Part One: Dr. Sleep: The Australian Psychiatrist Who Made People Sleep Themselves To Death

Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all

of history.

I'm Robert Evans, and those of you watching this will notice, those of you listening

shouldn't notice shit, that I'm recording in a different location today.

It's instead of being in my dank basement in Portland, Oregon, I am in a house in the

French quarter of New Orleans, the city that never sleeps.

The big apple, ah, anyway, you to not be in New Orleans with me, but here to podcast

with me, the great Gabe Dunn.

Welcome to the show, Gabe.

Thank you.

As I said, before I'm so excited, probably too excited, I'm a big fan of you guys.

I would listen to you overnight at my warehouse job for hours and hours, and then I would

get home and realize that I had only heard your voices for eight hours.

Well, that actually happens to Sophie and I sometimes too.

Yeah, I was like, sometimes what?

I made this, I said this is a joke to somebody the other day, and then I realized it wasn't

a joke.

Sometimes I'll think things, but instead of it being in my voice, it's in Roberts.

Wow, you've meld.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And when I'm in a party and someone's like, hey, Robert, do you want to shoot this mystery

powder into your veins?

And I'll be like, I'll hear Sophie's voice saying, yes, Robert, I think, don't test it.

Don't test it at all.

Don't take any precautions.

Just inject anything you find into your body.

That does sound like New Orleans.

Thank you, New Orleans.

It is.

I mean, Sophie's motto is live moss.

Taco Bell actually stole it from her.

The lawsuit is ongoing.

Wow.

Yeah.

I believe it.

You look so cute.

You look so cute.

You look so cute.

You look so cute.

You look so cute.

I was going to say, I would love to see Taco Bell.

If somebody could give me a reason to live moss for me.

But I think what Robert was saying is, Gabe, do you have any pluggables you want to plug

up top here?

Want to let the audience know who you are?

Because this is your first time on Bastards.

It is.

Believe me.

I would have, like, if I had been on it before, I would have been like, I can't come

back because my life has peaked.

I am a writer.

I am an activist out of LA.

So I do a lot of anti-ice on the ground stuff.

My life got taken over by it in June when the National Garden faded.

So that, and then I do a fun time show called Best Gabe Ever, which is a spin off of just

between us, the show I've been doing for, like, 12 years.

And then I have a sub-stack called 1,000 natural shocks and a related podcast called 1,000 natural

shocks that used to be called bad with money.

But then the world, I, financial advice, became even more irrelevant than it already was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think the best thing to do is to, I don't know, try to have money.

Yeah.

I mean, truly.

I, like, tried to girl boss my way to whatever and then it just ended up being, I don't

know, buried in the ground, turned it into gold blocks.

I don't know how to help you.

You're talking about anti-ice activism in LA and it, I've been thinking about a surface

level aspect of this for a while, which is in Seattle and then to a lesser extent in Oregon

during the 2020 protests, a major symbol of, like, the protests in those cities were, especially

Seattle was the use of umbrellas.

And it was kind of a significant thing because even though it rains all the time in the

PNW, people don't use umbrellas here.

Like, the fastest way to tell someone is not from here or in is not a resident is that

they're using a fucking umbrella.

So there was all sorts of graffiti in Seattle during, you know, the height of the protest

that was like, we never needed umbrellas before because we never saw a real storm.

And anyway, I think there's something, there's some, there's some good bit in like Los

Angeles never had to deal with ice before because it's LA.

So now we have to figure out like something.

We also, well, they, they have those signs that are like California melts ice, you know,

right.

It does.

That's actually a major problem that we have here.

Right.

And we also, I thought you were going to say because we've been using umbrellas to,

to block stuff.

And I think in California, people are buying umbrellas for the first time.

Yeah.

Not a city that had a lot of utility for umbrella owners, previous, they go, where is

the car culture?

And I was like, where, where do we even buy umbrellas?

Is that, is that a, is that at the supermarket?

Where do you get umbrellas?

I grew up in LA.

I don't remember ever having an umbrella.

So it's one umbrella, Michael.

How much could it cost?

$1,000.

That's the people in Beverly Hills.

Right.

Right.

This is an iHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human

No one knows what the future holds, but you deserve a weather app that can help.

Weather bug is easy to use and provides forecasts for your every need.

From storm warnings to pollen levels, write at your fingertips.

Get the fastest local alerts and comprehensive 10-day forecasts wherever you are.

With hyper local real-time customizable alerts, make sure the weather never takes you

by surprise so you can plan every day with confidence.

Download the free weather bug app from the app store today and start getting accurate

weather forecasts 24-7.

You know what I can really go for right now?

Literally anything that comes in a McDonald's carton, wrapper, or bag, or a McDonald's cup.

Yes.

Any of those items you do it.

If got your cravings covered, now stop in for the flaky filet of fish, the crispy snack

wrap, or a large fries for just $2.99.

Limited time only, price and participation may vary, cannot be combined with any other

offer.

Taco Bell is rolling out the new chicken, bacon, ranch, street chalupas.

And here's the thing.

You literally can't just get one.

They come in twos, and thank goodness they do.

Because these toasted cheddar street chalupas filled with slow roasted chicken, crispy bacon

and avocado ranch are stacked with bold flavor that keeps you going back for more.

Chicken bacon ranch street chalupas, only a Taco Bell.

Get yours today.

At participating U.S. Taco Bell locations for a limited time only while supplies last.

Support for the show comes from public, the investing platform for those who take it

seriously.

On public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stock, spawns, options, crypto, and

now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with

AI.

It all starts with your prompt.

From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers, growing

revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work.

It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against

the S&P 500.

Then, you can invest in a few clicks.

Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based

on your thesis, not someone else's.

Go to public.com slash podcast, and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

That's public.com slash podcast, paid for by public investing, brokerage services by

open to the public investing ink, member finraw and SIPC.

Advisory services by public advisors LLC, SEC registered advisor.

Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool.

Output is for informational purposes only, and is not an investment recommendation or

advice.

Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

So Gabe, it's probably time we get to the actual focus of our episode.

This is a guy I don't think you have heard of.

It's not a guy I had heard of before.

I started doing research on this.

Love it.

The episode title that I've got working is called The Real Doctor Sleep, which is the title

entirely because I'm pretty sure Stephen King wrote a novel called Doctor Sleep.

I don't know what it's about.

I've certainly never read it.

I don't think it has anything to do with our episode, and it's a bad joke to make because

I don't know anything about the Stephen King novel.

But I did it.

I think that's the one his son wrote.

I think his son wrote it.

Maybe.

Maybe.

But you know that.

Because when you're a Neppo baby, you have to do exactly what your parents did.

Well, that's that.

I can also imagine a Stephen King Neppo baby just being Stephen King writing books for

his kid and pretending they're his kids book.

He has time.

He could put out five or six extra books a year.

That's nothing.

That's like three hours of work for Stephen King.

You're imagining, like you're imagining a kid.

Like you're imagining a 10 year old and Stephen King is writing for him.

But I'm like, okay, so he's a 45 year old man and Stephen King is still writing his books

for him.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

As long as he's alive, you know, yeah.

So obviously behind the bastards is a podcast.

I'm not complaining, but it takes a lot of work, right?

These are generally eight to 10,000 word scripts every week.

I average reading probably one to one and a half books a week, sometimes two books a

week for doing like research for these episodes.

And that's all year round, you know, 50 some weeks out of the year.

The Epstein four partners that we just did thankfully didn't require me to go through books

because that does take a lot of extra time.

But I spend hours trawling through the Epstein archives and hours more reading everyone

else's coverage of what's in there.

Then I had to write like 16,000 words on the motherfucker.

So there's a lot to do, which is why I appreciate it whenever fans of the show are so good to

suggest episode topics on the mega thread and the behind the bastards subreddit.

Because a lot of people will be like, you know, oh, I want to, when are we finally going

to get the Mao episodes?

Or you should do Steven Miller and yeah, we'll get to all the big guys.

Those guys do require a lot of work.

What I really like from the episode suggestions is that people often help me find subjects

who are really interesting and really fun to hear about.

But they're also like kind of obscure and there's not a ton written about them, which means

I can read everything written about them in the space of a couple of days, which is a lot

lower research burden to me.

And that's the kind of episode that we've got here.

So I first off, I want to thank the admins of the subreddit for making the episode suggestion

mega thread that I asked about during the Q and A episodes, because that came in handy

this week.

Somebody posted an unusually detailed thread user Captain Ravioli about an Australian black

doctor who killed a shitload of people by making them sleep themselves to death.

We are talking about Australia's doctor sleep.

Gabe, have you heard of this story at all?

I have not, but so darkly, my first thought was like, how's that bad?

How is that?

It is.

This is an interesting, quite medical treatment, both in that first, it starts in a good place.

It's not a quack medical treatment that starts quack.

