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

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast filmed in front of a live studio audience.

If the words live studio audience refer to the other people in my Airbnb who can probably

hear me through the door.

We are giving our part to Dr. Sleep Harry Bailey, the Australian doctor who slept people

to death kind of.

And our guest in this episode as in last episode is Gabe Dunn.

Gabe, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

I'm a huge fan.

In case people didn't hear the first one, which would be a weird thing for them to do.

I'm a huge fan.

I love this show.

I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah.

We got a little, we like to do a little warm up before every episode.

You know, we're just like ask a little questions to the audience and get them to know the guest

better.

Here were you on the night of May 17th, 2007.

I was a freshman in college, so probably in Boston, probably with a boyfriend who is

cheating on me.

Okay.

But I don't know if he specifically cheated on me on that day.

Many such cases.

Many such cases.

Let me just take this down, Gabe denies being present during murder.

Okay.

We'll just move on then.

Great.

So are you ready for part two?

Do you have any Boston in the murder?

A lot of murders do.

Again, Boston.

You know what?

Two-shake.

Two-shake.

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So it's probably time to talk about what Dr. Bailey was like to work with, and to go to

as a patient or a parent as a patient, right?

What's this guy like as a colleague, as a boss, and as your doctor?

He was obviously a charming man, very charismatic, and this is obvious because he was able to

convince large numbers of his colleagues and many patients that he's totally legitimate,

right?

Not only legitimate, but a really good physician, and he's got a talent for displaying

himself and portraying himself in a way that makes people think he is trustworthy, right?

I don't trust anyone who seems trustworthy.

That's a good...

Right.

When I need someone to watch my car or my cat for a weekend, I make my way to the most

windowless strip club in Portland, and I find a guy sitting in the back who's obviously

carrying an illegal concealed weapon, and I give him the keys to my house, you know?

Because he looks so shady, he's obviously a good guy.

That's what the Home Alone movie's taught us.

That is what it taught us.

No, I just mean if you're like a celebrity, if you're like someone who's like Tom Hanks,

what's Tom Hanks up to?

I'll trust that guy.

Neither do the QAnon people.

Tom Hanks is the deep state.

Very true.

Very true.

Yeah, he's a charming guy.

Multiple people who knew him all noted that Harry Bailey was always well dressed, and as

his career went on, he was able to afford fine tailored suits.

He was, as the Australian encyclopedia of biography notes, both a, quote, cherub-faced

charmer and prone to, quote, occasional drunken rages.

There's not enough to tell about those occasional drunken rages.

Unfortunately, we do not have nearly the context I'd like to have on this guy's drunken

rages.

He's the wolves that live inside you.

Yeah.

And I kind of reading between the lines, I think both his wife and some of his nurses put

up with his occasional drunken rages, right, that he, he sometimes is a real problem.

You're at work drunk as a doctor, well dressed, cubic?

Maybe.

I can't say that, like, there's just very little detail on this, but kind of from other

things, people said, I kind of think maybe he, at least, maybe it was because it may

have just been like work parties and stuff that sometimes he got too drunk at, right?

Okay.

That's happening.

Fuck Mary Kilt, Fuck Mary Kilt, Cherubic, well dressed, drunken rage.

Let's see.

Fuck well dressed, Mary drunken rage, Mary drunken rage, and kill the cherub.

Yeah.

Okay.

Wow.

Didn't see that coming.

I did.

I fear I did.

So he also has a tendency to lie.

This is noted by his colleagues and some peers pretty early on, like a lot.

And weirdly, in situations where it's not necessary, and often to exaggerate stuff that

he definitely did, like he do something positive or that was seen as positive.

And then he would lie about it to make it seem even like a bigger deal.

So people notice this about him, too.

I get it.

I get it.

Salesman, you know?

Right.

Right.

And some of this is like his colleagues and some of the people who work with him will

note that like, oh, he'll light a patience about some of his successes and things like

that.

He's not mostly lying.

He's lying to his colleagues, but he's lying a lot to convince people to do his treatment.

Right.

Like he's lying about how well this stuff works to get them in the bed.

Right.

Okay.

Now speaking of getting them in bed, Dr. Harry Bailey was also a man you would describe

as irresponsibly horny.

And in some cases, perhaps illegally horny.

The authors of the Chelmsford blog note that he had quote, a reputation for making sexually

inappropriate comments to or regarding female patients.

So that's not where that sleep stuff gets real creepy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just wait, Gabe.

And again, this is, if you're wondering like, well, why didn't this cause a problem before?

It's the 60s.

Yeah.

He is probably, I would, I would be shocked if much less than half of practicing male

doctors in this period had a reputation for making sexually inappropriate comments to

patients.

Maybe it wasn't that high, but I bet it was.

My grandfather was such a square.

He was a doctor around that time.

And he, my grandmother's and like my dad when all these people in our family said that he

was like not really liked because if another doctor married doctor was like having an affair

with like a nurse or something, he would just, he would be like, he would ice him.

He'd be like, I hate that guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, this is what we do.

We're fun.

And he was like the guy being like, hey, we shouldn't do this guys.

Can you believe he's got a problem with doctor, fucks every nurse?

My God.

Can you believe it?

That's his, his, yeah.

I got to think that other like he didn't have a lot of friends because he would be like,

I can't think out that guy.

He's a moron.

I can't hang out with you.

You're a sex pest.

Yeah.

That does you every now and then you see something like, like you got some of this during

like me too, where there would be, you would find out because usually you found out, oh,

the celebrity that I like or kind of like kept his mouth shut and knew about Weinstein.

But every now and then you'd find out about one who was like from the jump like, no,

fuck, fuck this guy.

I won't work with him.

And it was all, it was usually someone who you're like, oh, I wonder why their career

hadn't taken off more.

Oh, because they had ethics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because they were mean to the rapist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My grandpa wasn't climbing the ranks at the hospital.

Right.

Yeah.

Why do you want to stop everybody having fun, you know?

Right.

And that's the kind of doctor.

That's how Bayley is.

And again, that's also how he's seen.

This is not immediately seen as a problem by a lot of people in his profession because

the problem is why it's read in the profession.

Now, that said, an interesting thing about him is it's noted in several of my sources

that both his wife and a lot of his mistresses, many of the women he had affairs with, showed

incredible loyalty to him over the years.

He dicks my ties.

Something about this guy, it's not just like the women he's romantic with.

So a lot of his staff too, something about this guy, he really does inspire a lot of

loyalty in the people close to him.

So it's not just the woman he's sleeping with.

It's beyond that.

So he's not digmatizing.

Yeah.

It's not just the dicks.

Right.

He's the more has to be happening.

He has to be giving these people something out of a relationship that they value.

Even though his wife, like, leaves him eventually for cheating on him, you know?

Sure.

Sure.

Sure.

It's like, it's like Keith Renieri, Manson, it's like that kind of shit.

Yeah.

Or just, I've known men and women who cheated constantly on partners that they were with.

And we're also really pleasant and nice people outside of that who were very well liked

and who even their partners or former partners who got pissed at them, eventually would

be friends with them again because they're just really charming people who can't fucking

control themselves around consensual sex.

And maybe that's kind of what's going on with this guy is that he's just likable in person

for a long time.

That's crazy.

I kind of think that is the case to a lot of people.

I mean, some people do note, wow, that it's drunk and rages aren't great, but a lot of

people are able to put up with them.

And it's because he's giving them something, like providing them something socially that

they value.

So I don't know.

It's an interesting guy, right?

