The Sleep Room

Hardcover / ISBN-13: 9780349128894

Price: £25

ON SALE: 3rd April 2025

Genre: History Of Science / Psychiatry / Psychology / True Crime

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Reviews

Shocking tales from 1960s psychiatry
Blake Morrison, Guardian Book of the Day
Powerful... it is to Stock's great credit that he places patient testimony centre stage
Observer, Book of the Week
Stock has written a valuable work that sheds a lot of light on dark areas of British psychiatry and intelligence and points the way for further study. An essential work.
Anthony Frewin, Lobster
A fascinating and compelling account of some of psychiatry's darkest practices that has resonance today
Joanna Moncrieff, author of Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth
A gripping medical biography that encompasses sex, drugs, brainwashing, intelligence operations, murder and several scandals
Frank Tallis, author of Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind
A chilling case study in dangerous psychiatry, Stock's gripping exposé of the invasive and reckless interventions inflicted on women in the Sleep Room will keep you wide awake
Cordelia Fine, author of Testosterone Rex
A gripping and harrowing account of a distinguished medical authority who pushed a therapeutic regime of electroshock, brain surgery and mind-bending drugs to its limit and beyond
Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
A devastating account of the effects one unchecked psychiatrist had on vulnerable mental patients
Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors
A shocking account of a very British medical scandal. It's also a damning portrait of a man who, in the name of psychiatric progress, left a trail of broken lives in his wake
Daily Telegraph, five stars
A beautifully researched, wildly unsettling study of a psychiatrist running amok
Sam Knight, author of The Premonitions Bureau
The Sleep Room is the writer Jon Stock's determined attempt to piece together exactly what went on in Sargant's Sleep Room, which operated from 1964 to 1973... Stock builds on interviews with former patients (including the actress Celia Imrie) and colleagues of Sargant's to make a compelling case that it was home to a scandal that the medical establishment has done its best to forget... In his telling, Sargant emerges as an egomaniacal lech and a dangerous, reckless psychiatrist
Sunday Times