It starts with some real doctors and scientists being like, shit, this might help.

This like might be a therapy that actually does something.

And then it winds up not working, but this guy decides to make it his entire life.

And he gets a lot of people killed, but when I explain how this is supposed to work,

you're going to be like, well, shit, I want to try that.

That's the problem.

And that's, and that's ultimately the dark humor of my whole thing is I'm like, oh,

tell me more.

What did he use that's not me out?

That's so bad.

I don't have to be online for a week, shit, exactly.

And how gentle is the sleep?

Okay.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Not what we will talk about all this.

But first, let's talk about our bastard.

Let's introduce this motherfucker to the audience and to the gate.

Harry Richard Bailey was born on October 29th, 1922 and picked in new South Wales,

Australia, his hometown was a tiny place.

And it's still this today.

There's only about 5,000 people who live in picked in now.

So it was even smaller one presumes back then.

And it was, it hadn't been, it had been like a town about a hundred years

when he was born, just a little over.

Picton was declared within the area of legal settlement in Australia in 1821.

The town was named for a British army officer who died at Waterloo and had been

quote, feared for his erasible temperament, which I just find funny.

That like, there's this dead guy who's claimed to fame was he was a real asshole.

Let's name a town in Australia after him.

Is that angry?

Like he was angry?

Yeah, he's a day.

He's mean.

Yeah, he's on.

Well, that might be a good quality to have for that kind of person.

I know I can see being on re being a benefit as an apoleonic era military officer.

Although again, he dies at Waterloo.

So we can't have been that good, right?

I like soldiers who don't die at Waterloo.

Yeah, I'm such a flouncy little gay boy that I'm like, I don't know what qualities

would be good for a soldier out of the loop.

Don't tell yourself short, Gabe.

I believe if you were taken back in time to Waterloo, you could kill a lot of

Frenchmen or Englishmen depending on, you know, where you stand or Austrian.

You know, I believe I think I'm just off to the side.

Like, does anyone want chips?

I think I'm trying to stay away from the candidates, but you guys are just like walking

at guns.

No, I don't want to walk towards a gun.

That's a horrible idea.

I'll be here with juice when you come back.

Yeah.

I'm going to introduce the concept of ducking behind cover to the Napoleonic era militaries

and then get to this.

This is my problem like with like unconfronting ice and DHS where I am in L.A.

Because my whole thing is like, they'll just come do their little army thing.

And I'm like, my thought, I'm so autistic that I'm like, you don't have to do this.

Does any of us have to do this?

None of us have to do this.

I feel like I don't feel being like guys, I think we should just go home.

Oh, like the general from the dispatch talk.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly like that.

So anyway, that was a digression.

Harry Bailey was the eldest child of his parents, Jack Bailey, a railway night watchman

and eventually station master and Ruth Smith, a homemaker.

Smith was his mom's maiden name at least, obviously.

So she's Ruth Bailey, I presume, by the time that Harry is born.

She and her husband came up, like grew up in the same general area in New

South Wales and they'd known each other most of their lives.

They send Harry to a private Christian school for his basic education.

And unfortunately, this is one of those bastards where we just have very little

about their childhood and early life, like basically nothing.

We don't have any quotes that he was an ambitious boy.

We don't even have any, even have anyone talking about the fact he was like a good student,

which I presume he was given, you know, what he does with the rest of his life.

So we're just going to have to move forward knowing this guy's early back story is kind of a black box to the world.

The only hint of any kind of color or detail about his day-to-day life as a child came from this entry,

came from his entry in the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography.

Quote, Harry enrolled in science at the University of Sydney in 1940, lacking money.

He did not finish the course and found work as a pharmacist assistant.

And in fact, there seem to be, and I think there's two times where Harry is trying to go

through a degree program and has to drop out for financial reasons.

And from that, I think it's reasonable to infer he comes from a kind of poor family.

You know, made me to probably not unusually poor for Picton, probably as poor as basically everybody else in Picton.

But he doesn't have money growing up, right?

Like you don't have to drop out of school twice to work full time if your family's flush, generally speaking.

That'll put a chip on your shoulder in medical school for sure.

And it I think is he is going to really follow the money his entire career in some very evil ways.

And I think maybe that's kind of where it starts.

Like he grows up really poor and that is kind of that seems to be his primary motivation in life as I want to make money.

Even more than the medical stuff he's talking about doing, he wants to get paid, right?

I feel like that happens to men like men are poor and then they grow up and they're like, I got to be evil about it.

Yeah, I get it because like, you know, I have like as in my career, I have not done what a lot of other reporters do and focused on like getting staff jobs.

I focused on my reporting is usually been like my secondary job.

And I did something else and comedy and entertainment because it paid better because I did grow up like poor and with a lot of economic anxiety.

And so as a kid, there was this growing up, there was this like I have to at least I don't want to like deal with the fear that I dealt my parents dealt with.

Their whole childhood, I want to be more stable than they were.

But Harry, I think it becomes like a I have to get rich at all costs.

And it doesn't matter whatever I have to do to people to do it as opposed to maybe I won't work full time for a newspaper because that doesn't seem like it like a future forward position.

Right. Yes.

Chip on your shoulder entitlement.

It starts like that.

Yep.

Yep. So and this is reading between the lines a bit by me here.

So take it with a grain of salt.

But I he the fact that he is he's really committed to trying to get a scientific degree, right?

Like a medical degree eventually because he tries a couple of times he's to drop out and save up money.

I see this as evidence that we've got this kind of we've got a smart determined broke ass boy who's desperate to make something of himself, right?

Like he really has to.

I don't want to yeah, I don't I don't want to say that that's I think that that's a really admirable thing.

And I will go well or badly.

I will maintain my admiration toward him until inevitably something happens.

And he is kind of admirable at the start here at least it seems that way.

Yeah, to continue with a quote from the in psych Australian encyclopedia of biography.

On January 19th, 1945 at the registrar general's office, Sydney, he married Marjorie Jocelyn Noon in a cashier.

He studied medicine at the University of Sydney and got his MB and MS,

winning the Norton Manning Memorial Prize for psychiatry and the major Ian Vickery prize for pediatrics.

So again, not a lot of color here, but he does finally get to graduate and as soon as he starts working as a psychiatrist,

because obviously you're doing like your internship and stuff.

He's like winning awards very quickly.

He is in very short order within a few years of starting.

He is an award winning psychiatrist.

Is a psychiatrist for children?

Do we know he's that he child psychiatry is a major area of his interest.

Yes, like he is like specializing in pediatrics for a period of time.

Yeah, well.

So yeah, he's he's at this point by the time he's, you know, in his early 20s,

he's got his medical degree.

He's won some awards.

He's married a working class girl, you know, who we presume kind of busted her ass.

The whole time he was in school tell make a stream come true.

And then it does.

He seems to be doing really, really well, right?

Everything's coming up Bailey.

Now, I will say the fact that because he's when he's working on his medical degree,

he did not initially want to be a psychiatrist.

It's a choice he makes kind of late in his scholastic history.

And there's a reason for this by the 1950s.

And this is true in Australia, but it's true all throughout like the Western world.

Psychiatry is not a super popular field for doctors, right?

And because of this in many parts of the West, including Australia,

there are not enough psychiatrists to meet the need.

It's a very underserved job, right?

Just like I think a good example today, there's not nearly enough anesthesiologists, right?

If you're if you're a nurse anesthesiologist or a fucking doctor,

you are going to be working as much as you want to work because there is no limit

to the amount of need for you.

Sure.

And that's not a super important part of the surgery or anything.

No, no, no, of course not.

It's one of the most important parts.

And as a result, if you are getting into a medical field today and it's something

that you have an inclination for, you make a lot of money as an anesthesiologist.

And the same thing is kind of true of a psych in the 50s, right?

There's not enough of them to meet the need.

There's a lot of demand.

And so Bailey being this kind of poor kid looking for a place to make his

mark would both say, well, it'll be easy to get work as a psychiatrist.

Like this is a field where they need more people, but also it's a new field.

And there's a lot of shit being discovered every day.

I have a chance to get in kind of on not on the ground floor, but pretty close

and make a name for myself because there's less of us.

So if I'm good at this, it'll be a lot easier for me to stand out than if I

were to become, you know, a hard surgeon or whatever.

And the state of mental health is not what we want it to be.

Yeah.

We'll talk about that too.

But you know, a big part of why he becomes a psychiatrist is psychiatry is what

you want to get into if you're looking to make your mark in the medical field.

And you want the easiest time of it possible.

So after graduate getting out and getting his, his degree, our boy spends a

year in turning at the Prince Alfred hospital and then gets a full time regular

gig at the Broughton Hall psychiatric clinic and like heart, which is a

suburb of Sydney that I'm sure I have mispronounced.

And we have a giant Australian audience.