He's got something going on that makes this work for him.

I feel like it's narcissism, but I don't know.

I'm not a doctor.

I'm not a doctor putting people to sleep in the 60s.

What do I know?

I'm sure that plays a role.

I don't know, but he's also just very charismatic.

He's got the risk.

Yeah.

One of his colleagues, who's later implicated in some of his criminal behavior, Dr. John

Heron described Bailey as quote, a man of strong character and dogmatic opinion, but a man

who understood scientific theory and the scientific method.

This is a weird statement a little bit because what he's saying here is that like, Dr.

Bailey has a strong personality.

And when he comes to an opinion about something, it's kind of unbreakable.

If he's convinced of something, he doesn't get unconvinced of it.

But he's also a really good scientist who understands the scientific method.

And like, you kind of can't be both of those things.

You can't be a kind of guy who like just makes up his mind, no matter what countervailing

evidence shows up and also be a really strong practitioner of the scientific method.

Because kind of the whole point of the scientific method is like, you got to kill your darlings.

You know, like, I learned that the fifth grade.

Yeah, this really seems like it should work, but it doesn't.

So we're going to stop doing it is what scientists and doctors did with deep sleep

therapy. Dr. Bailey can't do that.

So I should also note that the fact that he cannot change course once he starts going

down a path, this is not just relevant with his embrace of deep sleep therapy.

Because Dr. Bailey also becomes a leading proponent of psychosurgery, which is,

you know, brain surgery is a treatment for various problems, right?

He is not giving lobotomies, thankfully.

I'll say that.

What is he doing?

What is he doing?

So modern day psychosurgery is you're using these are very generally very like targeted

and kind of minimal, like physical impact operations directly on the brain to deal

with like treatment resistant disorders, right?

Like today, a lot of the focus is we want to have as little of physical impact as possible,

right? We want to be doing really targeted work because it's very dangerous to fuck around with

this stuff. Psychosurgery is a little bit more of the wild west in Dr. Bailey's time and

day, right?

And he's also convinced that homosexuality is an illness and an illness that can be cured

by psychosurgery.

So he does prescribe brain surgery to a lot of gay people.

The one thing he was right about everybody knows that.

Everybody knows that.

Yeah.

Now, as I stated, his patients are at first in the early days, very loyal to him in a way that

bordered for some people kind of on being seem like drug dependency, which it may have been.

Cause some people do really regularly come in for like, re-up bouts of sleep therapy.

And part of me is like, are they just addicted?

Yeah.

You know,

yeah, part of the loyalty, at least the short term loyalty that a lot of his patients have is

that he's selling them an answer to their worst and most intractable problems, right?

You get a child or you got a close relative who's suffering from constant psychotic

breaks, right?

It's a huge problem.

It can fuck up an entire phase of really big issue.

And someone says, two weeks of sleep and they'll be back to normal.

They'll be back to the, you know, the version of themselves.

You remember if a doctor sits down and looks you in the eye and promises you that and his

walls filled with awards, you're probably going to say, okay, do it, right?

You know, and likewise, yeah.

And if you're, if it's you going in and your anxiety is so bad, you can't even sleep anymore.

And it's ruined your fucking life.

Dr. Bailey will put it like, hold you and tell you it's going to be okay.

And then the second he can, he will drug you into unconsciousness and start performing

surgery and shit on you.

So he doesn't think you can sleep the gay away.

But he thinks you can, he can chop it out of you because I, and I don't know that he did

this, but it kind of sounds like he thinks if maybe he could knock you out and then surgery

the gay away, but I can't find it.

I don't know that he actually did.

They tried to do that to me, but I just ended up trans.

So we had to scrap it.

It's very delicate procedure and yeah, he did a little slip.

I'm all.

So the Chelmsford blog notes that as far as Dr. Bailey was concerned, he had many loyal

independent patients, yet would often make callous comments about them in private circles.

After his death, like, yeah, he's again, he's, he's promising his people everything.

Like they will talk about how compassionate he seemed.

And then he'll be like, can you believe he's fucking losers?

You know, there's a royal commission report after his death that aggregates accounts

from a bunch of his co-workers, employees, and patients in this report concludes that he

was quote, too faced, devious, dissembling, and unprincipled.

And I feel like now that we've set his personality up more, let's talk about what all this

stuff means in practice.

What is he doing to his patients?

One of his early patients was a 13 year old girl who was admitted, suffering symptoms

of anorexia nervosa.

She was placed into a drug-induced coma and strapped naked to a chair.

Then the treatment began per an article in Reuters by Australian journalist Michael Perry.

Just after midnight, a doctor entered the ward, moments later, her body rudely awakened

from a drug-induced coma thrust violently upwards as a ball of electricity surged through

it. It happened 10 times and two weeks without anesthetic, without her consent, and without

the knowledge of her parents.

Eventually, she was discharged with brain damage, but she is one of the lucky ones because

she survived.

Cool.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

What year is this 13 year old girl?

No anesthetic, no consent, huh?

What year is this?

I think 63 or 64.

He starts practicing deep sleep therapy at Chumsford in 63.

I think this is a fairly early patient.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I mean, that's like, how do we know that that's what happened?

Who told because they take, they take, they document it.

Like they're taking, they're keeping notes and stuff.

Like these are patients, they're being treated, you know?

The files are not right.

Yeah.

Like, like, they're not always providing the files to the regulators they're supposed to

and stuff, but they are taking note about what they're doing.

It's not just random.

Okay.

Yeah.

Bailey started practicing deep sleep therapy as I said in 63.

And as you're all now, well, where he often paired it with electroshock therapy, but

he also experimented with other kinds of serious medical procedures.

Like I said, he's into psychosurgery and he doesn't always get consent from his patients

before he performs surgery on them.

In 1966, Glenn Whitty, age 28, went to Chelmsford for DST.

She woke up after several days under and went on with her life.

She seems to have felt that it may be helped.

I don't actually have an account from her saying how she felt about it, but she goes on

with her life.

She doesn't seem to have a complaint initially.

18 years later, one day a lump appears on the size of her head and it grows to the size

of an egg.

So she's like, the fuck is happening here?

And after a couple of days, the lump splits open and a metal plate falls out.

Shut the fuck up.

Yeah.

Cool stuff.

Is that in some body horror fucking Cronenberg ass shit?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, some Ted Suo Ironman bullshit.

The next year another metal plate emerged, right?

And she has no explanation for what the fuck is happened.

Other than that, these must have been surgically inserted to her at Chelmsford.

Elaine Gainesboro, who visited Chelmsford the same year as Glenn Whitty, also told Reuters

that she had four metal plates inserted into her skull.

She was not informed that this had been done and only found out that this has been done

nine years later because a pin holding one of the plates to the bone broke.

She started experiencing difficulty speaking after this and blames whatever the fuck

Dr. Bailey did to her for that.

As Whitty told Reuters, we called Dr. Bailey the science professor because he was

experimenting on all of us.

We are all damaged, brain damaged.

And she blames that on his little horror hospital.

But I don't know why Frankenstein ass fucking yeah.

Okay, wait, okay, you have metal in your head.

You don't know.

You're hit by lightning or you don't know and you go through like a metal detector.

You got to know there's metal in you or a fucking MRI that can kill you.

You can put metal in people and not tell them you sure can't.

Um, it's, it's, it's wild.

Like I don't know why he did this.

It, these are both, I think from the same year, like 64 was it?

I would like to know that all of these are men, which I understand that doctors

largely were.

And the three test subjects you've thus spoken about are young women.

