At 16, I was experimented on by the CIA and now I'm suing

Dr Cameron would make Ms Ponting listen to the same tape recording hundreds of times.

"It ran over and over again, you're a good girl, you're a bad girl," Ms Ponting recalled.

The technique was a form of "psychic driving," says doctoral student Jordan Torbay, who has researched his experiments and their ethical implications.

"Essentially the minds of patients were manipulated using verbal cues," she says, adding he also looked at the effects of sleep drugs, forced sensory deprivation, and induced coma.

Medical records show Ms Ponting was given LSD, as well as drugs like sodium amytal, a barbiturate, desoxyn, a stimulant, as well as nitrous oxide gas, a sedative known as laughing gas.

"By April 30th, the patient had explorations… she had become quite tense and extremely violent when given the Nitrous Oxide, throwing herself half out of bed and starting to scream," Dr Cameron wrote in one of her medical files, which Ms Ponting has obtained through a freedom of information request.

The harsh truth about the MK-Ultra experiments first came to light in the 1970s. Since then, several victims have tried to sue the US and Canada. Lawsuits in the US have largely been unsuccessful, but in 1988, a Canadian judge ordered the US government to pay nine victims $67,000 each. In 1992 the Canadian government paid C$100,000 (about $80,000 at the time) to each of 77 victims – but did not admit liability.

Ms Ponting was not among them, because she did not yet know that she was a victim, she says

For decades, Ms Ponting said she felt something was wrong with her, but she did not learn of the details of her own involvement in the experiments until somewhat recently.

She says she had little memory of what happened at the Allan, or in the years that followed.

Ms Ponting eventually married and moved to Manitoba, where she had two children whom she is still close to. Now, she's a grandmother to four grandchildren. But she says she has suffered life-long repercussions from her time at the Allan.

"I felt it all my life, because I was wondering why I would think this way, or, you know what happened to me," she said.

She says she's had to be on a cocktail of medications her whole life to deal with mental-health issues, which she attributes to her time at the Allan, as well as recurrent nightmares.

"Sometimes I wake up screaming in the night because of what happened," she said.