So they will let you know,

crikey, a girl in Rome.

That's my Australian.

That's going to piss them off more.

Or sorry guys, that was, that was, that was uncalled for.

That was uncalled for.

This is like when you spell something wrong on purpose in, you know, a

tick-tock so that you get a bunch of engagement.

You're doing this on purpose.

So the more comments, the more emails, the more popular the show is.

Yeah, I've discovered something with Australians, which is that they respond

really well to negging.

So I'm just kind of doing that to build our audience over there.

Well, I just want to give a spoiler that Roberts actually never intentionally

mispronounced a single word a day in his life.

And never, I've never mispronounced a word.

I'd argue.

Yeah, he's never mispronounced a word.

And if it happened, it wasn't, it was, the job's done.

What do you want from him?

Yeah, flood the emails, let us know.

Yeah, please don't let them know.

I won't read the emails.

I don't care.

So he starts working at this, this clinic in a suburb of Sydney.

And he seems to be really good at it.

Opportunity start flooding in for him at this point.

And he's so in demand that in the fall of 1954, he begins a 15 month

tour for the World Health Organization, which is going to take him all

across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Remember the World Health Organization, everyone?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, this is, I mean, he's, he doesn't do anything bad while he's with the

WHO, but his time with the WHO does kind of lead to something bad.

It's not really the WHO's fault.

But part of what this is is he's a young up and coming doctor.

And the WHO is having him shadow, prominent psychiatrists in other

countries, right, to see their methods to work with them.

You know, it's a good professional development thing.

Right.

And he finds himself as he's meeting these guys and he's seeing these new

cutting edge treatments they're working on.

He finds himself gravitating to these like sexy new medications and,

uh, electronic devices that are being used in therapy, like

electroconvulsive therapy.

If he's really drawn to, right?

And that is, that's a real therapy.

People use it.

It's used to day on, for example, people like epilepsy.

But at this time, people are just kind of being electrocuted because they

figure maybe that'll shock us, shake them out of it.

Right.

I'm, um, it's not great.

It's wildly overprescribed at this period of time in a way that is like

often just torture.

Um, yeah.

And he's also really interested.

We're starting by the 50s.

You have to remember drugs aren't great until like the 1900s is really

when we start to figure out drugs.

And especially we start to figure out sedatives, um, largely like been,

binzos, like, binzos have hit the, hit the floor and doctors are like a pill

that makes my patient just go away so I can do whatever I need to do on them.

And they won't say anything amazing, right?

Um, and he loves sedatives.

He finds himself like fascinated by binzos in particular.

Honey, me too.

Like what?

Yeah.

Who doesn't love a good binzo, am I right?

Yeah, they're good, but he's not taking them himself, right?

He's just over prescribing them or loves to prescribe them at this point.

Yeah, he's, he's just loves to prescribe them.

And it's important.

We would say over, but at the time nobody's calling this over prescription.

I don't even know that he's prescribing more than is normal for the day at this

point in time because doctors love giving out binzos in the 50s.

Sure do.

Sure do.

Yeah.

That's why boomers are the way they are, maybe.

Yeah.

Like 80% of medicine is benzodiazepine and fucking cigarettes.

Like that's most of modern medicine, the 50s, bring it back.

We should return, we should return it.

That was the gold was a golden era.

Yeah, God almighty speaking of gold.

You know who might sell you binzos, you know, under the table.

If you're nice to them, is it the products and services?

That's right.

That's right.

We might be sponsored by a guy down the street who will sell you binzos or there

might just be a guy down the street who will sell you binzos.

And if so, I got to tell you, that's just going to be straight fentanyl folks.

Test you.

Yeah, you know, test you, and less it's from our sponsors.

Test your shit.

Do whatever our sponsors give you or anyone who says they're one of our sponsors.

Anyway, here's ads.

No one knows what the future holds, but you deserve a weather app that can help.

Weather bug is easy to use and provides forecasts for your every need.

From storm warnings to pollen levels, right at your fingertips.

Get the fastest local alerts and comprehensive 10 day forecasts wherever you are.

It's hyper local real time customizable alerts.

Make sure the weather never takes you by surprise, so you can plan every day with confidence.

Download the free weather bug app from the app store today and start getting

accurate weather forecasts 24 seven.

You know what I could really go for right now?

Literally anything that comes in a McDonald's carton, wrapper or bag or a McDonald's cup.

Yes, any of those items you do it.

We've got your cravings covered now.

Stop in for the flaky filet of fish, the crispy snack wrap or a large fries for just $2.99.

Limited time only price and participation may vary cannot be combined with any other offer.

This podcast is sponsored by Better Hell.

It's March.

That means things are finally starting to warm up and maybe get a little bit brighter

outside, depending on where you live.

And it also means international women's day is coming up.

This is a great time to celebrate the women in your life and celebrate the progress that women have made all over the world.

We want to remind women how much they matter and that therapy offers a place for them to take care of themselves in a way they deserve.

Better help therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the United States.

Better help does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals.

A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 plus years of experience

and industry leading a match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time.

If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations.

With over 30,000 therapists, Better Help is the world's largest online therapy platform.

Your emotional well-being matters find support and feel lighter in therapy.

Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash behind.

That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash behind.

Support for the show comes from public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.

On public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stock, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.

It all starts with your prompt from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year.

You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work.

It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtests it against the S&P 500.

Then you can invest in a few clicks.

Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.

Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

That's public.com slash podcast, paid for by public investing, brokerage services by open to the public investing ink, member finraw and SIPC.

Advisory services by public advisors LLC SEC registered advisor generated assets is an interactive analysis tool output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Welcome back to the hard coost.

So I don't know why I said it that way.

What's happening here?

New Orleans is getting to you.

Yeah, that's got to be the nollens.

So let's take a step back here.

We've just been talking about Dr. Bailey's live up to the kind of birth of his career and it's tour with the WHO.

He's trying out new drugs.

He's learning how to electrocute people, meeting fun doctors all over the world.

So let's take a step back and let's talk a little bit about the state of psychiatry and care for the mentally ill at this point, both in the West in general and in Australia and specific, primarily in Australia, specifically.

So the first mental health institution in Australia was the Australian lunatic asylum in Castle Hill in New South Wales, which they used to call him that is called lunatic asylum.

Crazy.

That's what I call my apartment.

Yeah.

So that was established in 1811 and I probably don't have to tell you it wasn't a nice place.

The lunatic asylum in 1811, attendance had no training.

Treatment was not a kind of people.

There's no thought that you treat people.

This is just a warehouse to stick crazy people until they die.

Right.

There's a lot of violence, a lot of brutality, a lot of sickness.

It's gross and it gets really crowded really quickly because whenever someone doesn't like fit in and, you know, isn't able to like handle life on their own.

They're just kind of thrown in here, right?

A lot of these people are just like not even folks that we would say have mental illnesses off and it's just like, Oh, poor guy throw him in the lunatic asylum.

He's sleeping in the street, something like that.

I had a boyfriend who was six foot seven and he would sometimes be like, Oh, what if about past lives for us?

And I was like, uh, I would be in an asylum for being like having depression and being gay and you're six foot seven.

You would be in a freak show.

Yeah, there's no romanticizing this.

Yeah, you would, you would be in a freak show or you would be in like one of those Austrian military units where they only hired tall guys to make the king look cooler.

We're not having the pleasant bill experience.

Yeah, I would have been burned at the stake.

So that, that first lunatic asylum gets so crowded that in 1837, a new asylum has to be built and more follow a decade later.

Uh, per an article on the Chumsford scandal blog, quote, mentally ill patients were commonly transferred from jails to these asylum's upon their opening.

This gives clues as to the attitudes held towards those afflicted with mental illness.

It was only in 1867 that an active parliament made a mandatory for mentally impaired persons to be housed in a silence rather than prisons.

This group together, the mentally retarded or disabled and the mentally ill.

In 1900, these categories were made distinct and the patients separated.

Those are, yeah, not all terms we use now, but this is what they're calling them at the time, right?

They're bringing it back.

Yeah, they're bringing it back.

Yeah, fucking streamers are.

So things do start to get better.

But even in a silence where the superintendents are promoting like a philosophy of humane care and actually trying to treat people, there are still massive practical issues.

Of there's never enough budget for these places to make them very nice.

They're always overcrowded.

It's hard to get supplies and this leads to what's called a custodial approach.

So, asylum's are regulating and housing people and they're acknowledged that they need treatment, but they're not providing treatment.

The only thing that they use to control patients, they've got like violence and straight jackets, right?

They're basically like beating them and to comply them and putting them in straight jackets.

The situation improves gradually and unevenly.

By the time Dr. Bailey is in college, the focus had shifted to treating the illnesses people presented and that's now increasingly a part of the actual asylum experience is now we're still, you know, pretty unpleasant places, but we're actually trying to treat you much more than we were before and treatment in this case still does just often mean your pounding people's brains drugs though, right?

