Where to start with this book? It was even more disturbing than I’d expected. The premise is an investigation into the controversial psychiatrist William Sargant and his ‘sleep room’, a ward in the 1960s-70s in which patients – generally young women – were kept in drugged sleep for weeks or months and given electroshock, leaving them with memory loss and trauma affecting the rest of their lives. Medical consent was not really an issue and male doctors of high standing were allowed to get away with a lot. He also may have abused some of the patients and conveniently they wouldn’t remember.

However, this book is not only a biography of Sargant and a collection of patients’ terrible experiences, including that of actress Celia Imrie, who was admitted as a teenage anorexic. It also presents the history of surgical treatment for mental health conditions and goes deep into 20th century experiments in mind control for military intelligence in Britain and the US. This means it veers away from the main topic and there are whole chapters when the sleep room isn’t mentioned and where mentions of Sargant are scarce. This extra information helps give a wider context to the era and strengthens the case that Sargant was more involved in the notorious mind control experiments than is evident from the records. He was in close correspondence with other psychiatrists involved in these but it’s not known whether the patients in the sleep room were part of experiments.

The chapters in the book tend to leap about, so the narrative is a little hard to follow. I’m also not sure what makes this medical scandal ‘very British’ as the title suggests. It was certainly a thought-provoking and very dark read which at times was quite astonishing.

Published by Little, Brown in 2025.

The title in the US is The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him.