Uh-huh.

A lot of his patients are women.

Yeah.

Oh, shocking.

A lot of women attended, I guess.

Um, so I don't know like why he

did this, but it does kind of, he may have stopped after 63.

This may have been an experiment where he was like, I wonder if this will help

for some reason, this case.

And it didn't.

And so he stops doing it.

At least I don't, these are the only accounts I found of people claiming

that this happened to them.

And they're both from 63.

So maybe he stops doing this, but he's doing other stuff, right?

The show, he's, he's perfectly willing to experiment in very invasive ways

on people's bodies without their consent.

Oh, no, okay.

Now in the early years, when something like, it wasn't always a plate,

but patients would find out he'd done something to them that they had not

been told about that they hadn't consented to.

And they would complain, which is a normal thing to do, right?

And in this, whenever they did, they were told, Oh, no, you don't remember.

Well, here's the paper you sign.

You know, we did, we woke you up to feed you and asked if we could do this.

And you said, yes, and you signed the paper.

But of course, you're barred, the fuck out.

You have no idea what you've done.

So this is something that happened periodically throughout the days and weeks

that people were kept unconscious.

They generally did not remember their conscious moments because again,

their brains were drenched in barbituates.

Today, no reputable doctor or facility would consider this proper consent.

You absolutely cannot consent to surgery when you are woken up and still

on enough barbituates to drop a fucking mule, right?

That is not consent.

Even if you say yes, and sign a piece of paper,

and your signature is just like looping down the whole paper,

just going down the whole paper.

Yeah.

Now, this is also, and I should note, at the time,

this should have been a problem, but it wasn't.

It, this is not even at the time considered to be great medical ethics,

but it's also not considered bad enough that anyone does anything, right?

Like nothing gets referred, like nothing,

nothing makes it to a point where he has to like suffer consequences.

So people aren't taking this seriously, and he is getting reported to

regulators into the government.

So there are choices being made by professionals in the Australia,

who are supposed to be regulating the medical industry,

that when patients complain about stuff like this, his answer is sufficient.

Now, they signed a paper, they're just crazy.

Crazy people, never remember that.

Here's the signature.

You know, thanks for coming in, Dr. Bailey.

Sorry, we knew it was bullshit.

I mean, he's crazy broads, am I right?

You know, it's shit like that is happening all the time.

That's how he's getting away with it, right?

I suspect they know that it's not good,

but they don't want to deal with what that,

what that would cause to the medical community.

And we'll, we'll talk more about why he's allowed to get away with this.

But you know what you can get away with, listeners?

Wow.

A deal, a hell of a deal,

or adds for the Washington State Highway Patrol.

It's a crap shoot.

I don't know.

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Gabe and I have both joined the Washington State Highway Patrol.

It was a really convincing ad.

Really convincing ad.

I read it.

They didn't want me.

I forced it.

I read it.

You know, you're both free now.

The recruiter promised me I could serve in Hawaii.

I don't know why the Washington State Highway Patrol's there,

but I know so many guys who went to fucking Iraq and Afghanistan

because when they were 17, some guy was like,

yeah, you'll get to go to Hawaii.

Oh my God.

Of course you won't be fighting, son.

That's what they're telling Border Patrol right now.

Right.

So as I've said, there is a strain running across

the psychiatric profession.

And I'm not saying those are the only doctors

who have this problem, but we're talking about that today.

And there's a strain of, if only we could just do

whatever we know is best to these irksome patients

who always got to ask questions and say no to stuff, right?

That's a big thing for a lot of psychs.

And so the first complaints against Dr. Bailey go nowhere.

And this remains true even when he gets a child killed.

Ah, obviously people die sometimes in deep sleep therapy.

Remember, the first study on this

has a 12% fatality rate.

And deaths had happened to Dr. Bailey

from the start of his clinic, right?

And Dr. Sargent had gotten people killed over in the UK.

Chelmsford's first death of a DST patient occurred in 1963,

the first year that it was operating

and doing this therapy.

That death was marked down as death by misadventure,

which is a weird way to say you gave someone

an over a fatal overdose in a hospital.

But there was no investigation.

I've heard death by misadventure used before.

Yeah.

I don't know that I'd call it that.

Great name for a book though.

Yeah, oh, absolutely.

So it turns out that death is kind of unavoidable

when you're pounding people's nervous systems

with enough downers to fuck up an elephant.

By 1969, per a very good article in the Sydney Morning

Herald quote,

Bailey and Heron had been sending patients to Chelmsford

for a good rest for six years.

Tin had died as their bodies collapsed

under the weight of massive drug dosages and ECT.

Others would suffer terrifying hallucinations

and wake up naked in their own urine and feces

and a mixed sex ward.

So not a great place.

And the hallucinations don't really go,

like I'm sure they're kind of permanent.

There's things that are permanent even though you're alive.

Yeah, I don't think that the lose,

but they're a permanent call.

I mean, for one thing,

if you're not moving physically in a coma

for like two or three weeks,

that causes long term health issues.

You have to go to rehab to move right again.

It's bad to not move for several weeks at a time.

Right.

So by this point in time, by 1969,

there's quite a bit of evidence

that not only is this therapy bad,

but that the Chelmsford hospital itself

does not have great standards of care.

In 1965, nursing staff had even petitioned

the hospital administration,

which included Dr. Bailey about safety concerns.

No action was taken.

In 1967, there was an anonymous complaint

about Chelmsford to the health department.

No action was taken.

Psychiatric hospitals were not generally nice places.

And most people preferred not to think about them, right?

Including most people in government.

You want to look into this?

I don't want to fucking look into these crazy people.

They're probably just saying crazy shit.

Let the doctor do his thing.

He's won awards.

That's what's happening,

except for in an Australian accent, right?

Yeah.

You know?

Crookie.

Why worry about that?

That's insane.

We go triple in the barbie.

Yeah, you can't really even make that charming.

No, even in an Australian accent.

No.

So Elaine McKay was the mother of a 14 year old boy named Craig,

who suffered from cerebral retinal degeneration.

This meant that he had started going blind at age seven,

which he found traumatic and painful

for extremely obvious reasons.

He gets so depressed that Craig becomes

and his mother's words hard to handle

because he's really pissed off and sad.

She sits down in Dr. Bailey's nice office

outside the hospital to see if he can help.

Her boy, quote, he was a charmer.

He promised you the world and everyone said he was the best.

So once she walks Dr. Bailey through what's happening,

he prescribes DST for her son and she trusts him.

He told her you're losing him at the moment,

but all have your boy back.

And what loving parent,

hearing those words from an award-winning medical expert

wouldn't say yes, right?

Yeah.

It's not her fault.

She found a doctor who all of the professionals said

was a good doctor.

She did her job.

She's trying to get her boy cared for.

It's so fucked up.

Parents of the kids are so vulnerable.

Yeah, and the part of the sad thing

is that a lot of times today,

you hear a lot of parents getting their kids killed

with crack therapies, but it's obviously a bad

like you should have known not to do that to your kid.

This one, she did nothing wrong.

When I heard the Sydney Morning Herald,

Craig was admitted to Chelmsford in April 1969.

He stayed for four months

during which time his mother held a unique position

as a witness in the sedation ward.

None of the relatives of the other patients

in the sleep ward were allowed to visit, she recalls.

After they'd been down for two weeks,

the nurses and hairdressers would do them up

and make them look normal when the relatives could come in.

I saw it all because I was the only one allowed to stay.

I said that if they didn't let me stay,

I'd take Craig out myself.