There's not, you're not necessarily getting like useful therapy, they figured out tranquilizers by this point, whichever place straight jacket.

So they're like, look, we're not using straight jackets as much because we're just dope and I'm up to the point where they can't move most of the time with the idea be to reintegrate them into society.

Yes, that has finally broken through and by the 50s and 60s, nurses and attendance theoretically, at least, consider themselves to be working to treat and improve the conditions of their patients, not just to store them.

People are often still just stored their whole lives, but there's at least an understanding that you're supposed to try to help these people, you know.

You send your wife because she's depressed, they put her on rents, those send her back home.

Now she just washes the dishes like a zombie.

We did exactly exactly and honestly, theoretical 50s housewife, send me your bins, those please, I will put them to good use.

So not a joke, I would never, you'd never do something like that.

Now, unfortunately, this is a primitive time still for mental health care treatment and many doctors find themselves overwhelmed by the difficulty and

the horror of dealing with certain illnesses.

This makes them desperate to find chemical solutions that are fast and simple and this brings us to deep sleep therapy.

The basic idea here is that for some mental illnesses, maybe you'll help a person if you just knock them out with drugs and keep them unconscious in something that's kind of adjacent to an artificially maintained coma for long periods of time, right?

How long?

Great question, you know.

We'll talk about that, but it's anywhere from, in some cases, because one thing they're using this for, where might actually kind of help?

I mean, the drugs are probably still making it in that negative because they're how much they're pumping, but like people who are insomniacs, they'll be like, okay, well, I can knock you out for 12 hours.

Then you catch up on your sleep, right?

And that's initially a lot of the first days they are just trying for like a day, but they start trying it for like a couple of days at a time, a week at a time, two weeks.

Like they'll do various versions of that as they explore it more.

The first psychiatrist to try this as far as we can tell was a Scotsman named Neil McLeod, and he experimented with knocking people out for long periods of time as a treatment for schizophrenia, right?

His attitude is, I mean, if we set the main bipolar disorder, it could be good.

It could be good for that.

Yeah, sleep it off, right?

You can see why people would think this.

So he's not, McLeod is not a bad guy for wondering, fuck this, maybe if I just help let this person sleep for like five days, the wake up better.

I don't know, it's worth a try at the time, right?

Now, as you probably know, all sleep is not created equal.

You got your light sleep or slow wave sleep, and you've got deep sleep, and you've got rapid eye movement sleep, better known as rim sleep.

Because when you enter the rim stage of sleep, the human subconscious naturally generates the image and voice of Michael Steip.

We all experience this, right?

That's why they call it rim sleep.

You got me.

I was not expecting it.

I'll always make a good, an REM joke, you know, it's a, it's a band, it's a band, they're definitely a band.

Each stage of sleep has different effects and does different things for you.

By this point, kind of the mid 20th century, scientists had started to understand that deep sleep is particularly important for healing, right?

Like from physical ailments and stuff, you know, like it's what you're supposed to sleep if you're sick, you know, to get more sleep, because your body does actually like heal and kind of restores itself during the sleep process, and deep sleep is really important for that, which is why if you don't get enough deep sleep, your health starts to suffer, deep sleep also plays a role in memory consolidation, right?

Your brain does a lot of it's like sorting and filing memories, I guess, during the deep sleep stage.

I want to quote from an article by the editorial team at neurolaunch.com proponents of deep sleep therapy hypothesize that by artificially extending the deep sleep phase, they could enhance its restorative properties and provide therapeutic benefits for individuals suffering from mental health disorders.

The theory suggested that prolonged deep sleep could allow the brain to reset natural neural pathways, reduce stress and alleviate symptoms of various psychiatric conditions.

However, it's important to note that the mechanisms proposed by deep sleep therapy advocates were largely speculative and lacked robust scientific evidence.

The human sleep cycle is a complex and finely tuned process and artificially manipulating it for extended periods of time, carry significant risks and potential consequences.

Yeah, I was going to say the opposite.

The opposite of that is you're sleeping so much that you have a fog and you're you're like your brain is actually working worse.

Yeah, yeah, and that's the thing with depression, right? You want to sleep all the time or it's one thing that can happen with depression.

People tend to want to just knock themselves out for long periods of time.

Yeah, you lose track of you lose track of the days, you lose track of like your own memories, what's a dream, what's not, you become Leonardo DiCaprio and inception.

Sure. Yep.

But I think you also, I feel like I get, I think you get why a well-meaning doctor or a patient would feel like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

I see why that would help. Yeah, like sure, you know, let's give it a try.

Well, if you're depressed or you're stressed out or they do give you still a benzo.

Yeah, if you're lucky.

So let's talk about how deep sleep therapy works.

Once a patient was identified as a good candidate for this treatment, they'd be administered a heavy dose

of various sedatives described by the people in neuro launch as a cocktail of barbituits and other sedative drugs, which if I'm honest, I know, it sounds pretty great, right?

This is the worst two people to do this episode.

I know, I know.

As I was reading, as I was like doing my research, I kept being like, fuck, I didn't want to try this.

This sounds rad.

So the cocktail is three major ingredients.

Chloral hydrate is a big one.

This is a chemical that had come out of Germany as a popular sedative in the 1870s, and it works very well, but it's also extraordinarily dangerous.

Just being close to the vapors of chloral hydrate can fuck you up.

It's also super addictive, which is a problem because if you're keeping someone unconscious and giving them this every day for two weeks, their body can wake, they can wake up, addicted to chloral hydrate, right?

It's not ideal.

Yeah, it's also, and it also causes like lots of physical problems for patients, including because it's a central nervousness and depression, heart and lung failure.

So people can die pretty easily overdosing on this stuff.

Again, my God, that's so much more dangerous than I thought.

It's a, it's a serious drug.

Chloral hydrate is a real as drug, and it's not the only one in this cocktail.

No matter which are you taking, is it like a tincture or you're taking a lot of great question, great question.

It varies on the doctor.

It varies on the doctor, and sometimes it is administered via IV, sometimes it's administered via like a series of pills, right?

Usually they're taking pills to put them down initially, and then an IV kind of keeps them topped up during the period of time where they're unconscious, right?

Another major ingredient of the cocktail is ammo barbitol, which is a barbiturate derivative that was known as a street drug under the name

Blue Heavens, and sounds awesome.

It is also super addictive and causes horrific withdrawals that can straight up kill you.

Benzos are one of those things if you are addicted to benzos, and you stop, it can just kill your ass, like the withdrawal can.

Like you have to, you have to taper off often with medical assistance.

It can be a real problem.

Blue Heavens?

Blue Heavens is the street name for a ammo barbitol.

And yeah, another major part of the cocktail was sodium theopintol, which is used as a general anesthetic, but is better known as one of the more popular truth serums, right?

Truth serum.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I knew that.

I knew truth serum.

Now, it's also a rapid onset barbiturate, like ammo barbitol.

So in addition to this is like chloral hydrate and two rapid onset barbituates is what you're taking together in this cocktail.

Your heart and lungs are failing.

You are absolutely.

You won't breathe a shit.

Don't shut your mind on something called blue heaven.

And you won't stop telling your secrets.

Exactly.

Perfect.

Wow.

That's a Friday night, baby.

Yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice Friday night.

If you've never been on like a, if you've never taken like a heavy dose of Xanax or something, when I was a kid, and I'm a kid, I mean, like 20 years old.

The person I was seeing at the time gave me what we both thought we each took a quarter bar of Xanax.

This is my first time taking Xanax.

Sure.

She'd been taking it for a while, but it was street Xanax.

And what we got was, thankfully, this was not the era of fentanyl yet.

It was definitely Al Prazelam that was pressed into that street pill.

But when you get a street pill, sometimes it's the strength of a normal pill.

Sometimes it's much stronger.

So I took a quarter bar, which should just kind of mellow you out.

And I took it, and I remember stepping down the street out in front of my house.

And then I came to myself sitting on my couch 30 hours later without any memories of the intervening period.

Yeah, I would do that.

It would totally work.

Yeah, yeah, it totally works.

I would not even know how I got.

Yeah.

Were you living in New York?

Where were you?

No, I was in Texas at this point in time.

Oh, Texas, okay.

But you've had some hot, hot zans, too.

I'm guessing.

And that's part of why, especially in the mid-Auts,

there were a lot of deaths due to zans that had fint in them,

or that were just way too hot.

Because if you're, I mean, zanax is not a great drug.

You don't want to kill yourself mixing it with alcohol,

really dangerous to mix with like fucking Coke or whatever.

Especially in high quantities.

And if you have no idea how strong the pill you're taking is,

like that's particularly dangerous.

But I bring this up to be like, that's how powerful this shit is.

