THE STRANGE CASE OF OAK RIDGE AND THE QUESTION OF HISTORICAL MEMORY
Oak Ridge was once the site of a maximum-security ward for the criminally insane at the Ontario Hospital in Penetanguishene Ontario. The building that stood on that ridge has since been torn down, and today only its old gates remain standing on the grounds of what is now called the Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care. In the 1960’s and 1970’s that building housed an experiment in “therapeutic community” that went under the name of the Social Therapy Unit (S.T.U.). It was created by psychiatrist Elliot Barker with the support of the institution’s superintendent, Dr. Barry Boyd, who hired Barker in 1965. At the time, Boyd hoped to replace the current “warehousing” of mental patients with more active treatment. Barker, for his part, had just returned from a journey of discovery in which he had visited, among other destinations, R.D. Laing’s Philadelphia Association in London and Maxwell Jones’ “social psychiatry” unit at the Henderson Hospital in Surrey – two of the time’s pioneering attempts at therapeutic community. Both knew that professional resources for a treatment program at Oak Ridge were unavailable and likely to remain so – that was the very reason why the patients in question had for so long been warehoused and forgotten. Both agreed that, under those circumstances, a program in which inmates helped one another was worth a try. They proceeded, using both encounter and drug therapies in a treatment plan in which patients counselled, accompanied, and disciplined one another. What resulted was widely celebrated. Television and radio documentaries acclaimed the program. Favourable newspaper stories, and series, were devoted to it. A federal Parliamentary Committee visited and gave its endorsement. The provincial Ombudsman’s office also gave its blessing.
Then, in the 1990’s and afterwards, the tide of opinion began to turn. Psychiatric survivors, as they began to call themselves, re-evaluated the Social Therapy Unity, first as a form of oppression, and later as a form of torture. Around the turn of the century the then-new law firm of Rochon Genova began to assemble a law suit against the Ontario government and the two psychiatrists who had directed the S.T.U., Elliott Barker and his successor Dr. Gary Maier. By the time the case finally went to trial in 2020 there were twenty-eight named plaintiffs – several of whom had died in the meanwhile, and several more of whom would die before judgment was rendered. They claimed damages from the Province of Ontario and the two psychiatrists on the grounds of assault and breach of “fiduciary duty.” Gary Maier was called and gave evidence during the trial; Elliott Barker was unable to appear – he had given evidence at an earlier preliminary hearing, but by the time the case finally went to trial he was over eighty and was suffering from dementia. Edward Morgan, a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, presided and rendered judgment on June 29, 2020. He found, in a nutshell, that the defendants had been cruel, careless, and irresponsible, and that they had neglected their duty to protect those in their care – their “fiduciary duty” in the legal language of the trial. His findings are here: Barker v Barker, 2020, ONSC 3746. The case was appealed, and Morgan’s judgment was largely upheld by the Ontario of Appeal which released its decision in August of 2022. (Barker v. Barker, 2022 ONCA 567 – the text had not yet been posted at the time of writing.)
In the early 1980’s, I interviewed Elliott Barker for Ideas in connection with an organization he had founded called the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – a name that gives a pretty good idea of the rueful conclusions he had drawn from his efforts over twenty years at curing the psychopaths who had been his patients at Oak Ridge. We became friends and saw each other occasionally. I also knew Barry Boyd and other people in this story, so I followed the trial closely and attended in person when I could. There were few spectators, and the case was barely noticed in the media – the Toronto papers had handful of cursory inside page reports, and the broadcast media ignored it altogether.
Justice Morgan’s decision, when it came, was unsurprising – his reasoning was entirely consonant with the contemporary disposition to judge the past by the standards of the present – and yet, for all that, still appalling in its complacent and high-handed attitude towards the past. After I read it, I made a few notes on what seemed to me to be its most outstanding faults. I have posted them below. I do so in the hope of stirring some competent historian’s interest in the case. I am, by now, too old, and too occupied with other work, to imagine that I would be capable of the task, but I think that, in the right hands, the Oak Ridge story could be most illuminating. There is, first of all, the question of historical memory, and the status of the past in relation to the present. (A Canada so entirely bent on condemning its past, rather than trying to understand it, doesn’t seem to me to have much of a future.) The Oak Ridge story is also an important chapter in the history of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry (as well as in the history of science more generally). And, finally, the story might shed a valuable light on the particular character of the 1960’s in Canada – a decade too long eclipsed by the clichés of American popular culture. So here are my notes, with apologies for the fact that they are just notes, without much context or connective tissue. A very partial bibliography follows.