What is happening here is they found a whale, right?

Craig's mom is a whale.

The family clearly has money

or they think the family has money.

So they're like, if we keep him in the hospital

for four straight months,

that's four months worth every day.

He's paying to be here.

Plus whatever fucking drugs we give him

and whatever fucking treatments we cook up, right?

Great, keep him in as long as we can.

Why ever let him go?

The hairdresser part really threw me.

Great stuff.

So after her son has been at the hospital for months,

she asks if she can take him home.

But the nurses said, quote,

just a little longer, just a few days longer.

She calls Dr. Bailey repeatedly to try to be like,

hey, when is this done?

I really want to take him out.

Are you sure he still needs to be doing this?

I don't see what more being asleep can really help.

And she doesn't know that this is happening,

but Dr. Bailey is giving her son

electroconvulsive therapy.

He is electrocuting Craig at night once she leaves.

And she doesn't realize this, but from that article, quote,

during the day, the nursing staff, she says,

were very kind and considerate and Craig was happy.

But he said, a bad man comes at night.

At the time, I didn't know what he meant.

Later, I realized it was Bailey.

That's him talking about Bailey

coming to electrocute him at night.

Wow.

So again, this kid's not unconscious the whole time.

He's being put unconscious for periods of time,

but he's not out the whole while.

And he's aware of some of the times

he's being fucking shocked because I just don't think

Dr. Bailey particularly cared.

Now, we don't know exactly what was done to this kid

because all of his medical records at the hospital

were mysteriously lost later.

So I can't tell you really.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Oh, interesting.

There was a fire in that one cabinet.

There was a freak fire that burnt one kid's file.

We don't know what Bailey gave him

or what extra curricular surgeries or drugs

he may have experimented with using.

But on August 19th, 1969, Elena arrived at Chelmsford

and saw her son sitting in front of a fan.

He was unconscious and there's like a fan blowing on him.

He's like visibly feverish and riddled with bed sores.

Oh, my God.

So she waits with her son that day, and then she heads home.

Later that night, she gets a call from Chelmsford.

And they tell her and her husband

that their son is dying.

So she calls the hospital frantic.

And the hospital, the person who picks her up

is like annoyed that she's freaking out.

It's like calm down.

You've got yourself into a bit of a mess.

She was talked down to quote, like I was an idiot.

I kept calling that night.

I drove them nuts, ringing them every half hour.

We got a taxi over to the hospital

about a seven o'clock in the morning.

We knocked on the door.

The matron said, we just lost him my dear.

And that was it.

I was a mess, as you can imagine.

They took me off and started popping pills

into me to calm me down.

We were a couple of deals.

We believed everything they told us.

Oh, no, I don't know.

They're going to get the mom in too.

No, I think they're just like giving her a little,

like they don't keep her in,

but like they do drug her immediately.

And first off, ma'am, you and your husband aren't

deals for trusting a hospital.

No, I know.

And second, this is where the real crime,

you crime shit starts going down

because they killed this kid.

They kept him in way longer than they needed to.

They gave him, they gave a 14 year old,

four months of regular massive doses of binzos

and fucking a chloro hydrate.

Like, that's insane.

So this is where it becomes like, it's not just Bailey.

The nurses have the attitude,

everyone at the hospital has the attitude.

They have, that is mixed.

Because again, the nurses trust Dr. Bailey.

They're not doctors.

They don't always know, this becomes increasingly

they start to, but it takes some time, right?

I do say there are nurses who are definitely complicit

and doctors who are definitely complicit.

It's hard to say how much and who at this point in time,

other like the doctors, definitely are,

but like it's hard to say which nurses had enough,

like should have known something was wrong,

and at what point, right?

This is probably one of the points, though.

Four months.

Can you still don't dismiss a mother who's freaking out?

It's like, oh, I mean, and it's also just,

this kid's problem is that he's going blind.

You're not going to fit, no, there's no way

this is going to fix that.

The therapy was because he's depressed and acting out

four months for that.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

On Craig's death certificate,

his cause of death was listed as Bronco pneumonia.

Since Chelmsford was a reputable hospital

and nobody likes extra work,

his case was not referred to a coroner.

I'd say we don't know what killed Craig,

but after his death,

Dr. Bailey had the hospital send Craig's parents a bill.

That's one of the things is he is billing people,

as I noted, the top often more than their annual income.

And when he kills a patient, he still bills them.

So you're like wife or son dies,

and then you get a bill for more money than you're worth.

Oh, sorry.

I mean, that's insurance now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

In this case, Dr. Bailey sent his parents a bill

for more than 1,100 pills, mostly sedatives.

They give this kid 1,100 bill doses

of different sedatives.

God knows what they're putting in it with IVs, right?

Oh my God.

I'm gonna guess that adds something to do

with the cause of death.

I think a lot of people will die if you give them 1,100 doses

of fucking binzos in four months at age 14

while electrocuting them every now.

I was gonna say they charge for the therapy too.

Yeah, yeah, they're charging for all of it, baby.

Now, the stories of Chelmsford patients

are uniformly bleak and horrifying.

Jim Lawler went to his general physician's suffering

from pain behind his eyes when he was referred to Chelmsford.

I don't know precisely what year this happened,

but he gave an interview to a local TV station in 1985,

which I found as a transcript on the Chelmsford blog.

Quote, Lawler, when I came home from the hospital,

my son said to his mother,

Mom, what's happened with this operation?

He said, something went wrong with this.

Dad is not the father that I used to know,

and that's from a kid who is deaf interviewer.

Is it possible to explain how you feel, Lawler,

resentful and bitter,

because what's done to be done to me

shouldn't be done to a dog?

It's because like, you gotta think, dude.

This guy's talking about like, he comes home.

His son is deaf.

So he's not hearing his father's voice.

Purely by the way, his dad looks in his physical language.

The instant he sees him, this kid is like,

this isn't, this isn't the dad I know.

This isn't my dad, something's wrong.

Like that's one of the things.

That's bad.

When someone is affected like this,

you think, okay, there's this, you know, 25 victims,

but it's not, it's whole families,

it's whole generations, it's whole lines.

I'm, you know, that kid felt the repercussions,

like it's so evil.

It ripples.

Yeah.

There's actually a more depressing parent story

in the archives of Chelmsford cases,

if you can believe it.

And I know we all love a depressing parent story.

Go on.

One of Dr. Bailey's victims testified

before an eventual royal commission

over what had happened and said this.

I went in for help with postnatal depression.

Dr. Bailey told me I just needed some rest.

I signed something, but I was already drowsy from pills

that given me.

Next thing I knew, I woke up three weeks later,

unable to remember my children's names.

Wow.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's fucking like,

that's, it's fucking serious.

It's kind of dark.

It's kids names.

Yeah.

That's horrific.

How can you, and this is where I get to the point

that like, okay, yeah, there's got to be a lot

of complicity among the staff,

because how can you see a woman go in

for postnatal depression and come out of a fucking

multi-week coma, unable to remember her kids' names

and be like, we're helping people.

How can you do that?

Okay, I think there's like,

and this comes down to the asylum of it all.

I think there's this deep mistrust even now,

but probably even, you know, more back then,

of anyone doing anything remotely differently.

Like, I see so many people that get so freaked out

by let's say like a homeless person

because they move their arm weird,

and I'm like, relax.

Like, I think there's like a deep,

unless you're moving the exact way,

or your face is the exact way,

or your temperament is the exact way

that like it's, you know, conformed,

societally conformed,

then people are deeply off put by you.

