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One of Cameron’s entries in the file from October 1957 notes: “Patient walked about room this morning, out in the hall, appears more restless than previously, stared at the speaker and said, ‘That thing up there, up on the wall, my ear is burning, my ear is not burning. But that tries to make up my mind. That’s not my mind. Is that my mind?’”

Jeanie was discharged from the institute in December 1957. She went home to her family, destroyed after a total of six months in Dr. Cameron’s care. She died in 2002. Dr. Cameron went on to become the president of the World Psychiatric Association, dying of a heart attack while hiking in 1967.

Alison Steel keeps a manila folder full of her mother’s papers and old photographs. Her favourite image of Jeanie is from before she was born. Her hazel eyes are wide, and her auburn hair cut to the shoulder.

“She looks like an angel,” Steel says. “But I never got to know that person. They stole my mother from me. They used her as a human guinea pig. They stripped her of her emotions.”

Photo by Christinne Muschi/Postmedia Network

In the years after 1957, Jeanie would spend hours sitting in the dark, or in her room. When she drove, she kept the flicker on to keep her “company.” She once arranged all the patio furniture outside, placing sticks wrapped in tinfoil on the chairs, declaring it was Sherbrooke Street. She spray-painted a white living room ceiling in red swirls, and spray-painted the toilet seat silver.

Alison couldn’t ask her mother for advice; she had nothing to give. She was present — she would make grilled cheese sandwiches for her daughter and her friends — but never fully there.