THE OAK RIDGE JUDGMENT: PRELIMINARY NOTES
§ One of the singular things about this case is the dramatic change in the reputation of the Social Therapy Unit at Oak Ridge. During most of the years of its existence this was a celebrated program. The media were favourable – Joan Hollobon in the Globe and Mail, Matty Lanzo on CBC Radio, Bob Davis in This Magazine is About Schools are all examples – and so were the Ontario Ombudsman’s Office and a committee of Parliament. Then at some point this reputation began to change. A sign of this change for me was an encounter, sometime around 1990, with a woman who identified as a psychiatric survivor. I happened to mention to her my friendly acquaintance with Elliott Barker, and she reacted as if I had told her that I was an admirer of Joseph Mengele. How this change happened seems to be an untold story. Without this story, the whole judgment is mystifying. How could the people involved – Boyd, Barker, Maier etc. – possibly have been as morally obtuse as they appear in Judge Morgan’s hindsight?
§ At the first session of the trial that I attended, I was surprised to find that one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs was a man with whom I had previously enjoyed a friendly acquaintance. We greeted each other, I told him that I was there because I considered Elliott Barker a friend. The atmosphere became immediately uneasy. He gave me a quick summary of the position he had been arguing in court: Barker and Maier, according to him, had viewed his clients as disposable people. They had seen these patients, he went on, as people so badly damaged that they could not be damaged any further and had therefore felt free to experiment on them with impunity. What had gone on at Oak Ridge. he concluded, belonged in the same category as the treatment of indigenous children in residential schools - both belonged, as I later heard him say in court, to “Canada’s dark past.” I began to understand that, for him, the case was generic – it was not about unique people caught in unique predicaments – it was about a set of powerful abstractions like “the dark past.”
§ The judgment is apparently thorough, but the terrifying offenses committed by some of the plaintiffs – including sadistic rapes, arsons, and murder for its own sake – don’t really seem to be taken into account. They are accurately described, and then seemingly set aside, as the judge patiently attempts to weigh up how much harm was or was not done to each plaintiff. This leaves the impression that one has gone through the looking glass into law-world. How can the desperate measures instituted in the S.T.U. be so totally divorced from the desperate acts to which these measures attempted to respond?
§ This divorce is evident in a lot of the language of the judgment. The S.T.U. was an attempt at “therapeutic community.” The central idea was that the patients would help and discipline one another. In the eyes of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, this meant that their clients were wantonly put under the power of “psychotic killers” and “hardened criminals.” But many of their clients were of the same kind. The victims were also victimizers. This figure-ground problem pervades the judgment.
§ In a paragraph toward the end of the judgment [1321] Justice Morgan argues that Elliott Barker was not disadvantaged by being unable to appear. Because Barker could be represented by his writings, he claimed, “the court has now ‘heard from’ Dr. Barker, as it were, at his most articulate and in a way that did not allow him to be directly countered or visibly undermined.” This struck me as odd – why was the case being conducted at all if it could have been settled from the written record? – and very unfair to Barker, as if the judge knew that Barker would only have made it worse for himself had he been able speak. I mention it because Barker’s motives and his actions remain almost entirely obscure in Morgan’s judgment.
§ What did Elliott Barker think he was doing? We have his writings in which he explains his theory, and we have the testimony of the plaintiffs in which they reconstruct what happened to them in testimony given thirty to fifty years after the fact, but the judgment provides no bridge between the two. We don’t see Barker working with patients, we don’t hear his hopes or his fears, we hear of no successful treatments. Convicted now of recklessness, assault, and torture – Judge Morgan repeatedly calls the S.T.U. treatments “tortuous” but I presume he means “torturous” – he appears as something of a monster.
