The Sleep Room

Author Jon Stock
Narrator Antonia Beamish, Celia Imrie, Richard Armitage
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Run Time 11 hours and 48 minutes
Format Audio
Genre History of science, Psychiatry, Psychology, True crime.

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What to expect

'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 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 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 Patriarchy Inc. and 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

Critics Review

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

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

Powerful… it is to Stock’s great credit that he places patient testimony centre stage

Observer, Book of the Week

A beautifully researched, wildly unsettling study of a psychiatrist running amok

Sam Knight, author of The Premonitions Bureau

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 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 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 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

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