North America’s Crime of the Century?
Up to 50,000 innocent children
may have died or disappeared
in Quebec’s psychiatric institutions
Survivors demand justice
By Christine Hahn and Thomas G. Whittle
Save LivesAny and all information relevant to abuses or human rights violations reported in this article should be sent to Freedom to forward its ongoing investigation. If you have other data regarding psychiatric experiments upon children, or the use of violent or coercive psychiatric methods against them, Freedom also wants to hear from you. Send full information in writing to Freedom Magazine, 6331 Hollywood Blvd., Suite 1200, Los Angeles, CA 90028. E-mail editor@freedommag.org, call (323) 960-3500, or click here to Freedom Investigations |
Every morning, with her dog, Coffee, she helped her mother gather up the eight or nine cows the family owned so they could be milked. From her mother, she learned many things, including how to bake delicious bread — a skill that today, more than 60 years later, she still enjoys.
In a rural community where horses were the primary means of transportation, Clara encouraged Clarina’s dream of one day becoming an airline stewardess. It was a close-knit family, one where each member supported the others.
The idyllic life ended in 1945, when Clara, stricken by tuberculosis, moved to a sanatorium.
Clarina’s father, Joseph Duguay, a lumberjack frequently away from home, was persuaded by the family doctor and the parish priest to send Clarina and her younger sister, Simonne, to an orphanage in Rimouski, on the St. Lawrence River. He was told they would be well educated.
But in 1946, shortly after Clarina turned 11, she and perhaps 10 other children from the facility were loaded onto a bus. Told they were being taken on a tour of Rimouski, they were instead driven to the town of St. Ferdinand, hundreds of miles away, and through the gates of the St. Julien psychiatric institution. There, Clarina’s horror story began.
Fraudulent Psychiatric Labels
Many years later, Clarina would learn of the false psychiatric label — “mentally retarded” — that condemned her to St. Julien.
But at the time, she inexplicably entered a hell where she scrubbed floors endlessly on orders from the institution’s staff.
“They would plunge our heads into ice-cold water if we did something wrong,” Clarina said, adding that they would be kept immersed almost to the point of drowning. To this day, she dreads water and fears she will drown.
For the tiniest infraction, she could be forced to kneel in an excruciating position for hours, or put in a straitjacket, or locked to a bed with no mattress — her feet tied to the cold steel frame and her head pinned down by a dog collar around her neck. She reported being sexually assaulted.
Simonne later joined her at St. Julien, also unknowingly labeled retarded. With both girls, their father was not informed of their fate. Letter writing was forbidden at Rimouski and St. Julien; compounding that barrier, the girls’ father could neither read nor write. Presuming no news was good news, he trusted his daughters were being properly cared for.
And when Clarina cried for her mother, a staff member told her that Clara had died of syphilis in another psychiatric institution. In truth, she succumbed to tuberculosis at the sanitarium, unaware of her daughters’ plight.
But then it got worse. Clarina remembers the chlorpromazine she and others at St. Julien were forced to take, an experimental drug at the time*, but one so powerful its principal pioneer and promoter, German-born psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann, would later dub it a “pharmacological substitute for lobotomy.”1
“It made me into a zombie,” Clarina said. The drug, known as Largactil in Canada and Thorazine in the United States, was administered by injection and by pills, virtually every day. She was told it was “cold medicine.”
* Chlorpromazine was not approved for use in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration until 1954.