§ Elliott Barker, as I understood him, was preoccupied by the figure of “the psychopath.” This term was thrown around a good deal during the trial but usually in the partial and polemical way that I pointed to earlier – patients were characterized as psychopaths insofar as they exercised power over other patients, and as vulnerable individuals when they were subject to this power. This manipulation of the term served the plaintiff’s case well, since it allowed the very design of a therapeutic community in which patients were to heal one another to be shifted at will into the image of vulnerable people subject to the illicit and abusive power of psychopaths. But it did not do justice to the meaning that Barker gave to this word. What he understood by it goes to the heart of what was attempted in the S.T.U. Psychopaths, for him, were people so warped by vicious treatment that they had effectively lost all conscience – people who had ended up, at least temporarily, beyond appeal. There was nothing accessible in them to which an appeal could be made. To find and awaken the conscience was the whole point of the treatment and the reason why its main emphasis fell on disrupting defences. By its very nature, this attack on well-entrenched defense would have to be coercive and sometimes violent – a point on which Barker was quite frank in his writings. (He paid dearly for this frankness when these writings were later turned against him, as they were in this trial.). Barker’s theory, and the consequences that flowed from it, are not taken seriously in Justice Morgan’s judgment. At no point does he confront Barker’s central claim that only aggressive and invasive treatment can undo the wrong that has put the psychopath beyond appeal and made him – these were all men – dangerous. Instead we have the sleight of hand by which the psychopath and the vulnerable individual become distinct personalities. As a result, the whole force of Barker’s argument is lost and his procedures reframed as an odious abuse of helpless victims.
§ One of the murkiest matters here is the idea, promoted in court and in the media by the lawyers for the plaintiffs, and seemingly accepted by Judge Morgan, that the authorities at Oak Ridge regarded the plaintiffs as “throw-away people” and took the view that since they were already damaged they could not be damaged further by the reckless experiments that were conducted on them. There is a certain irony here, since what Barry Boyd and Elliott Barker believed they were doing was exactly the opposite. When Boyd took over as superintendent he wanted to end the “warehousing” of the criminally insane and attempt active treatment. That was why he hired Elliott Barker and why the radical methods Barker employed were even thinkable. Barker wanted to rehabilitate those who would otherwise be tranquillized, locked up and forgotten. It is strange that he should now be accused of having no regard at all for his patients, when he may in fact have had too optimistic a view of their capacity and willingness to change. (This, I believe, was his own view in later years.)
§ The idea that what Barker and Maier were doing at Oak Ridge constituted either research or experimentation is another very murky matter. A lot of the trouble arises from the ambiguity of both terms. To experiment can mean to try something, or it can refer to the careful staging of a precise scientific question. Research, likewise, can mean simply the attempt to find something out, or it can take the form of controlled study. Barker and Maier used both words in their attempt to attract support but arguably in the first sense of trying to find something out. In the judgment the second meaning is invoked, and they appear in the unacceptable position of conducting “experiments” on people.
§ Here the question of consent becomes very important. All “experimental” use of drugs at Oak Ridge was voluntary – one signed a “contract” to participate. But, since the patients were there involuntarily – mostly on indeterminate sentences – and the psychiatrists largely determined when and if they would be released, the judge ruled that this was not informed consent. One can see his point, but it leaves Maier and Barker without a leg to stand on. The patients appear as pure victims – without agency or influence – the doctors as purely arbitrary authorities who make decisions based on their “experimental” or “research” agendas without regard for the interests of their coerced patients.