And so that's why they're like,

oh, this person, you know, is feeling a little sad

or is kind of like exposing that probably you have

some sadness after giving birth,

get them out of my eyesight.

Get them out of my eyesight, drug them.

Yeah.

So the nurses might be like,

so crazy.

You know what, she'll recover, and at least now

she's not being weird.

Right.

And you know, I think,

I think that's a really good point.

And I think in order, like also in the case of how,

how people would have thought this was working,

a lot of his patients are people who are being like,

referred from other, like from a silence and stuff.

There's gets a frantic,

they're having like, you know, psychotic breaks.

So they're like loud, and like you said,

they're moving weird.

And then after a three week coma,

they're really sedated and quiet and calm

when they leave the hospital.

And so maybe the nurses are like,

ah, they're better, right?

That is the problem's returned,

and they have new ones now because of what's happened to them.

But yeah, I think that's probably accurate.

So Craig was, as far as I found the only child

to die in Chelmsford,

but children were often admitted

the youngest of Dr. Bailey's patients

for deep sleep therapy was 10 years old.

No.

Yeah, it is not great.

That said, death ease, not uncommon for patients

at Chelmsford, particularly if they're patients

of Dr. Bailey.

I found an essay on the website Waking.io,

which is a company that offers sleep treatment services,

and they host a pretty good article

about everything that happened at Chelmsford.

I think it's on their site as like a reminder

of what can go because they're offering like sleep treatment.

It's like a reminder of like,

this is what goes wrong if you don't have

rigid standards of medical ethics, right?

That's really good of them to have.

Yeah, yeah, and it's a pretty good article.

It provides statistics on Chelmsford patients.

Death rates at Chelmsford were staggering

compared to standard psychiatric care.

While typical psychiatric units in the 1970s

had mortality rates below 0.5%,

Bailey's deep sleep therapy patients

faced a death rate exceeding 3.5%,

seven times higher than comparable facilities.

One particularly tragic case involved a 24 year old teacher

who entered Chelmsford for work related stress

and died of pneumonia after 28 days

in a barbiturate coma,

leaving behind two young children.

What is this pneumonia?

What's going on?

Well, if you keep people in a coma

with their central nervous system depressed

for weeks on end in a hospital

where like maybe there's other sick people,

they'll get sick maybe.

Or they lied about the cause of death

because they fake death.

Maybe it was just the barbituids killed them

and they faked and said it was pneumonia.

They did it or her.

They did it a lot.

They did it a lot.

I did think that I was being a bit of a howdy do that.

Okay, they were lying as it turns out.

I don't know that they were, but they lie a lot.

It's also not unrealistic that a patient

in these circumstances would contract pneumonia.

That's still the hospital's fault

because you know what you don't do

is put someone in a 28 day long coma

because they're stressed out at work.

I know.

That's not how you solve that problem.

Some of this stuff is interesting.

Some of this stuff with mental health,

like I had a great psychiatrist who would say,

I'd be like, I'm so anxious.

I'm so upset about what's going on in the world

and she would be like, I feel like if you were at this high

a level in everything was like regular in the world,

I would be worried.

But your response is accurate to what's going on.

But I feel like, for example, like a school teacher,

she's like, oh my God, I feel a little stressed

about being a school teacher.

And nobody's like, yeah, that seems right.

Everyone's like, you gotta get rid of that.

Yeah, it's so fucking hard for me to believe.

And I wonder what he told this teacher.

I wonder if she knew it was supposed to be 28 days

because people report being put under longer

than they agreed to.

Like Bailey lies a lot to them.

So I don't actually know what this person thought

they were even getting into.

That's right.

So insane that people, it's fucked.

Yeah.

But they have no idea.

And then they're there for weeks.

Weeks?

Weeks.

We'll talk more about that in a bit.

So if you remember from episode one,

Harry Bailey didn't just work out of Chelmsford.

He owns part of it.

And he makes money both from getting consultation fees

and from getting a cut from the profits of each patient.

This offers some explanation as to way he may have done stuff

like put plates and people's heads

without their consent, right?

There's a possibility that Bailey wasn't even doing

all of the torturous stuff he does to people

to experiment.

And he doesn't do stuff like put people up for 28 days

because he even legitimately thinks

they need that much time.

He just wants money, right?

He's like, got it.

Maybe he may just be randomly

inflicting medical violence on people for profit.

It may even be something where he'd like,

I don't know entirely.

Wow.

Some of his behavior makes me think

that may have been part of what was going on.

It's something he does sometimes.

In 1970, upset by the number of corpses

that he had received from Chelmsford

and their general condition,

the local coroner filed a report with the health departments.

The coroner's like,

these people are sending me a lot of bodies

and the bodies they're sending me do not look good.

I am a coroner.

I am used to dealing with dead people from hospitals.

This is not normal.

Hero coroner.

Well, he tried to be.

He tried to be.

I haven't found much more to tell

with what happened to his report to the health department

other than that the investigation was blocked.

And it's here I should point out

Chelmsford was a big business.

It made a lot of money

and that money goes into the local community.

As one whistleblower and nurse later testified,

we knew patients were dying unnecessarily.

When I tried to document the problems

I was threatened with termination.

The head nurse told me Bailey brought in too much money

for the hospital to risk losing him.

I've lived with guilt for 20 years

about the patients I couldn't save.

Holy shit.

And that explains why the hospital

lets him get away with this,

that he kind of part owns.

But it's also that explains why I think

local elected leaders and local regulators

like the officials don't want to fuck with this

because there's a lot of money here, right?

Maybe they're getting bribed.

I don't know if they're getting bribed

or if it's just that there's a lot of money

in the community needs it or whatever.

I don't entirely know.

But he should be getting in trouble more often than he does.

Right.

So that nurse was at least a partial whistleblower.

Maybe a little too late for it to matter

but did something.

Not all of his nurses felt this way.

In fact, for most of the hospital's time in operation,

Dr. Bailey seems to have been very popular

with his staff who often left to defend him.

He took care of them in return

as this article for the Canberra Times makes clear.

His compulsive spending included

buying jewelry and gifts from expensive shops

for his wife and staff.

He bought the latest technology for his rooms

as well as Jaden Persian carpets.

Another example of his extravagant lifestyle

was his regular attendance at Sydney's

most exclusive restaurant.

So he is spreading the money around, right?

And the city's like that.

The city's like that, the staff likes that.

To quote Fallout New Vegas, everybody likes that.

You know what else everybody likes?

He's a product and services.

That's right, baby.

Everyone loves a good product, a solid service.

Maybe there's even an ad for a mental hospital

that will knock you on conscience for 28 straight days.

Jesus Christ.

Even after doing all this research,

I kind of am like, oh, that might fix my work stress.

I don't know, man, 28 days of sleep.

Sounds good.

I know, I'm not unconvinced.

Yeah, sounds all right.

Can I just have 28 days of binzos?

Can I just be barred out for a month?

Would that be okay?

No, it would not be okay.

Not this current drug economy.

It's bad for you.

We don't know what it is anymore.

Don't fuck around with binzos, people.

I try not to make even jokes about drugs anymore

because you never know what people are going to take seriously.

Don't fuck with binzos, folks.

It's really easy to kill yourself if you're stupid.

If you prescribe them, whatever.

They're great.

They work, but they're also interact with a bunch of shit.

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So I think one of the most horrifying things about all of this to me

is that at no point to Dr. Bailey

actually have a meaningful scientific theory

for why this was supposed to work.