You can take a pill the size of the end of your finger

and you're just gone for a full 24 hours or more, right?

And these people are taking way more out and about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is why they're throwing in the chlorohydrate.

They don't want you functioning for shit during this.

I took, I was taking Ambien for a while,

and I stopped because I would,

I would go to bed wearing one thing, take the Ambien,

and then wake up in different clothes

in a different part of my house.

Yeah, it's fucking wild stuff.

I was like, what is a food would be missing?

I'd be like, I guess I ate something.

I must have done something.

Yeah.

Who knows?

Who knows?

One time I looked in my Google searches

and I had Google Scary Horses.

Yeah, I have a couple of notebooks from times like that in my life

where it'd be like, oh, I had a really great idea for an article

while I was fucked up and I'll look over

and it'll just say something like completely incomprehensible.

Or I'll just not be able to read my own handwriting.

It's like, thanks, drug me.

Like really the idea of the century there.

The word purple and then four paragraphs

of unreadable spriggles around it.

I'll turn this into a book immediately.

Brilliant.

That's like that thing where they're like,

artists have to be like, booked up to me.

I'm like, I don't know about that.

No, no, no, there's certainly limits

to when it's how much of that can be handy or useful.

So one of the first physicians to explore these

of Deep Sleep Therapy or DST was Jacob Klicey.

He was a Swiss psychiatrist who seems to have had a deal

with the pharmaceutical manufacturer, Roch,

because he only used their barbiturates in his cocktail.

Pernarticle on the website, Mad in America by Dr. Philip Hickey,

quote, in Klicey's first publication on this matter,

he acknowledged that three of the 26 patients had died

during the study due to Bronco pneumonia

or cardiac hemorrhages.

This is about 12%.

Nevertheless, the method achieved some popularity

in the 50s and 60s and was used by William Sergeant

in the UK and Donald Cameron in Canada,

both considered eminent psychiatrists.

So the first guy to try Deep Sleep Therapy

kills 12% of the 26 patients that he...

This is because people didn't talk to each other.

I mean, no, unfortunately not.

They're reading this.

Sergeant and Cameron find out about this

because they read this study where he kills 12%

of his patients and they're like, I gotta get on that.

But the people, the people don't know.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the people taking a green to the treatment

are not being told, so yeah,

and the first study we did on this,

it killed three of the 26 people in it.

You want to roll those dice?

Yeah, exactly.

And this is part of the problem is,

it is the standard to have consent in this period of time.

But what they, what consent means in the 50s and 60s

is not what we would call consent today.

Because a big thing, doctors,

there's a bit, doctors don't like explaining stuff

to patients in this period of time.

I'm not, they don't always do it now.

They don't like explaining stuff to patients now, at all.

Yeah, but it's considered,

it's like offensive to a lot of doctors

that a patient would have any input at all.

Oh, it's like, how dare you question my expertise?

I'm a doctor.

La la la la la la.

Yeah.

Not, not to victim blame,

but I think you should ask

every time you're prescribed something,

has this killed 12% of the people who take it?

Has this killed 12% of the people who do it?

I mean, if they say no,

and they really killed 13%, that's on you.

That's on you.

Solid question to ask.

One of the problems here,

because these are doctors often working in like public health

for the mentally ill in the 60s,

one of the issues is that a lot of the people

they're being sent are not compostmentists anyway.

So they're not able and often not asked

to consent to anything,

but they're certainly, these guys is attitude.

No one outside is going to come in and say like,

well, you're giving all these guys a treatment

that killed 12% of them.

Everyone else who is in the government

is in like a local who should be a watchdog for this

is just like, we want these people off the streets,

give them away from where anyone will watch them.

I don't care.

You're a doctor, do whatever to them, fuck it, right?

That's not all that, because obviously regular people

who are out in society and stuff

and not institutionalized get these therapies too,

but a lot of them are institutionalized people

and just nobody gives a fuck what happens to them, right?

That's why they're doing shit like this.

Yeah, still now.

So the amount of time you're kept under

during deep sleep therapy varies pretty widely.

The vast majority of therapeutic treatments in Europe

seem to have been a day or less.

It's very uncommon for the credible doctors

doing this at the time to keep people

under for more than a day at a time,

but some researchers experiment with extended periods of time

up to like two weeks long.

Perneurolodge code.

My God.

Yeah, oh, and it gets, just you wait my friend.

Oh my God.

Yeah, two weeks.

That's a coma.

Legally, that's a coma.

That's a fucking coma.

Perneurolodge.com, quote,

during this time, patients were kept in a state of unconsciousness

with brief periods of wakefulness for feeding and basic care,

monitoring and safety protocols were essential components

of deep sleep therapy,

given the risks associated with prolonged sedation,

medical staff closely monitored patients' vital signs,

including heart rate, blood pressure,

and respiratory function,

and travenous fluids and nutritional support

were provided to maintain hydration

and prevent malnutrition.

So if he's going to put a picture up,

you can see on the video version,

if not, I will describe it.

Oh my God.

Yeah, you're seeing a feeding of a patient here.

So you've got a man in a hospital bed

at a 60s look in one unconscious.

There is a doctor or an orderly,

I can't really tell, standing behind him

who's got his, he's holding his hat.

He's got a hand on either side of this guy's head

to keep his head straight.

And then there is, you know, like a beer bong.

Yeah, it's a funnel.

Oh, you have to take your beer bonging food into him.

Yeah, it's like what they're using

is like a funnel attached to a tube

that goes into his nose.

And this guy's just pouring for, honestly,

it looks like a craft of coffee.

I'm sure it's some of the nutritional supplement

or just hydration or whatever,

but it looks like he's just pouring coffee

into this guy's nose.

Me and the morning trying to get up.

Do you know if people have,

do you know if it was beefy coffee?

Yeah, you got a nose fee.

I can't, I can't get out of bed

until I've had an entire liter of coffee poured up my nose.

You know, so if you'll tell you,

that's the only way I work in the morning.

True, right.

And then as soon as they're done,

my eyes pop open and I pop out of bed,

like ready to get daddy.

Thank you for the don't wake daddy reference.

That's really going, that's going,

that's going to be really popular

with the chunk of our audience

whose knees are starting to fail.

Oh, and REM isn't.

Oh, and Michael's type isn't.

Yeah, it's okay.

The people who would most get the Michael's

type joke can't hear anymore.

They're gen X.

Robert, like they're, they're,

their bodies failed long ago.

Stop insulting the people that support us.

I know.

I love you guys.

Gen X listeners know.

I love you, Gen X viewers.

Yeah.

So what I just described is how deep sleep therapy

was supposed to work.

The fact that you are supposed to generally be under

for no longer than a day at a time

and you're woken regularly to be fed,

to be like moved, to be like,

you should be walked around to help prevent bed sores.

But you know what that takes?

Work.

You got to have people who like are keeping track

of everybody's schedule and like waking guys

and putting them back down and moving them around

and cleaning them.

And if you really want to cut costs,

why not just keep them knocked out instead

and just having me unconscious the whole time?

They need to, they need to stand you up

and like we end up burning you around.

Cheaper, cheaper is better.

Cheaper is better.

They does have one guy that's kind of making you walk.

Yeah.

I mean, usually they just don't do that.

Usually just leave you unconscious.

That, that, it comes increasingly cause,

in big facilities, right?

In large and like psychiatric hospitals.

Because they often don't have adequate staff too,

but they are supposed to and I should note,

even though the good places they are waking you up,

regularly moving around feeding you,

you don't remember any of that.

You're still bins out out the whole time.

So for you, it's still like you were just gone

for two weeks or whatever.

So the most common early treatment deep sleep therapy

is used for is schizophrenia.

But it's also used for severe depression.

And as I said, insomnia, over time,

doctors explore treating anxiety disorders

and addiction with this therapy as well.

And you can see the logic here, right?

Oh, somebody wants to sober up from whatever,

knock them out for a few days until they detox, right?

Great idea.

Now there's some downsides to this.

There's some reasons why this is not as good an idea,

as it seems, which is that withdrawal

from drugs you are physically addicted to

often carries physiological effects.

And, you know, most withdrawals are not fatal, right?

But it can become fatal when someone is going through withdrawal

from a drug they're physically addicted to

and you deeply depressed their central nervous system

for days on end with huge doses of binzos.

So people die sometimes.

Why, wait, what do you mean, how?

Like they stop breathing.

It's a, it's a, it's a CNS depressing.

Yeah, so they just, they just, I mean,

there's other ways this kills them too,

but a lot of times they just stop fucking breathing

or their heart just stops, right?

Wow.

There are other ways this cocktail kills people.

Some people are just allergic, right?

And have bad reactions.

Or some people are more vulnerable to binzos than others.

And so a dose that's okay for one is dangerous

or fatal for another person, right?

And they're not always being as careful as they should be,

right?

