The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell - almost medicinal.
“I didn’t like the look of the place. It didn’t look like a hospital to me,” she told the BBC from her home in Manitoba.
That hospital – once the home of a Scottish shipping magnate – would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for “disobedient” behaviour.
It was there that Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA’s top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. On Thursday, a judge denied the Royal Victoria Hospital’s appeal, paving the way for the lawsuit to proceed.
Even when these facilities aren’t being used by the CIA to experiment, they are already torture facilities.
The US has an entire cottage industry of “troubled teen” treatment programs which are essentially completely unregulated. No requirements on accreditation, no requirements that staff have any sort of training, no requirements that the care offered be evidence-based. Children are raped and die at these places and it is covered up. Parents can essentially sign away all of their children’s rights.