Gordon Thomas is a journalist, not an historian. As might be expected, his Journey into Madness reads well, but hasn't the structure and organized detail one would expect of a history. Instead of an exhaustive overview of what is known of CIA forays into trying to psychologically control people, Thomas gives snapshots of particular events and persons, affording a general sense of just how pernicious and influential our CIA has been in the modern medical history of torture.
Thomas frames his book in terms of William Buckley, the station chief of the CIA operation in Lebanon who was abducted there in 1984 and died, still in captivity, over a year later of untreated pneumonia. Thomas suggests that he was personal friends with Buckley, but by book's end one knows so much about the antithetical values held by the author and his subject that one doubts the friendship could have been very close--or are we to believe that it was only in researching his book that Thomas came to recognize what monsters Buckley and his crew really were?
In so far as the book has a thesis it is that all physicians, be they trained in the West, in the Soviet Union or in the Islamic world, share a common ethos. These shared values, however, are commonly betrayed by physicians in the pay of governments and the governments which encourage physicians to break their oaths are legion.
Particular attention is paid the United States of America and its intelligence arms, especially the CIA, because much of the primary research in modern torture techniques was funded and first applied by our government. These techniques include psychosurgery, electroshock, insulin shock, hypnosis, electro-magnetic field propagation, induced sleep, psychic driving, psychotropics etc. There are some graphic descriptions of some of these techniques, many of which have also been used in psychiatry, sometimes with more benign intentions.
Other than elaborating the speculations of the CIA and other intelligence agencies about the tortures undergone by Mr. Buckley before his death, Thomas' claims are well-documented and noted. In addition to the claims about torture techniques and mind-control experiments he briefly digresses into other documented CIA "studies" involving clairvoyance, voodoo, Satanism and the like.
Although it is very depressing to read about how truly evil the executive branch of our government is and has been since at least the beginning of the Cold War, this book is a page-turner. I finished the thing in under two days, breaking off reading spells only because I had to.