§ All sorts of drugs are named in the judgment, and one hears how often and in what amount they were administered. Yet little light is shed on how and to what end these drugs were used. The plaintiffs, in keeping with their suit, recall bad experiences, and one never hears, except in general, what Barker and Maier thought they were doing or even if their “experiments” now and then succeeded. This is a result of the judgment’s lack of interest in the social atmosphere in which the S.T.U. once made sense. (The judgment is equally uninterested in interrogating the current atmosphere in which it’s possible for the plaintiffs to appear as pure victims without agency or responsibility.) Work with LSD in therapeutic settings had shown great promise in Canada up to the time the drug was outlawed in 1968. Canadian scholar Erica Dyck has documented some of this research in her book Psychedelic Psychiatry (U of Manitoba Press, 2012.) A lot of this work has resumed in the last ten years, as Michael Pollan has shown in his recent book How to Change Your Mind. But no notice is taken of this literature. Dr. Maier is referred to repeatedly as an enthusiast for LSD – he is even pictured at one point as telling a group of patients, “I hold in my hand…the power…to cure psychopathy.” (para 1307) – but the idea that Maier’s belief in the therapeutic potential of LSD was anything more than a megalomaniac fantasy is never seriously entertained. All the psycho-active drugs used in the STU are effectively demonized. No account of the harms that might have been caused by the tranquillizing psychiatric drugs that would otherwise have been used is allowed to modify this picture.
§ The judgment has an air of inevitability, as if no other conclusion could possibly have been reached. In this I think Judge Morgan speaks solidly for his time and its common sense. The conditions under which the Oak Ridge “experiment” became possible are not seriously taken under consideration beyond a few sloppy clichés about “the sixties.” Elliott Barker had his roots in a liberation movement within psychiatry that had many expressions in 1960’s Canada. He was connected, for example, during his student days with the group that was working to unlock the wards and free warehoused patients from the old asylum at 999 Queen St. He would certainly have been aware of the promising work Humphry Osmond, Abraham Hoffer and others were doing with LSD and other psychedelics at the Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. I would characterize the mood of the time as both utopian and apocalyptic – utopian in the sense that great things seemed possible, and apocalyptic in the sense of now or never – that it was time to act and act decisively. Barker was aware of the paradoxes involved at Oak Ridge. He acknowledges, in a passage from his essay “Buber Behind Bars” that Morgan cites against him (para 31ff.), that there was inevitably an element of coercion in the treatment of people already doubly coerced – by the indefinite terms of their incarceration and by the violent compulsions that had put them in Oak Ridge in the first place. Nevertheless, he had the sense that something must be attempted. Witnesses found the atmosphere on “F Ward” circa 1968 to be full of promise. Against the judge’s flat claim that all the S.T.U. interventions were “therapeutically useless,” (para 1316] I can point to a case with which I’m familiar – that of Mike Mason, who was Barker’s co-author on the above-mentioned “Buber Behind Bars” and other papers. Mason was released from Oak Ridge in 1968 and went on to become a successful family lawyer. How many others ought to be counted as “cures” is unknown at this point. My point is that no account is taken of this period whatsoever in the judgment. As a man of his own time the judge has a keen eye and a keen conscience for victims and victimization, but no appreciation whatsoever of a climate in which it was hoped that people could change one another by opening up to one another and taking responsibility for themselves.
§ Justice Morgan puts a lot of emphasis on the destructive side of the S.T.U. programs and claims at several points that they had no constructive side. Typical is his assertion [para 293] in the case of Eric Bethune that, “Dr. Barker went out of his way to break down Mr. Bethune’s mental defences, and by all accounts he succeeded. There is no indication in the record that those mental defences were built back up.” There are several problems here. One is what “built back up” might mean. Barker is the one who is accused of psychiatric hubris, but I don’t think he ever imagined that he could “build mental defenses” for another person. He was certainly interested in disrupting defenses – the drug program was called Defence Disruptive Therapy – but his theory was that once the character armour that inhibited self-knowledge began to crack, people would be healed by opening to one another. There was no sense that they were to undergo psychiatric “reconstruction.” Justice Morgan may disagree with Barker’s theory, and with Barker’s belief that the reorientation of the personality that it aimed at was possible, but he should at least acknowledge that such a theory and such a belief were in play. (Morgan does give a brief nod to Barker’s approach in the first section of the judgment where Barker and Mason’s article “Buber Behind Bars” is mentioned, but, since the judge doesn’t take Barker’s argument seriously and regards his methods as “therapeutically useless,” he seems to feel no need to revert to Barker’s ideas when discussing cases.) At this point – fifty years on – it’s very hard to know how much Barker may have worked with Eric Bethune, when the latter was his patient. Barker can’t speak, and Bethune, as a plaintiff seeking damages, is now an interested party. The record, however voluminous – the judge mentions 120,000 pages of Oak Ridge records – will not necessarily disclose Barker’s disposition towards Bethune. The suggestion here from justice Morgan of a tidy therapeutic procedure in which everything that is broken down is then carefully built back up makes me think, once again, that his opinions emanate from some ideal “law-world” rather than from any attempt to stretch his mind around the chaotic milieu in which those he now judges had to operate. The plaintiffs in this case, as their lawyers have emphasized, and media reports have reemphasized, were vulnerable individuals. Many of them were also, in their time, extremely dangerous people who had not only committed frightening crimes but were also convincing liars, able to hide their proclivities from themselves and others. On top of that, they now have both a material and a psychological interest in proving that Drs. Barker and Maier were the source of their troubles. A further complication is a zeitgeist in which claims of victimization now regularly trump all other claims. All this makes me feel that this judgment does not provide an accurate picture of what went on at Oak Ridge between forty and fifty-five years ago. I wonder if such a picture is now even possible – certainly it would require more humility and more historical perspective than is shown in Judge’s Morgan’s decision.