Like when I started digging into this story

and first read about DST in the first place,

I was like, oh, you know, from a layman's standpoint,

again, like we've said,

I can see why you'd think this would work, right?

And when I started reading about this, I was like,

oh, so they thought it was kind of like when a computer fucks up,

the first thing you do is turn it off and turn it on again, right?

And that was like my layman's explanation

for how I assumed that they thought this worked,

but I figured, well, Dr. Bailey's a doctor.

He's got to have a more substantial reason

for why he thought this was a good idea.

And I was wrong.

I was wrong.

Here's how Robert, he said he loves the scientific method.

He's a super into, loves the scientific method.

Let's talk about the scientific method here.

I want to read to you how the Sydney Morning Herald says,

Dr. Hailey explained the why deep sleep therapy works.

And he's explaining why his version of deep sleep therapy,

which now by default includes electroconvulsive therapy.

So this is his explanation for what it does.

Bailey likened the treatment to switching off a television.

His self-developed theory was that the brain

by shutting down for an extended period

would unlearn habits that led to depression,

addiction, and other psychiatric conditions.

What you thought, it's exactly what you thought.

What?

I was joking.

You really think it's just like,

have you tried turning it off and on again?

That's the exact thing he's saying.

Exactly.

You sons doing heroin?

Have you tried turning them off and on?

I guess.

I get the concept.

Your daughter's schizophrenic.

Have you tried turning them off and on?

Sorry.

I was gonna say, I get the concept.

Cause sometimes I'm like, you know,

maybe I just need to like, you know,

use the right kind of phone charger on my body.

I don't be back.

Right.

I don't be back to full sleep.

Maybe, and obviously, part of why this is compelling

on my people will leave this is,

this is a little how sleep works.

Yeah.

It doesn't learn traumatic stuff, like addiction,

or but it is quite a good addiction,

but it does, having a little reset's good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's also like one of the problems with benzos

cause they're great for certain things,

like anxiety and stuff.

But if you're like taking a bunch of benzos

to deal with like trauma and stress,

it can make it like worse

cause you're not really like healing necessarily.

You're not like working through.

It's why they, they're really hesitant to prescribe it

for PTSD today because like, because of that reason.

Right.

So you have to be very careful

when you're utilizing benzos with patients

who are dealing with like trauma and stuff.

Right.

And if you're just keeping them barred out

for 28 days while they're on,

they're not working through anything.

They're not processing anything.

They're gone.

Yeah.

Why?

The ideal situation, at least as I understood it,

was with mania, or for me, or with anxiety,

was to sort of bring you back down to a baseline,

not bar you out,

but bring you back down to a baseline

and then you can start to work from there.

You're not supposed to like bar out

so that you just don't even know about it.

Right.

It's supposed to be used to like aid

and kind of like soften and minimize problems

while you're still doing other things to work on them.

It's not meant to just knock you out of existence

for weeks on end.

That's not a healthy, no reputable doctor says

that's what you should do with benzos.

Right.

Yeah.

And again, as we've kind of started to talk about,

one of the things that really differentiates

Dr. Bailey's approach from the other ways

people approach deep sleep therapy in Europe

is that he is a vocal exponent

of extremely long sleep therapy.

For most patients, his normal prescription

was a 10 to 14 day session, but as time went on,

he tried doing, right, that's the norm.

But as time goes on, he's like, well shit,

they'll meet you 14 days and I'm getting paid every day.

Let's try three weeks.

Let's try four weeks.

The longest he keeps anyone under is 39 days.

That is long enough.

I mean, it way less than that is long enough

that patients are severely weakened after this

and need weeks, if not months or years of physical therapy

to recover like a 39 day coma is a calamity to your body.

Yes, it's holy shit.

And they're not even bicycling your legs for you.

No, they don't give a fuck about that.

Is that even moving your arms around?

Uh-uh, uh-uh.

And to illustrate that point, I want to tell you,

probably the best and most detailed account

that we have from a patient, right?

Okay.

And this comes from, this actually found in the post

from the subreddit user.

He suggested this.

He suggested that there's an autobiography

of an Australian actress who undergoes this treatment.

So Tony Lamond was an Australian singer, songwriter,

dancer, comedian.

She was like a triple or, she was a bunch of things threat, right?

She does it all.

Here's a picture of Tony.

You can, you can see her on screen if you can,

but if you can't, she's a lady.

She looks nice.

She looks cute.

Yeah.

Now, I'm gonna tell all our Aussie listeners off the bat,

I have no goddamn idea who this woman is.

Other than, you know, I skimmed Wikipedia,

is not really important, her like stage career

for our purposes.

What you need to know is that in the mid 60s,

she was a moderately famous young performer

who was working nightly at a major stage show,

and her husband, Frank, had just died, right?

So she's got this really high pressure job,

while she is performing, I think it's a pretty athletic,

like a lot of dancing performance every single night.

It's an exhausting schedule,

and she's just overwhelmed with grief

because she lost her husband.

She's a young widow.

Oh, man.

So they give her a fuck ton of drugs she doesn't need?

Ha, ha, ha, sure do.

Tony was under a lot of stress,

and given the state of medicine at the time,

her doctor prescribed her huge doses of sedatives,

which again likely means she was already under barbituates.

Quote, I had not allowed myself to stop and mourn,

but had thrown myself into work

at a financial necessity.

She writes in her autobiography, First Half.

Seeking comfort, she winds up reading a book

about an American widow, which convinces her

that she's made a mistake by dulling her mind

to the pain of her husband's death with pills, right?

And this inspires her to start exploring

mental health care options.

So so far, a great story about the positive ways

books can impact our lives, right?

Okay.

This woman's in a rut.

She reads a book about another person who dealt

with a similar thing, and she's like,

I'm gonna start taking some real steps

to make get myself better, you know?

Okay.

Great.

We're so, it's so hard to do.

It's so hard, Tony, to get to that point

with a problem like this.

Unfortunately, when she starts talking about,

telling her friends that she's exploring

mental health care options, one of them advises her,

hey, I know about this famous award-winning local doctor

who just helped open a private hospital.

Yeah, but that's so, that's barbituates again.

Yeah, just what he was doing.

I'll tell you how it's phrased to her,

because it's important, you know, how this is sold to her.

So here's her autobiography.

She, and that's her friend, recommended I talk about my problems

to Dr. Harry Bailey, an eminence psychiatrist.

So she's first told I should talk to this guy about

okay, okay, okay.

I made an appointment with him during which I began

to articulate what was troubling me.

After a one hour session, he suggested I take

a specialized treatment called Deep Sleep Therapy,

which consisted of my being put to sleep

under medical supervision for a few days,

so that when I awoke, all your troubles will be gone.

In my befuddled state, it sounded pretty good to me.

No more problems, lead me to it, right?

She's already not doing well, she's not sleeping well,

she's exhausted from work burnt out and grieving,

and he's like, I gotta put you down for a few days,

and then it'll be better.

And she's like, maybe, right?

She's gonna take time off her job.

Great question.

So next she writes, Dr. Bailey arranged for me

to have a week off from the show, how nice of him.

We'll come back to that in a minute.

She is admitted to his hospital that Friday,

within days of coming to him.

Tony recalls entering the hospital and feeling excited

that she was now taking her healing seriously

and was on the road to having a new life.

She was put up in a semi-private room,

and along the way, she saw several beds

lining the corridors filled with sleeping people.

Quote, although it was mid-morning,

the stillness was eerie for a hospital

that looked to be full to overflowing.

