The sinister psychologist who fried the brain of the real-life Ruby Tuesday confined patients to a ‘Sleep Room’ while administering illegal lobotomies and shock therapy – and also hosted deranged sex parties at his London home

The British model who inspired Keith Richards’ hit Ruby Tuesday has lifted the lid on her time under the care of a ‘monster’ psychiatrist in Sixties’ London. 

Linda Keith, who dated the Rolling Stones guitarist as well as Jimi Hendrix, is among a growing group of women speaking out about the abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of Dr William Sargant at London’s Royal Waterloo hospital. 

Almost four decades after his death, Sargant remains one of British psychiatry’s most controversial figures who believed that diseases of the mind could be cured with physical treatments like deep-sleep therapy or narcosis and even lobotomies. 

Equally, the well-connected doctor – with ties to MI5 and the CIA – was so powerful that he got away with brutalising and abusing mentally unwell and troubled women under the guise of ‘reprogramming’ their brain. 

Now, some of his former patients, including Linda and Calendar Girls actress Celia Imrie, are sharing their haunting memories of ‘The Sleep Room’ in ward five where Sargant unleashed his reign of terror. 

Linda and Celia’s accounts are part of author Jon Stock’s new book, The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal, that is billed as a ‘chilling exposé of Sargant’s bizarre psychiatric treatments’ that left a ‘trail of broken lives in his wake’. 

In an excerpt from the book, which was serialised by The Guardian, Linda, now 79, wondered what she’d say to Sargant if she saw him again. 

‘Probably what I said when I saw him on Bond Street a few years after he’d stopped treating me,’ she said. ‘He thought he was being very friendly and that I’d be thrilled to see him, but I called him a monster – to his face. I said it to the person walking past me, too.

”This man is a monster.’ And then I walked on.’ 

Linda told Stock that her parents admitted her to the now-defunct Royal Waterloo hospital when she was 23 after becoming concerned about her rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. 

The daughter of BBC radio presenter Alan Keith, Linda’s relationship with the Purple Haze singer that began in 1966 made drugs ‘a big part of my life’. 

After becoming concerned for her well-being, Alan decided Linda needed to leave the United States and return to London, where she could seek treatment from Dr William Sargant.  

Linda, who described herself as a ‘pleasure-seeking, music-obsessed drug addict’, said her parents became fixated on the idea that Sargant was the only person who could ‘cure me’ and tried to ‘persuade me what a great man he was’. 

While Linda was able to hold them off for a while, she finally agreed to meet Sargant ‘in my terrified state’ after experiencing what sounds like a severe allergic reaction to drugs. 

She was quickly admitted to The Sleep Room that Sargant set up in 1964 after he was put in charge of the Department of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital that Royal Waterloo later became a part of. 

Linda has no memories of ‘being put to sleep’ in the small, dark room, with as many as eight patients ‘crammed close together’, that was completely silent except for the sounds of their moans. 

‘All I know is that I didn’t wake up for six weeks.’ 

The women were admitted to The Sleep Room for conditions like depression, anxiety, anorexia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and put to sleep for extended periods of time – sometimes up to five months – with a potent cocktail of sedatives, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics. 

Linda told Stock she felt a ‘tinge of fear even now’ when she thinks about the ‘enormous amount of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)’ she was given while unconscious. 

However, Linda estimated she had been subjected to ECT – which involves giving patients an electric shock of 110 volts to trigger a brief seizure – close to 50 times during her stay in The Sleep Room. 

These repeated electric shocks ‘left me hugely mentally incapacitated’, Linda said, and unable to dress herself, order food at a restaurant, and – much to her despair – read. 

‘I recognised letters and words, but they made no sense to me, so I gave up,’ she said. ‘It was as if my brain and personality were dead.’ 

 After her treatment, which Linda described as ‘Sargant’s brutal annihilation of my character’, she had a follow-up appointment at his Harley Street clinic where he ‘actually came on to me’. 

‘Tried to hug me and kiss me on the mouth,’ she recalled. 

 Linda managed to duck out of his reach and ran out of the clinic, but not before ‘hitting him sideways’ as the six-foot-tall man who tormented her for six weeks landed on a pouffe. 

‘He was lying sprawled on the floor as I made my exit.’ 

Celia Imrie, best known for her roles on Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia!, was 14 when she was sent to ward five to treat her anorexia. 

She can’t remember being given ECT but Celia is still tormented by the sight of one of her fellow ‘inmates’ in what she described as a ‘prison camp’ receiving shock therapy. 

Celia told Stock ‘the scent of burning hair and flesh’ follows her around to this day as she recalled how her ‘tormented body shuddered and jerked’.

The Sun reported that the doctor – nicknamed ‘Sargant the Shock’ – bought his own ‘shock box’ and was administering ECT to hundreds of patients at St Thomas, with Linda comparing it to a ‘conveyor belt’. 

Disturbingly, the big, burly doctor – who Celia said had an ‘evil presence’ – would even give it without a general anaesthetic.  

The 72-year-old was made to strip down in front of a ‘theatre full of’ Sagrant’s students so they could see ‘how thin I was’, adding that she was ‘injected with insulin’ because the ‘self-appointed god of psychiatry’ believed fattening his patients up would fix their ailments. 

The horrors she witnessed – something no 14-year-old should see – at the hands of Sargant ‘continues to cast a long shadow over me’ six decades later. 

‘Even today, I can still see his face so clearly; his ape-like features,’ Celia, who first admitted what she endured in an article for The Daily Mail in 2011, said. 

‘And sometimes I go to the depths of despair for no real reason. Most of the time I manage to pull myself out of it, but there’s no question that Sargant damaged me in some way.’ 

Sargant, who took most of the patients’ medical files with him when he retired, has also inspired the work of clinical psychologist-turned-novelist F. R. Tallis’ psychological thriller The Sleep Room. 

Tallis previously claimed that young women from troubled families made perfect patients for Sargant’s experiments.

‘He cherry-picked them. They were easy targets – alienated from their families and unable to challenge his authority,’ the author said. 

While Stock’s book pieces together what went on in The Sleep Room, after Sargant destroyed all his records, past accounts from survivors have also shed a light on his predatory behaviour towards women. 

Stephanie Simons, who visited Sargant’s private rooms in London’s Harley Street in 1967 suffering from depression, recalled how he asked her to strip to the waist so he could examine her before administering anti-depressants.

‘He didn’t ask me to get dressed again,’ she told FEMAIL. ‘He told me to sit in a chair, naked to the waist, and talked to me for nearly an hour like that.

There has been at least one formal complaint made to the General Medical Council, with another patient accusing Sargant of having sex with her to cure his impotence, The Sun reported. 

 In Stock’s book, the author reported how one of Sargant’s colleagues at St Thomas walked in on him kissing a patient. 

‘He stands up and walks out, saying, “That’s the way to cure a patient.”‘ 

Outside the hospital, Sargant reportedly hosted wild wife-swapping parties – with the medical community reeling after a photograph of a a man believed to be the doctor showed him dancing with topless young women. 

Sargant appeared to reflect on his professional career – now tainted by new accusations about his conduct while at St Thomas hospital – and unethical modes of psychiatric treatment, years before his death. 

‘Some people think I’m a marvellous doctor, others think I’m the work of the devil.’

The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal, by Jon Stock, is out now, published by Little, Brown.