Here is something that did not make the news.
In 2025, the CIA added a newly processed document to its public reading room. It was written in the early 1950s. It describes a research program aimed at developing chemical compounds capable of altering human behavior, compounds designed to produce anxiety, depression, docility, and confusion in targeted subjects, delivered covertly, without the subject’s knowledge or consent.
The document is not about a foreign enemy. It is not about a prisoner of war. The subjects the researchers had in mind included ordinary American citizens.
It generated no headlines. No congressional response. No comment from the American Psychiatric Association.
Let’s consider the average person experiencing stress and anxiety due to life circumstances. That is how most of these stories begin. A person carrying something too heavy, reaching for help, walking through the door of a system that told her it understood what was wrong and had the tools to fix it.
She left with a diagnosis, a prescription, and a framework for understanding her suffering that she would carry for the rest of her life. Her brain, she was told, had a chemical imbalance. The medication would correct it. She should expect to be on it indefinitely.
She is not a case study. She is not an outlier. She is one of 80 million Americans who filled an antidepressant prescription last year alone.
I have been thinking about people like her while reading a seven-page CIA document written in 1952.
The document has a title: Special Research for Artichoke. It has been sitting in the CIA’s public reading room since 1983. And it describes, in the dry procedural language of a government research proposal, a set of ambitions that should stop you cold.
What you are about to read will change the way you understand every psychiatric diagnosis you have ever been given, every medication you have ever taken, and every doctor you have ever trusted.