Analogies.

And again, oftentimes this is being done in facilities

where they're trying to deal with as many people

as quickly as possible and they're not overly concerned

with stuff like, you know, safety,

as much as they should be, right?

That said, physicians love this

because psychiatrists love this because it,

it gives what certain kinds of psychiatrists

because obviously you get your Freudian types

who it's all about talk therapy.

But there are psychiatrists who's whole thing is drugs,

drugs, give them something to, you know,

that's all that matters is dosim, right?

There's a place for aspects of that, obviously.

Sure.

But when you take it to the too far extent,

you're like, I just don't want to deal,

I don't want to talk to the patient at all.

I don't want to deal with their shit.

I want them knocked out and then I can give them

whatever medication I think will help them

because I'm the doctor and it's only my opinion

that matters, right?

That is how a lot of these guys think.

Are these people brought in by their families

or like, so if they died, would somebody care?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Okay.

Some of these people are basically wards of the state

or are brought in by the state.

They're arrested or something.

They're sentenced to this place

because they're non-compassmentists

but they've committed a crime.

But a lot of people take themselves in

because like, I can't sleep.

I'm depressed.

I'm suffering horrible anxiety, right?

So it's a mix of ways people get into this.

But a lot of doctors are very enthusiastic about it.

And in terms of when you're talking about the practitioners

who are advocates of this therapy,

they will tell patients that they can get relief

from their symptoms after just a couple of weeks

that they won't even be awake for.

Instead of basically they're saying,

look, you can go to the Freudian and maybe it'll help you

but it'll take years of therapy

or knock your problem out in two weeks.

You're not even awake.

Wow.

Good.

That's what they have an ad on Santa Monica and Koenga

for whatever that thing is.

That's like the neuro link or something.

Where it's like, it literally says,

like don't be depression gone.

I'm like, that can't be right.

And I'm always, you should and you should always be

super on guard whenever anyone's talking about

like a serious mental health problem like

and this just knocks it out.

Wow.

Has that ever happened?

It's a health.

There's some stuff like I got the thing that changed my,

when I was a kid and very anti drug,

the thing that like changed my mind about pot legality

is I had a friend with multiple sclerosis

who like we she's my wow guild

and she got we got on like a webcam chat

so she could show me how her hands were shaking

as her friend prepared a joint for her

so she can like how and I was like, oh, of course.

Right.

Oh, right.

No, that was all it took for me, right?

Sometimes you do get stuff that is that miraculous

for certain things, but not for something that's as complex

and as wide-ranging as just depression, right?

Right.

That's just, I don't trust anybody making claims like that.

So as time goes on, it becomes clear

that deep sleep therapy has a lot of deadly issues with it.

Patients undergoing it have a high tendency

to contract pneumonia, they get bed sores

that often get hideously infected in part

because since these people are unconscious for days on end,

the order of these are supposed to be taking them

to the bathroom.

But if you're just letting someone sleep,

maybe they're not, maybe they're putting them in a diaper,

maybe the diaper overflows,

maybe they're not changing the diaper often enough.

And so you have bed sores

that then people get shit wedged into.

Not good for your health.

For the video people that can see my face,

you get it.

But for the all listeners, I would say through like,

75% of what Robert's been saying,

my mouth is just wide open.

It's not pleasant.

I am so shocked.

And this is not everywhere that does this.

There are good facilities where,

and the good facilities people still die

because the treatment is inherently dangerous and a bad idea,

but they're not dying of bed,

they're not getting bed sores, right?

They're not sitting in their own shit,

but there are places where that happens, right?

And in all cases, even when you're doing this well,

there's a risk of blood clots

because people are on their backs,

laying down for days at a time.

And when you do that,

you can sometimes you pop a fucking clot, right?

Right, right.

The medical term is pop a clot.

Pop a fucking clot.

There's a lot of risks with this shit

and it becomes very clear as time goes on.

And so a lot of doctors start criticizing the therapy

and people pull back from it.

A number of practitioners stop using it.

A number of hospitals stop using it.

And the practitioners that are using it,

most of them substantially narrow the scope

of its prescription, right?

They start sending out less and less

and are more discriminating about when they use it.

But the time World War II ends,

the vast majority of patients

who are getting deep sleep therapy in the UK

are war veterans with what we now describe as PTSD.

And I gotta tell you,

thinking back to 2017 was when I had

my first really bad PTSD break.

There was like a three to four week period

where I was borderline psychotic.

Like I was not making rational decisions.

I could, like I couldn't hold a thought together.

Like I was, I don't know how to describe you

if you haven't been there, like how disorienting

and debilitating it was.

If I could have just been unconscious for three or four weeks,

I probably would have said yes.

Yeah, but do you think that would have helped you?

No, no, no, the data says it wouldn't have, right?

But I do understand, I can see how in good faith

a doctor would be like,

this is probably the best thing for this guy.

And I can see how a fucking vet would be like,

please just knock me unconscious for a while.

As long as you promise I won't dream,

yeah, let's fucking do it, you know?

Like I get why people try this.

Yeah, I mean, I have bipolar disorder

and during mania, I would have,

I could see like people well-meaning family members

or something being like, knock them out.

Knock them out.

So that he can't do anything to himself.

Right.

And it's the, I should also note here that

by this point in time in the UK,

when they're prescribing these soldiers,

they're not knocking them out for days at a time.

The standard length of treatment is less than a day, right?

They're doing that sometimes for regularly,

like periodically, you'll go in and they'll knock you out

for hours, but they're not,

they're not being unconscious for days at a time.

So what did help you?

Oh, me, time, some amount, some of it was therapy.

It's mostly just like time, honestly.

Like it's mostly just time.

Like kind of PRN in the moment,

there's some medications that offer some benefits

to some people, but when you actually look into PTSD medicine,

there's a lot of like efficacy is not always very high

for the medications that have been prescribed traditionally

for PTSD.

Yeah.

Time is the thing that's had the biggest impact on me.

And these people don't want time.

Well, yeah, they don't want time

and the doctors are like promising them they don't need it,

right?

So you see both, these are not,

this is not like a lot of con cures where like parents

are shooting bleach into their kids

to stop them from having autism or something.

I understand and sympathize with the people

who would think this might work,

with the patients who would agree to this, right?

It makes, I probably would have at this point,

at that point in time, if I'd been dealing

with fucking war trauma or something,

I could see myself being like,

yeah, man, knock me the fuck out, right?

Mm-hmm.

So among most psychiatrists

that are still using deep sleep therapy

have significantly like tempered down it, right?

You're not knocking people out for days at a time anymore.

You're only using it in a couple of cases.

But some psychiatrists, a small number,

still see deep sleep therapy is having a massive value.

And the primary use it has is that

when someone is unconscious,

they can't stop you from doing stuff to them, right?

And I don't mean,

I don't mean if in the like the gross cell

though that probably does happen.

I mean electric and volts of therapy,

which is at this point, as I said,

a common treatment for all manual

or mood disorders and compulsive behaviors.

Because it's scary and unpleasant,

a lot of patients refuse to have it done to them.

So doctors start telling them,

okay, what if I knock you out and you're not awake

and we use electric shock therapy,

you won't be aware of it or remember it.

So some patients say, okay, we'll try it then.

Some doctors though.

And that's fine, right?

I mean, again, some time proved it's not a good idea,

but that's consent.

If the doctor's saying,

hey, can I knock you unconscious and use ECT on you?

And you say, yes, that's consent, right?

Some doctors are like, well, if there are any unconscious,

why do I need to get consent?

I can just shock them.

Like, fuck, ask them.

I'll just do it, you know?

What are they gonna do, right?

Well, they'll be barred the fuck out.

If they say, why did you do ECT on me?

I'll say you agreed to it while you were barred the fuck out.

That's what I was gonna say.

Are they, are they later saying that they didn't

or is the person like not aware that that's what happened?

Usually, often people don't find out.

And when they do, they're generally,

because we have a good amount of,

generally when they find out and complain,

they're told, no, no, you agreed to this, you know?

Right? Here's the paperwork, right?

So this is not a high point for medical ethics.

Dr. Donald Cameron, the famous Canadian.

It's the same understatement.

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Donald Cameron, the famous Canadian physician

who experimented with deep sleep therapy

was later criticized for drugging and shocking patients

without their consent and exploring practical torture techniques

as a psychiatrist.

He was advising, I think, the government

on how theoretically torture should work, right?

Oh, theoretically.

Yeah.

Dr. William Sargent, the prominent UK physician

that I mentioned earlier,

wrote this about electrocuting patients

without their consent in a medical textbook

that was published in 1972.

That's many patients.

No, recent.

It's really recent.

Here's Billy Sargent.

Many patients unable to tolerate a long course of ECT

can do so when anxiety is relieved by Narcosis.

