes that her son was ultimately placed up for adoption.

It really bothers me that this happened because, you know, when you have a child and you don't know who he is, it's very, very hard to live with that.

The last time we spoke with her, Lana told us that she has managed to find the man she believes is her lost son, but that he has sadly declined to meet her. We know her son was taken. This opens up another question: is it possible that her son spent time in one of the many Catholic-run orphanages in Quebec? Could he have been a Duplessis orphan?

This clip is from an APTN news documentary titled "Orphans of Church and State." Duplessis realized that federal subsidies paid $2.25 a day for mental patients versus 70 cents a day for orphans. He shortly thereafter collaborated with the church to wrongly classify thousands of orphans, in the terms of the day, as mentally retarded.

It shows Duplessis and someone who appears to be a representative of the Catholic Church in Quebec at a public procession. Walking in step and smiling warmly at each other. As far as I can tell, the decision to turn orphanages into psychiatric facilities was purely financial. Let me explain. Canada has a federal government and many provincial ones. They are different systems of government, each with their own pots of money. Duplissie wanted to secure more money for the orphans from the federal government. And at that point, they were supplementing provincial funds with money for psychiatric patients. As the APTN documentary claimed, federal subsidies paid $2.25 a day for patients in psychiatric facilities, while they only paid 70 cents a day for orphans. But this decision was like dropping a cluster bomb into the already brutal Catholic-run orphanages, causing physical and psychological carnage.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] [Speaker:INTERPRETER] The sisters had meeting in the auditorium. Mother Superior Angélique told all the sisters that starting today, there would be no more classes.

00:11:52

It was decided no more education for the orphans.

Starting today, there will be bars. Starting today. It was always starting today. And they said that starting today, the sisters would have different uniforms. Their uniforms would change from black and white to all white, like the nurses' uniforms.

The orphanage had been reclassified as a psychiatric institution, and the perfectly healthy children were now patients.

I remember talking to her. She was nice to me. She told me, "It's not funny what's going to happen tomorrow." And I said, "What?" She said, "They're going to label you mentally ill. You won't be able to do anything. You'll be stuck here for the rest of your days." [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] She took a while to explain all this. At the end, she told the sisters, "If you're not happy with this, the door is right behind you." Maybe 8 of them left.

The sisters that remained woke up the next day and put on their new nurse's attire. We have a document signed by Premier Duplessis himself in August of 1954 certifying that those who run the Mont-Providence Charity wish to turn the institution into in quotes, "a hospital for the treatment of idiots and senile people," and that they commit to taking in 1,000 of these patients. We have Hervé's medical file from that time. It reads: Hervé Bertrand, age 12, debilité mentale, mentally deficient, received on the 17th of March, 1955. This means that within 7 months of Mont-Providence making the request, Hervé was officially classed as a child in need of psychiatric care. In the 1950s, while orphanages in Quebec were being turned into asylums, other countries also claimed to save unwed women and their children. Probably most famous are the Irish mother and baby homes.

The state failed you, the mothers and children in these homes. In the personal testimonies of how many mothers ended up in these institutions—

This is a clip from 2021 by RTE, Ireland's public broadcaster. It shows the Irish Prime Minister, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, making a public apology in a big hall on behalf of the state.

The priest, the doctor, and the nun loom large. The sense of oppression, even at this distance, is overwhelming.

And in Australia too, there was a widespread system of forced adoption for unmarried mothers. Here is former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard issuing an apology in 2013. She is speaking in front of a black backdrop, looking right into the camera with a solemn expression.

To you, the mothers who were betrayed by a system that gave you no choice and subjected you to manipulation, mistreatment, and malpractice, we apologize. You were given false assurances. You were forced to endure the coercion and brutality of practices that were unethical, dishonest, and in many cases illegal.