§ The judge asserts that he has is able to make an “objective” assessment of the specific harms inflicted by Oak Ridge on plaintiffs who mostly knew terrible harm from the day they were born. He argues this in a remarkable section of the judgment (para 1151) where he claims that it is of no consequence that one of the plaintiffs, Shauna Taylor, now claims to have been damaged by programs she once enthusiastically praised. (Taylor, when held at Oak Ridge for multiple rapes, was known as Vance Egglestone. She has since undergone a sex-change operation.) “She obviously says different things at different times,” Justice Morgan writes, “and it is not possible to discern which is true and which is false. In my view, however, it does not particularly matter. The debate over her credibility is a debate about what she thought then and thinks now. But what is relevant at the moment is whether or not, objectively, the STU programs did her harm. Ms. Taylor’s subjective perspective is, in a sense, neither here nor there in terms of the causation of harm.” By what light does Morgan discern “objectively” what is obscure to Shauna Taylor herself? The answer, essentially, is that he regards his own judgment, and the opinion of the plaintiff’s main expert witness, psychiatrist John Bradford, as having this objective character. He apparently can survey Taylor’s troubled life and determine what caused what. I presume this same confidence underlies his sense that Barker and Maier were in the grip of the prejudices of their time, while he possesses unclouded “objectivity.”
§ Since Elliott Barker’s reputation has been so serious impugned by Judge Morgan, and Barker will now be remembered, unless this judgment is challenged, as one guilty of assault, breach of his duty as a physician, and moral recklessness, it’s worth recalling the case of Matt Lamb, one of the patients at Oak Ridge in the 1960’s. Lamb was a young man from Windsor who went to prison at sixteen for assaulting a police officer. Within weeks of his release in 1966, he went on what the papers of the time called a “shooting spree,” killing two strangers and wounding two others – a case of what one of the psychiatrists who testified at the Oak Ridge trial called “lust murder” – a sheer desire to kill. Lamb did well during the seven years he was in the S.T.U., and Barker took a sustained interest in him which seems quite at odds with the picture of the careless experimentalist that one gets from Justice Morgan’s pages. This close relationship led in 1973 to Lamb’s release under Barker’s personal supervision. For the next year Lamb lived with Barker’s family, working as a hired hand on the farm that Barker and his wife Julie then ran, and even sometimes baby-sitting their infant daughter. This speaks to me of a commitment to the rehabilitation of his patients which is not recognized in the judgement against him. Lamb eventually became a soldier, enlisting in the Rhodesian Army – the only army that would have him – which was then fighting the independence movement that took power in 1980 and turned Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. He was killed in 1976. The story is neither neat nor pretty, but the commitment Barker and his wife Julie showed to Matt Lamb shows a very different man than the one portrayed in the pages of Justice Morgan’s judgment.