What is so valuable is that they generally have no memory

about the actual length of the treatment

or the numbers of ECT used.

After three or four treatments without Narcosis,

they may ask for ECT to be discontinued

because of an increasing dread of further treatments.

Combining sleep with ECT avoids this.

All sorts of treatment can be given

while the patient has kept sleeping,

including a variety of drugs in ECT,

which together generally induce considerable memory loss

for the period under Narcosis.

As a rule, the patient does not know how long he has been asleep

or what treatment, even including ECT he has been given.

Under sleep, one can now give many kinds

of physical treatment, necessary,

but often not easily tolerated.

We may be seeing here a new exciting beginning in psychiatry

and the possibility of a treatment error

such as follow the introduction of anesthesia to surgery.

So Sargent is saying,

DST isn't valuable because sleep therapy in and of itself works.

This is the future of all psychiatry,

because the future of psychiatry is knocking your patient out

and doing whatever the fuck you want to them

until you fix them.

Well, one, how do you even define fixed at that point?

You're just like a blank.

And there's a lot of questions.

Well, sure, yeah, I'm asking, yes, right.

And two, your body still remembers,

like if someone broke your leg and then knocked you out

and then you woke up and your leg had been healed,

you would still have effects of like a broken leg.

Right, right, yes.

Yes, the body keeps the score,

which is certainly during the case of a broken leg.

Um, speaking of bodies,

you know who's killed a lot of people?

What?

Not the sponsors of this podcast.

Here's ads.

No one knows what the future holds,

but you deserve a weather app that can help.

Weather bug is easy to use and provides forecasts

for your every need.

From storm warnings to pollen levels,

right at your fingertips,

get the fastest local alerts

and comprehensive 10-day forecasts wherever you are.

It's hyper-local, real-time, customizable alerts.

Make sure the weather never takes you by surprise

so you can plan every day with confidence.

Download the free weather bug app from the app store today

and start getting accurate weather forecasts 24-7.

You know what I can really go for right now?

Literally anything that comes in a McDonald's carton,

wrapper, or bag, or a McDonald's cup.

Yes, any of those items you do it.

We've got your cravings covered.

Now, stop in for the flaky filet of fish,

the crispy snack wrap,

or a large fries for just $2.99.

Limited time only, price and participation may vary,

cannot be combined with any other offer.

Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

Support for the show comes from public,

the investing platform for those who take it seriously.

On public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio

of stock, sponsor, option, scripto,

and now generated assets,

which allow you to turn any idea

into an investable index with AI.

It all starts with your prompt,

from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow

to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue

over 20% year over year.

You can literally type any prompt

and put the AI to work.

It screens thousands of stocks,

builds a one-of-a-kind index,

and lets you backtest it against the S&P 500.

Then, you can invest in a few clicks.

Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities,

completely customizable and based on your thesis,

not someone else's.

Go to public.com slash podcast,

enter in an uncapped 1% bonus

when you transfer your portfolio.

That's public.com slash podcast,

paid for by public investing,

brokerage services by open to the public investing ink,

member Finra and SIPC,

advisory services by public advisors LLC,

SEC registered advisor.

Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool.

Output is for informational purposes only

and is not an investment recommendation or advice.

Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Let's talk about modern home shopping.

It's sort of become a fun side hobby, right?

Scrolling listings at night,

dreaming about kitchens you've never seen,

or backyards you haven't even stepped foot in,

all from the comforts of pretty much anywhere.

Redfin knows a lot of people like you want to own,

but are stuck in this browsing mode loop.

That's where Redfin flips the script.

With listings that update within minutes

and tours you can book right from the Redfin app,

you can see your dream home the moment it appears.

Now liking a listing is easy,

but actually landing it,

that's where Redfin comes in.

Redfin has over 2,200 agents with local expertise.

And Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents.

That means they want to help you win,

not just window shop.

Redfin is built to help you go from just looking

to wait, this could actually be home.

So become the newest neighbor on the block.

Visit redfin.com to start finding and start owning.

That's redfin.com.

And we're back.

So deep sleep therapy speaks to a powerful desire

among many mental healthcare practitioners.

We want to be able to treat our patients under the hood

without interference from their conscious

subjections or comments.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, not great.

This brings us back to Dr. Harry Bailey.

Bailey became aware of Dr. Sargent and his methods

while he was doing his 15 month world tour

with the WHO.

He worked alongside Dr. Sargent for a period of time

and observed him treating his patients.

When Bailey returned to Australia,

he was full to burst in with exciting new ideas.

He quickly convened Kalen Park Mental Hospital

to establish a cerebral surgery and research unit,

which opened in 1957 with him as the director.

Can we talk about how menacing Dr. Sargent sounds?

It's a cool name.

It's a cool name.

It's a several times and I was like,

oh, I don't know about that guy.

But I would like to find is a guy with a last name,

Sargent, to make into a doctor.

And then a guy with a last name, doctor.

And you have him join the military and becomes a sergeant.

And then you've got Dr. Sargent and Sargent doctor.

And they get married.

Yeah, I don't know what to do after that point.

But yes, there you go.

And they get married and hyphenate their names.

So it's now Dr. Sargent, Dr.

and Sargent, Dr. Sargent.

The dream, the dream.

The dream.

Bailey begins experimenting with new ECT methods,

often using various barbituids and downers

to knock patients unconscious first.

For Dr. Philip Hickey,

Sargent and Bailey wouldn't mail each other

bragging about how many patients they'd knocked out each week,

keeping score like Gimli and Legolas

during the battle of Helm's Deep.

Like they're literally being like,

here's how many people I put into a coma this week.

Man, you're falling behind.

Better knocks some more people out.

Which you might think maybe leads to them

knocking people unconscious and drugging them

who don't need it at all,

even under their own standards,

just because they want to contest, maybe.

So this all seems pretty fucked up,

a lot of what we've talked about.

But I got to say,

what Sargent and Bailey are doing

is still fairly widely accepted behavior

within their professional circles.

Not all of them,

but within psychiatry.

Generally speaking,

this is not controversial at this point in time.

It's certainly not something people are angry about.

There is general criticism of deep sleep therapy.

But Dr. Sargent and Dr. Bailey

are both award-winning,

prominent and respected members of the profession

within their field, within their countries.

Now, one of the issues.

Do you know what those same medications

were being used for other stuff?

Like were they giving new tons?

Yes.

Like were they giving you benzos

for like physical ailments and other things?

Like, okay.

One of the reasons why it's so hard to get benzos now

is that from the 50s through the 70s,

they were handing them out like fucking candy,

especially to like depressed housewives,

who also drank because it was the 50s and 60s.

And so it should load to people,

lost their moms,

because they would overdose on benzos and alcohol.

It happened to fuckload in during the period of time.

But I'm not talking about depression.

I'm talking about like,

do they give ammo barbertold to someone who's like,

my kidney's hurt.

No, no, no, no, no, you wouldn't.

We're all psychiatric.

And I think there is a degree,

because some of these are used before surgery and stuff.

So yes, some of these,

I don't know if it's ammo barbertold,

but some of the stuff these in this cocktail are used

to help knock people out for other procedures, right?

Because they're good for that.

Yes.

Okay.

But no,

someone's probably not getting prescribed ammo barbertold

because like they've got a fucking stomach ache

or whatever, that would be kind of weird.

So one of the issues at this point in time,

and it's still somewhat of an issue today,

but it's much worse back then,

is that two people outside of the medical system,

including people in the government,

mental healthcare is basically a black box.

No one really knows what goes on in these facilities

that doesn't work or get admitted to them.

And the people who don't work

or get admitted to these facilities

kind of don't want to know anything about them, right?

So Dr. Bailey is primarily the only people

who know what he's doing are his peers,

and they love him.

He receives the Northern Manning Memorial Prize

for Psychiatry, as I said,

and then a prize for Pediatrics.

Per the Australian Encyclopedia Biography,

his reputation high in 1959.

Bailey was appointed Medical Superintendent of Kalen Park,

a large institution suffering from years of neglect

and a culture of confinement.

He proved to be an impatient performer

within a few months he submitted a report

to the public service board

with detailed allegations of staff cruelty,

patient neglect, and daily pilfering from hospital stores.

Subsequent police and Department of Public Health

investigations found nothing to substantiate the charges.

Undeterred, Bailey blew the whistle

and dramatic newspaper headlines

embarrassed the Heiferan government,

particularly the responsible minister, William Shean.

Despite the resulting Royal Commission report

into Kalen Park by John McClemmons

confirmed many of Bailey's allegations

while concluding that some are exaggerated.

So he's looking pretty good at this point, right?

So whistleblower.

He's a whistleblower.

There's real problems at this facility,

but you're also seeing some of the signs

of the later problem this guy's gonna be

because even though there's real problems

that he's right about, he's lying too.

He's pretending stuff's worse than it is.