Ostensibly, all of these institutions were run in the name of God, promoting moral reform, a social service to help the community deal with its problem of fallen women and wayward girls. But in reality, while there were stolen moments of joy, there was a prevailing air of oppression. These were places of strict discipline, confinement, penance, and often forced labor, each a system of cruelty towards unwed mothers and their children. The same happened in Quebec, and it has since come to light that in these nun-run orphanages, physical, psychological, and sexual abuse were common. Between 1953 and 1959, Hervé says he was raped repeatedly while at the orphanage. His last rape took place during Easter vigil. He was 15. Hervé told us that it was so brutal that he required medical attention. And that's how he ended up at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. Saint-Jean-de-Dieu is a psychiatric hospital. So him being sent there for physical injuries is unusual. Once there, after he recovered, Hervé remembers.

[SPEAKING FRENCH] They sent me to a room. In that room is where all the kids who were recalcitrant and didn't listen to the sisters were sent. And they were sold, $10 each, to make experiments on them. J'aime mes amis qui étaient là. A friend of mine went there. They practiced a lobotomy on him and some others, going through their heads, stuff like that. And my friend, his job was to take the stretcher and to carry them to the pigsty. The pigsty was on the Sisters' land at Providence. Today there's a liquor store there. So I was standing by the window looking at it every day. My friend Silvio, he was going to take the children there. The pathetic day, the day they decided to send me there. To send me to the butcher. My friend Silvio came to me and said, "Tomorrow morning, it's your turn." It's your turn tomorrow to be sent to be experimented on.

Hervé also remembers seeing someone receiving electroshocks, an electrical lobotomy.

00:18:59

They tried a new kind of lobotomy. They called it reversible lobotomy. They put a stick in a towel in your mouth and you're tied up. And they send an electrical shock in your head. And him, he became crazy.

00:19:20

Note that such procedures may well have been treatment as usual for the hospital at the time. Or they could have been, as Hervé believes, part of an experiment. Hervé also says that he managed to avoid these experiments because a kind member of the clergy helped to reclassify him as not mentally ill. And because of this, he was discharged into the community. This is Hervé again, speaking to the producers of Orphans of Church and State. [SPEAKING FRENCH] In the clip, he says that there was a big window at the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital from which he could see the grounds of the hospital and the cemetery. He says that there were two parts to it, one for the sick and one for the kids, those who were tested on. It was known as the Pigsty Cemetery due to its proximity to a pig farm, which Hervé says he could also see from the window at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. This led to rumors that children who were at this psychiatric hospital, the children who fell victims to these experiments, were buried there. There are also famously allegations that children disappeared and were fed to pigs. Hervé, too, believes this, but it has never been substantiated.

So were orphans in Quebec being experimented on? Yes. And this isn't something we need to caveat with warnings of shifting memories because they left a paper trail. And this takes us back to Dr. Cameron. In 1954, there was a report published by the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, which explains the various kinds of experiments that were happening at the university. The report was requested by Dr. Ewen Cameron, who wanted to secure 5 more years of funding from one of their main research-granting agencies, the The Rockefeller Foundation.

It states, it must be borne in mind that the Allan Memorial Institute is the only psychiatric institute in Canada and hence has responsibilities for carrying on an unusually large amount of the mental health research work in this country.

The only psychiatric institute.

They continue, research work of the Department of Psychiatry represented so considerable a share of the total amount of research carried on in the mental health field in Canada so as to constitute a national asset.

The report also mentions treatments that we are already familiar with, including research on Largactil, Dr. Lehman's big antipsychotic drug, and the use of movies and of magnetic tape recorders, Dr. Ewen Cameron's psychic driving. You're a good girl.

You're a good girl. You're a good girl. You're a good girl. You're a good girl. You're a good girl.

You're a good girl. The report also mentions children quite a lot. For one, there was also something called the Mental Hygiene Institute. Mental hygiene is a term that refers to the proactive care of mental health and is aimed at preventing the onset of mental illness. It was often used to refer to methods aimed at the wider population, like public health campaigns and educational programs. And between 1949 and 1954, McGill's University Mental Hygiene Institute increased its work with children—in its own word, immeasurably. The facilities grew in capacity by 150%, with a greatly expanded staff. McGill was also working to establish a network of clinical facilities beyond the Allan, That's how the Division of Child Psychiatry at the Children's Memorial Hospital became a psychiatric training center for McGill.