§ The Oak Ridge judgment, finally, poses a huge issue of historical memory. Before Elliott Barker took over at Oak Ridge in 1965, he made a trip around the world which included a call on Martin Buber in Israel, visits to the “therapeutic communities” that had been started in England by R.D. Laing and Maxwell Jones, and a period in China where he studied the re-education methods of the Cultural Revolution. This last, seemingly irresistible, detail has led a lot of the scant newspaper coverage of the court’s decision. Sean Fine, for example, begins his story in the Globe and Mail, by describing the S.T.U as “a psychiatric program developed by an Ontario doctor after a visit to Mao Zedong’s China.” (“Court rules that Ontario mental health program amounted to assault,” July 1, ’20). It sounds so simple – we all know how the Cultural Revolution turned out, why couldn’t Elliott Barker see through it? That “Mao Zedong’s China” has an entirely different significance in 2020, than it had for Barker in 1964 is easily overlooked. The past, I would argue, can only be understood by those willing to bracket their knowledge of how it turned out and to entertain the possibility that it might have turned out differently. This difficult discipline is not even acknowledged in the Oak Ridge judgment, let along attempted. Justice Morgan and those whose counsel he took are secure in their enlightened present. They would never have done what those they judge did, even if tasked with the rehabilitation of men who were then considered the most dangerous mental patients in Canada. Justice Morgan sweeps the whole difficulty of understanding the past under the rug by his egregious claim that he rises “objectively” above the vicissitudes of memory and opinion. The result is that the cartoon version of the 1960’s that has already prevailed for some time is upheld. This matters in several ways, I think. It matters because Elliott Barker deserves a better reputation than this judgment will leave him with. It matters because what he attempted – to free the most fearfully damaged of his fellows from their compulsions – has now been turned against him and made to appear as arrogance, cruelty and abuse of power. It matters because the predicament he tried to address – those who have been hurt hurting others – persists in a way the judgment tends to hide by treating the plaintiffs, now mostly too old to do further harm, only in terms of their “vulnerabilities” rather than the responsibilities Barker tried to enjoin on them. And it matters, finally, because the “presentism” embodied in the judgment is now epidemic. It’s not only Elliott Barker who has become an incomprehensible moral monster. Most of our ancestors now fall into this category – the entire scene of Canadian history evokes only weeping and remorse amongst many of the young. This has produced a generation so divorced from history that it seems to believe that anything is possible. People have become so good, in their own eyes, and so alert to any falling away from this impossible and paralyzing goodness, that a gamble like Elliott Barker’s – flawed as it certainly was – has become unthinkable. He should have known better, as Justice Morgan is happy to remind him. A more modest and more truthful account remains to be written.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Buber Behind Bars”, (1968) 13 Cdn. Psych. Assoc. J. 61 (Barker/Mason)
“The Insane Criminal as Therapist” (1968) 10 Cdn. J. of Corrections 3 (Barker’Mason)
“LSD in a Coercive Milieu Therapy Program (1977), 22 Cdn Psych. Assoc. J. 311 (Barker)
Gary Maier and T. Hawke, “Penetang: People and Paradox” (1975) (no citation)
Butler, Long & Rower, “Evaluative Study of the Social Therapy Unit” (Ontario Ombudsman, 1977
E.T. Barker, M.H. Mason, J. Wilson, “Defence Disruptive Therapy”, (1969) 4 Cdn. Psych. Assoc. J
John Gunn, “Abuse of Psychiatry”, (2006) 16 Crim. Behaviour & Mental Health 77 (derisory description of visit to Oak Ridge)
E.T. Barker, “Treating psychotics with LSD: good results are reported”, Modern Medicine (March 30, 1978)
Elliott Barker and Alan McLaughlin, “The Total Encounter Capsule”, (1977) 22 Cdn. Psych. Assoc. J.
Dr. Stephen Hucker, “Oak Ridge: A Review and an Alternative” (the “1985 Hucker Report”).
MEDIA
From the time – a film by Norm Perry for CTV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6OBy-9s_p0
From the time of revision – the Fifth Estate: The Fifth Estate story on Oak Ridge aired March 4, 2021
More video resources are linked on the website of former Oak Ridge inmate Steve Smith: http://www.thepsychopathmachine.com/media.html