He's exaggerating.

He's kind of a showman, he likes drama, right?

He's also got this problem of,

he's knowingly judges up or just the truth or just lies,

but he also gets very convinced of his own

rightness and righteousness.

And even when people around him are convinced he's wrong,

that just convinces him further that he's right.

And in this case, that's a good thing

because this hospital did need to be investigated,

but that's not gonna be the case much longer.

Yeah.

He's like, he's like, it's not gonna be bad enough

to tell them this one thing,

so I'll just make up a bunch of stuff

and then it will be undeniable.

Right, right, right.

And one of the issues here is that this is a good thing

he does, and it makes him one of the most famous doctors

in Australia at the time,

because he's in the news or at least in New South Wales

at the time, because he's in the news a lot,

because it's a big story that the shit got covered up.

So you've got, at this point, Dr. Bailey

is not just an award-winning psychiatrist

with widespread professional acclaim

in several continents,

but a crusading activist for medical ethics.

Obviously, this is the guy you trust.

If your loved one needs mental health care,

he's the best guy to go to.

Dr. Bailey, after this point?

Yeah, not gonna be good.

Yeah, too much power.

Yep, the lesson here, folks,

is if anyone ever does anything good, you need to do it.

Yeah, look into it, throw him into the ocean.

The instant someone does anything good,

pass him into the sea, you know?

I just think, I just think when you do that,

like I see the merit of it, like he's trying,

but when you do that,

you don't get to the actual heart of the issues,

because you're just compounding stuff.

So like your actual thing that you're worried about

doesn't, it's not in the conversation,

because you're just making stuff up

to have some sort of sleeping, you know?

Yeah, part of the issue is that like Dr. Bailey

probably even did hamper the reform efforts

by lying about shit.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say, yeah.

But regular people don't know shit about that, right?

He's the hero doctor, so he starts a private practice

and it's immediately a success.

He's making a fuck load of money,

because I don't know if you all have noticed this,

but a lot of people don't trust doctors.

And so if you're the guy who's all over the news,

because he's the doctor who blew the whistle

on a bunch of bad doctors.

You might attract a really loyal following

of people who don't trust doctors.

This is kind of what, I mean, in a different way,

this is kind of what Andrew Wakefield does, right?

I mean, Wakefield doesn't ever actually bust

any real problem, he doesn't ever bring up

and he call it like solve any real problems,

but he's a doctor who's trying to warn people

about the bad other doctors.

And if you're someone who doesn't trust a doctor,

that's a really appealing kind of guy, right?

I was thinking about him, yeah.

Yep, Bailey is very appealing

when he starts in private practice.

This is 1962 when he begins his private practice.

And in 1963, he works at a deal with two other doctors,

Ian Gardner and John Gill,

to treat patients together at the Chumsford Private Hospital.

This is not a normal medical employment situation

for Dr. Bailey.

Chumsford was a small for-profit hospital

and Bailey had helped to fund it.

He's a part owner in the hospital,

the NSA on the website waking.io.

The financial arrangements revealed

by the Royal Commission painted a picture

of systemic exploitation.

Bailey received both his standard consultation fees

and a percentage of the hospital's revenue

from each patient he admitted.

This created a perverse incentive

to extend treatment duration

regardless of medical necessity,

to admit patients with minor conditions

who didn't require hospitalization,

to discourage early discharge,

even when families requested it,

and to maximize the use of expensive medications

and procedures.

Every time someone comes in and Dr. Bailey,

he's like, oh, this person doesn't need to be hospitalized,

but he tells them he need to be hospitalized for three days.

He knows exactly how much of that money

goes directly into his pocket, right?

Not just from seeing a patient,

but from the, he gets a cut of the cost of their treatment

every time.

So every new thing he can stick on, money in the bank, right?

Why wouldn't he use as much expensive drugs as possible

and as many expensive, right?

That's part of why he's doing,

he likes ECT on unconscious people,

is it allows him to charge for an expensive procedure

that he doesn't have to get them to agree to

and he can basically double his money

on the fucking sleep therapy.

He doesn't even have to do it.

Yeah.

Yeah, he doesn't even have to do it, right?

Right, right, or have one of his,

because he's got other doctors here.

He often has them do it, right?

Just going to say it, this doctor, Bailey guy.

Not great guy.

Yep.

So by the time he starts at Chelmsford,

Dr. Bailey considers deep sleep therapy

to be more than just a subject of intellectual interest.

It is the core of a financial enterprise

that he is starting to build.

With DSD, you can keep patients down for weeks at a time

and they're paying for every day in the hospital

and you're getting money for every day

they spend in the hospital.

Dr. Bailey used his prestige

in the fact that his hospital

was the only one offering this treatment in the area

to charge patients between 400 and 600%

more than comparable treatments cost

from other practitioners.

He regularly kept people unconscious

and sedated for days beyond what his treatment plans

suggested to maximize the amount of time he could build.

Via that same essay, quote,

some families reported bills exceeding their annual income.

Did the other doctors, the two other doctors

that were working with him, did they know

that he was scamming?

Oh, yeah.

Several of the doctors at Chelmsford are directly implicated.

They are helping him.

They are benefiting, one way or the other,

benefiting as well from the scams.

Yes, the other doctors are very implicated in this.

Now, I don't know if they're fully aware,

especially at the start of how bad this is.

There's some, especially the doctors and nurses

working early on might think they're really doing the best

because again, we don't, less is known, right?

But he's doing this for almost 20 years.

It becomes clear at a certain point

this is just a grift that's hurting people.

Right.

Yeah.

Speaking of grifts that hurt people,

you know what my favorite grift is?

Products and services?

No, ending this podcast for the day,

because I'm tired.

We'll be back to her say with more,

you wanna plug your pluggables at the end here though?

Sure, these are what one would call my products and services.

That's right.

You can go to my sub-stack,

1000naturalshocks.substack.com.

There's also a...

Just like ECT, by the way.

Oh, yeah.

Didn't even think that.

Mine's a hamlet reference because I'm unbearable.

And then there's the 1000 NaturalShocks podcast.

I also do a podcast called Best Gabe Ever.

That's more light-hearted.

And that's it.

Yeah.

Gabe, I think I know how you and I can make a shit load of money.

Is it shocking people?

Well, not exactly.

I'm a doctor in the state of New Jersey,

according to this plaque I received once.

So we open a clinic and I get people huge doses

of binzos to knock them out.

And then instead of giving them electroshock therapy,

we play your podcast of shock.

Ooh, I really thought you were gonna say we play REM.

I really thought you were gonna say we play REM.

No, no.

Incredible.

Michael Stipe gets enough fucking money.

All right, Gabe.

Thank you very much.

We'll be back with part two on Thursday, folks.

Until then, go to hell.

I love you.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website,

coolzonemedia.com.

Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards

are now streaming on Netflix,

dropping every Tuesday and Thursday.

Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode.

For clips and our older episode catalog,

continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel,

youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

No one knows what the future holds,

but you deserve a weather app that can help.

Weatherbug is easy to use and provides forecasts

for your every need.

From storm warnings to pollen levels,

write at your fingertips,

get the fastest local alerts

and comprehensive 10-day forecasts wherever you are.

It's hyper-local, real-time customizable alerts.

Make sure the weather never takes you by surprise

so you can plan every day with confidence.

Download the free weather bug app from the app store today

and start getting accurate weather forecasts 24-7.

A better help ad.

International Women's Day is this March,

and it's a chance to celebrate women in all their brilliance.

The leaders, the caregivers,

the problem solvers, the hype friends,

the quiet forces,

the how do you do it all types.

Answer with a lot of strength

and usually very little rest.

Therapy can be one way to support

the incredible work you already do.

A space just for you to reflect,

reset and reconnect with what fuels you.

Your goals, your boundaries, your joy.

Better help makes starting therapy simple

by matching you with a qualified therapist

based on your needs and preferences.

No pressure, no guesswork.

And if your first match isn't quite right,

you can switch anytime.

Here's to celebrating women

and giving yourself support along the way.

Visit betterhelp.com for 10% off.

That's betterhelp.com.

Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse?

Pay course intelligent HR solution,

empowers leaders to turn down the pressure,

their unified platform includes payroll,

talent management, compliance software,

and a lot more,

connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need

to drive long-term business results.

Visit paycord.com slash leaders

and go from work flood to work flow.

That's paycord.com slash leaders.

In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you.

Don't let them down.

Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com.

Dominate every match with next level speed,

seamless streaming, and performance that won't quit.

Push your gameplay beyond performance

with Intel Core Ultra processors

for the next era of gaming.

Upgrade to smooth high-quality streaming

with Intel Wi-Fi 6E

and maximize game performance with enhanced overclocking.

Win the tech search.

Powerup at Lenovo.com.

Lenovo, Lenovo.

This is an iHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.