I was given a handful of pills to take,

and the next thing I remember was Dr. Bailey standing

by the bed asking me how I felt.

I told him I'd had a good night's sleep.

He laughed and informed me it was 10 days later.

And what's more, he had taken some weight off me.

He sure had nearly seven kilos.

I didn't mind that as I have always had trouble

with my weight, but that much in 10 days,

I was checked out of the hospital.

And this time, noticed the other patients were still asleep

or being taken to the restroom while out on their feet.

And that's fucked up.

A lot of that, the fact that-

I was thinking that it's gonna start being about weight loss.

Yeah, well, at least she's not gonna talk about it,

but he must have been pitching this to others.

And you must have been selling this to others.

What this actually means is that they weren't taking

adequate care of you while you were down.

As she notes,

you should never be losing that much weight in 10 days.

That's so much weight at a short time.

Yeah, this means they were not taking care of you.

Is she fired?

Great question.

So-

I'm really focused on the right stuff.

I know, I know.

She's immediately shocked at so much.

It's also interesting to me that like,

mid-conversation, basically, they take these pills

and she's just out.

And that's how the treatment starts.

So her day job, as we noted, required her to dance.

But after 10 days motionless and bed,

she can barely move.

So she can't get right back to dancing,

but even if she had been fit enough to do so,

it turns out Dr. Bailey lied to her

about having work things out with her employer.

No, no.

Tony comes.

No.

Yeah, he just straight up bullshatter.

And Tony gets fired while she's under in a sleep

and replaced.

Wow.

That's my biggest problem.

I've real blown your bullshit in my mind.

I was like, was she fired?

Did she really have to-

She missed work?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, that said, she does right.

I wasn't too upset.

I was having difficulty remembering the simplest things,

like on which side of the envelope to put a stamp.

So basically, she's saying, like,

I wasn't even able to fire,

because my brain wasn't working at all.

He tried her brain.

I was in such a fog.

I couldn't function.

Wow.

Green fog is so scary.

It's so scary.

Yeah.

Yeah, especially when you shouldn't have it,

because it only exists because some guy

is fucking force-fed you barbituits while starving you.

Yeah.

So the sleep therapy itself did nothing for Tony.

Once she, like, she obviously after this,

she has to spend weeks pulling herself back together,

getting her brain and her body all working again.

And she does get work again.

She gets back into the industry.

She's back to performing.

But she still can't sleep.

And so she has to go back on the sedatives that she'd been on.

And she also starts taking valium for good measure.

So his therapy does nothing.

Her problems are the same as they were.

She even writes, my problems were still there.

I just didn't remember them.

Like, this doesn't help her, right?

It's only bad.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

Tony is kind of one of the lucky ones,

because this, like, sucks.

But after a few weeks, she's back, you know,

back better than ever.

Her career doesn't, right.

Her career doesn't take a long-term hit.

This is probably the most common type

of Dr. Bailey experience, right?

A patient gets treated.

They come back to their life.

And they have a lot of pride.

They've got to, you know, recover physically

and stuff and mentally from it.

But they get better, more or less.

Their problems don't really go away.

And maybe they continue to suffer some physical consequences.

But overall, their life continues

and they just move on with things, right?

And Tony does.

She never does.

He doesn't sue the doctor.

She goes on, she has an 80-year career.

She only died last year, 2025, at the age of 93.

So her life seems to have gone well after this point.

And I'm happy for her.

Yeah.

Can't say that for a lot of these people.

And again, even though her story works out okay,

she still suffers terribly for no reason, you know?

It takes her a long time to recover.

And she's more, there are more than 1,000 people

with versions of that story is their best case scenario.

For a lot of these people, the day they walked into Dr. Bailey's

office was the worst mistake they ever made.

But for him, it was Tuesday, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a quote from Dr. Philip Hickey's article

about Dr. Bailey's ongoing correspondence

with that guy from the UK, Dr. Sargent,

that puts a lot of Bailey's attitude in contact to me.

They, in Sargent, remained in close contact

and reportedly even vied with one another

to see which could keep a patient in the deepest coma.

So that's part of why these are so long.

Is he's fighting with this guy?

I bet I can do 49 days, you know, or 30, you know, whatever.

So what the fuck is this?

This is not fucking John Tucker must die.

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

Why are men this way?

Why are men?

I can't believe I abandoned everything to join you all

in this fucking bullshit.

Yeah.

Oh, man, if you'd asked me, I wouldn't have recommended it.

Yeah.

Men, I don't know.

I think we need to create Min 2.0, which is like.

I love it.

Maybe we have like a governor chip or something

that shuts down when you get too into certain things.

Yeah, I like it.

I like it.

Yeah.

I think if you get a Punisher tattoo on your body,

it just, you know, you're out.

You're out.

That's it.

Gotta be honest, don't like the phrase men 2.0.

Made me, made me queasy, didn't love it.

You're right.

We should start with Min 3.0.

We'll let it tell.

We'll be fine.

Well, afraid.

Um, so far, far too many Chelmsford patients

did not survive their time with Dr. Bailey.

I can't tell you how many exactly.

Every article I, every like reputable article,

it's a little different compared

because more research comes out, right?

Most articles you'll find say that from 1963 to 1979,

24 people died as a direct result

of Dr. Bailey's deep sleep therapy.

Like they died in the hospital while undergoing

the therapy.

And then eight, 19 further DSD patients committed suicide

within a year of undergoing therapy.

That was gonna ask.

I was gonna ask.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

1979.

Yeah.

79 is when this all starts.

It's so recent.

Yeah.

Um, and depending on who you count, also,

the direct death toll could be as high as 27.

I found at least one higher number,

but it seems to be somewhere between 24 and 27,

depending on how you count it, people died directly

as a result of justice therapy.

That's so awful.

Yeah.

How many patients has he seen in total, do we know?

Yes.

Kind of.

I'll tell you.

Yeah.

By the mid-1970s, enough people had been permanently injured

or killed, and there had been enough complaints

and investigations into what Dr. Bailey was doing,

that resistance had started to build to Dr. Bailey's methods.

Other Australian psychiatrists began speaking out slowly

at first against deep sleep therapy,

but what would really change things

was the case of Barry Francis Hart.

In February of 1973, he entered the Chelmsford clinic.

He'd been an actor and a model

until a botched cosmetic surgery caused him

like lifelong injury.

This leads to depression.

You know, it's a bummer.

Yeah.

So he seeks professional help for the depression.

A nurse came up to him while he was still sitting

in the waiting area.

So he hasn't even, the way he says it,

Hart says he goes to Chelmsford

because he wants to talk about getting help for his depression.

And a nurse walks up to him while he is in the waiting area

and gives him a glass of water and a pill to quote,

cool you down.

No.

He takes the pill, having never agreed to treatment

and wakes up naked in a hospital room two weeks later.

No.

No.

Like.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

In terms of breaches of medical ethics,

that's about it.

The breaching is to you get.

He was like, he was like,

this botched plastic surgery is going to be the worst medical experience

of my.

Yeah.

I mean, let me take.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Uh oh.

Uh oh.

So he recalls, quote, when I got out,

I was jumping at noises and couldn't concentrate.

I had brain damage and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Yeah.

Now, Dr. Bailey's not his position.

Dr. Heron is.

But Dr. Heron is basically Bailey's like a fucking prop,

like a mentee.

Right.

And he's doing the same treatment.

Um, so heart after he realizes what's happened to him and gets out

of the hospital,

sues Dr. Heron.

And attempts to have him charged with kidnapping and assault.

