Interesting piece you linked. Thank you.
I believe that the substance used in psychiatric practice back then was sodium amytal rather than sodium pentothal.
These paragraphs are particularly important, IMO:
The psychiatrist, on the
other hand, using the same "truth" drugs in diagnosis and treatment of
the mentally ill, is primarily concerned with psychological truth or
psychological reality rather than empirical fact. A patient's aberrations
are reality for him at the time they occur, and an accurate account of
these fantasies and delusions, rather than reliable recollection of past
events, can be the key to recovery.
and
MacDonald concludes that a person who gives false information prior
to receiving drugs is likely to give false information also under narcosis,
that the drugs are of little value for revealing deceptions, and that they
are more effective in releasing unconsciously repressed material than
in evoking consciously suppressed information.
If my memory serves, this treatment was offered only with the intention of dredging up unconscious material which could not be gotten to in regular talk therapy or hypnosis (also widely used at the time). patients were also told that, given the high level of suggestibility in patients wanting to uncover memories, the material produced in these sessions could be an unconscious attempt to piece disparate parts of a story together, rather than any incontrovertible truth.
In the second paragraph, the MacDonald study discusses a different group: sociopaths, (who IMO are more likely to be representative of terrorists) and makes the point that this kind of treatment is not useful because of a lack of willingness to get at the truth and the underdeveloped superego found in sociopaths. |
