In a hospital in Waterloo, London, in the mid-1960s was a psychiatric ward full of sleeping women. Suffering from disorders ranging from post-partum depression to chronic anxiety to anorexia, the residents of the “sleep room” were sedated and woken only to be washed, fed or subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). All were under the supervision of psychiatrist William Sargant, who at the time was hailed as a pioneer. Sargant claimed that a combination of enforced narcosis and ECT could fix disturbed minds. Failing that, the treatment would be surgical lobotomy.

The Sleep Room is author Jon Stock’s gripping account of a scandal in which female patients were denied dignity and agency by a man who wielded absolute power over their bodies. The book is ably narrated by actors Richard Armitage, Antonia Beamish and Celia Imrie. The latter’s contributions are unusually personal since, at 14, Imrie had been hospitalised with anorexia and was put under Sargant’s care.

In her remarkable and haunting testimony, Imrie remembers Sargant as “tall with an evil presence”. Though she doesn’t believe she had electro-shock treatment, she witnessed a woman in a neighbouring bed going through it, recalling a “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”.

Stock’s book paints a grim picture of the medical establishment’s attitude to mental illness. Sargant’s ward was finally closed in 1973. In the weeks before that happened, he destroyed most of the case records. He was never investigated and died in 1988 with his reputation intact.

Available via Little, Brown, 11hr 48min

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