As they explain, in the Mental Hygiene Institute, investigations are going forward on delinquent children living in a residential home, and efforts have been made to evolve methods of group treatment of emotionally disturbed children. Emotionally disturbed.

Like Lana. I shouldn't have been put into the Allen. I was a runaway kid. I did not commit a crime. And Carol.

She threatened to jump out the dorm room window.

And the Duplissis orphans. Tutmusitsk.

They're going to label you mentally ill.

The McGill report for the Rockefeller Foundation also mentions the Department of National Health and Welfare as a collaborator. Notably, this was the department in which the Indian Health Services was housed, and it was responsible for the transfer of Indigenous children from residential schools to other institutions, including hospitals, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric institutions.

We have some very important things to say.

Remember the Mohawk mothers and their fight to find out whether the bodies of Indigenous children were secretly buried on the grounds of the Allan.

And we're dealing with our children, our children that were taken from us and disappeared. Many of them never came back. So we want to find them. And then suddenly some of these children have been found, are being found in shallow graves next to the schools.

Well, this is where their story intersects with that of the Duplessis orphans. Because in 2024, Gahentinetta was outside the former grounds of the Pigsty Cemetery at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, next to a big flag bearing the logo of the Society for Duplessis Orphans.

In May, Bertrand and a small group of orphans gathered here to protest a warehouse expansion. But they weren't alone.

Québec will have to recon with the way that their dead are being treated here, as this is very alarming.

This is again from APTN's Orphans of Church and State.

Gataneta Horn is a longtime activist and currently a spokesperson for a group called the Mohawk Mothers. She says she's here to not only support the orphans, but also because she suspects among the dead possibly buried nearby our Indigenous children.

They're still looking for answers. As early as 1963, at a psychiatry conference, Dr. Cameron talked about the ethics of his experiments.

We took a wrong turning and continued to walk without a glint of success for a long, long time.

But did he have to face any negative consequences? Not really. Dr. Cameron died in 1967, and it was only in the mid-1970s that his experiments publicly came under attack, when the CIA released the MKUltra files. And posthumously, some of his colleagues came to his defense, like Dr. Layman, who in 1984 stated things that sound a lot like excuses. He told the Montreal Gazette that Dr. Cameron's work was, in quotes, "considered acceptable in the context of what psychiatrists knew at the time." Dr. Layman also said, in quotes, "There was nothing unusual about not getting consent." But these experiments were mostly after World War II, after the Nuremberg Trials, and consent for medical experiments was at this point seen as a fundamental principle of science. Dr. Lehmann himself mostly managed to escape reputational damage for his own experiments involving incredibly high doses of drugs. And there were other psychiatrists doing similar experiments. Whose reputations survived, with some legacies even outlasting the men themselves.

William Sargent, who was arguably the leading, certainly the most famous British psychiatrist after World War II, and a good friend of Ewen Cameron in Canada, when Sargent retired and died, the Royal College of Psychiatrists had a series of Sargent Lectures to honor his memory that persisted till 2007.

Lectures in his honor until 2007. Not only did none of these men have their moment of reckoning, some continue to be seen today as great men of psychiatry, which must be difficult for all those patients whose minds they destroyed without their consent in the name of science. So did these researchers, some funded by the CIA, invent any form of mind control? The idea that people's minds can be completely reprogrammed or controlled through drugs or electric shocks has been rejected by scientists. But conspiracy theories about the nefarious ways the government is trying to control us through water, drugs, or phone signals abound. The problem with profound and intentional distortions of reality, whether directly in people's brains, by doing things in secret, or by destroying the archives, is that it can leave people falling into an abyss. It can instill an omnipresent sense of paranoia, a fear that no matter how hard we look, we can never really learn the truth of the past. But that shouldn't stop us from trying. I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. Project Mind Control was presented by me and written by me and my producer Simona Ratta. The executive producers are Elsa Rochester and Louisa Adams.

Sound design by Craig Edmondson. The words of Hervé Bertrand were translated and read by Yannick Michael Fortier. The words of Dr. Cameron were read by Paul Livingston. Project Mind Control is an Always True Crime production.

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