Yes.

Unfortunately.

Fuck yeah.

Yeah, which he did should have happened.

However,

his records are modified by the hospital.

And the records say he can send it to the procedure.

So it's a, he said, he said,

sort of deal, right?

Now, ultimately the, the, the hospital settles with him.

So they're worried enough that they,

they give him a small amount of money, right?

Um, but he does not get, you know,

he doesn't get Dr. Heron arrested.

He doesn't get a lot of what he wants.

But his case starts to attract attention.

The news covers it, right?

I was about to say he's the news about to get a hold of this.

Yeah.

Thank God.

Yeah, this is not the first time,

but it's the first time it does in a big way.

And it's the first time that like people kind of stay interested

and start thinking,

like, what's going on in that hospital, right?

Um, so after this point, after heart suit,

other patients who have maybe been suffering silently,

but being like, well, what can I do, right?

Or maybe it's my fault that didn't work, right?

Now they have someone who's like, oh, maybe I was mistreated

by my doctor.

Yeah.

And, yes.

Yeah.

And also there are patients who probably had complained,

but as we've stated before,

the complaints went nowhere.

The regulators ignored them.

And those patients now realize,

maybe the wall of immunity that's been protecting this guy

is starting to fail.

So maybe I can try to complain again

and it'll get somewhere.

Law suits begin piling up against the hospital

and against Dr. Bailey after this point.

Okay, Barry.

That's good.

That's good.

Now, a little bit ago,

I gave you some numbers.

24 to 27 dead as a result of his deep sleep therapy

and 19 suicides within a year of receiving the therapy.

Those are not the only numbers that I've found.

Although the next set of numbers I'm going to give you

is questionable for some reasons I'll explain.

Okay.

Well, I'm about to read you a quote from a Reuters article

I've read from a couple of times before.

It was written by a journalist named Michael Perry in 1990.

Here's what he wrote.

Quote,

In all 183 deep sleep patients died,

either in hospital or within a year of returning

to the outside world,

while 977 were diagnosed as brain damaged.

The article claims that Dr. Bailey treated more than

3,000 patients with DST.

Now,

those are bad numbers.

Original ones were not good.

But those numbers are also different from the other numbers

that I have found in Reuters.

Reuters is obviously a generally reputable source.

So is the Sydney Morning Herald.

And the Sydney Morning Herald says that Dr. Bailey only treated

1127 people with deep sleep therapy.

Okay.

And I found that number in several publications.

I suspect it's correct.

However,

it's possible that Michael Perry just kind of

miswrote,

and maybe he was giving the number for the total number of patients

at Chelmsford that other doctors

and Dr. Bailey treated with DST.

Maybe he just kind of fucked that up.

I don't know.

Either way that's so many.

That's impossible to me.

Reuters is normally pretty reputable.

And one of the things that does worry me about the other numbers he gave

is I haven't found 133 patients died in the hospital

or within a year of getting out of the hospital.

Well, 977 are brain damaged.

I have not found those numbers anywhere else,

which makes me concerned for a reason, right?

So I looked in to first the journalist.

And Michael Perry seems to be a veteran reporter.

He's still wrote for Reuters recently as a year ago.

I have no reason to suspect him of malpractice.

But his article is old.

It's from 1990.

So maybe that's why the numbers are different.

Maybe it's kind of outdated.

But again, I didn't run into him anywhere.

And it's rare for numbers like this to be high

and then massively reduced lower.

One of his major sources for this article.

And one of the reasons that I kind of question aspects of it

is that he bases a good amount of it on a nurse

that he describes as a whistleblower.

And she was, her name was Rosa Nicholson.

Here's how Perry describes her story.

After a friend died following deep sleep treatment,

she spent 18 months trying to get a job at Chelmsford.

In mid 1977, an advertisement

and a Sydney newspaper gave her a chance.

For the next two years, she smuggled hospital

and patient records out of Chelmsford,

photocopied and returned them.

Very cool, right?

That's great.

Wow.

This is all true.

You're about to get, you're feeling happy

and you shouldn't be, right?

Oh, no.

This is behind the bastards.

Good things don't happen here.

Sure, of course.

On paper, it's pretty cool that Rosa's undercover,

you know, for years feeding information

about Bailey's operation.

But that brings the question to whom?

Is she feeding the information?

Oh, his competitor.

She's sending it to a journalist.

No.

No.

No.

So she has helpers who are helping to fund

and her question who are taking

the information that she gathers.

And those helpers are the church of Scientology.

Because they hate psychiatry.

Because they hate psychiatry.

That's right, baby.

Surprise second villain.

The church's Scientology with a spill chair.

Oh, my God.

I love it.

I love it.

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

And so I wonder if any parries are able to help.

Great question.

Part of why.

So I do wonder is maybe Perry's numbers high

because he's Scientologists gave them to him.

But per the Sydney Morning Herald quote,

two Scientologists, Ron Siegel and Jan E. Skate

had worked with the Chelmsford nurse,

Rosa Nicholson, to uncover evidence by stealing files

and secretly recording Bailey in the late 1970s.

And Rosa did find some pretty damning stuff.

She much later testified at the royal inquiry

over all this.

Quote,

Nicholson told the commission deep sleep patients

frequently suffered internal bleeding and severe infections.

They were given electric shock therapy every day except Sunday.

And I think that's pretty much true.

Unfortunately, at the actual time she was in place trying to stop Dr. Bailey,

the fact that she was feeding all of this info to Scientologists

meant that her work had the opposite of the intended effect.

As you mentioned, Gabe,

the Church of Scientology is a huge grudge

with the whole field of psychiatry.

And this goes back to the days of El Ron Hubbard

because Scientology starts as dionetics,

which Hubbard build as a replacement science for psychiatry.

And as a result, he thought that because psychiatrists don't embrace dionetics,

he teaches his followers that psychiatry is a murderous cabal

that tortures and kills people from money and power.

Unfortunately, it just so happens,

that does kind of describe the psychiatrists at Chelmsford a little bit.

Oh, no. Broking track is right.

Yeah, these guys are as evil as the Church of Scientology thinks.

Well, psychiatrists are.

Now, it just so happens that Dr. Bailey and his colleagues at Chelmsford

were that bad.

But the way the Scientologists go about trying to release the information

that's gathered for them backfires

and it actually damages the cases of former patients

who were trying to get the clinic shut down like heart.

A Scientology plan did not go well

and ended up damaging many individuals.

Oh, good a thought of that.

Wow.

I'm shocked to hear this information.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

For the Sydney Morning Herald,

the Scientologist's involvement

enabled Chelmsford to smear the whistleblowers and patients.

Heart would be accused of being a Scientologist himself,

which still raises a rare laugh.

Ha ha.

Yes, I had a botched plastic surgery

and nearly got myself killed.

Also, I could be an agent of the Scientologists.

Well, nowadays I'm like, maybe.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, that was a crazy shit.

So this elaborate scheme also was not necessary

for Dr. Bailey's downfall.

The same year, heart sued the hospital.

A group of his colleagues filed a former complaint

with Australia's equivalent of the AMA

like their main medical association

against Dr. Bailey's custom deep sleep therapy method.

The lawsuit or the complaint was dismissed.

But two years later, as lawsuits against Dr. Bailey ballooned,

his insurance company reported the hospital

to a different regular, a government regulator

and be like, hey, a lot of people are dying at this hospital.

How many people have to tell you that?

Yeah.

You're the government.

Maybe do something about it.

Again, when an insurance company

is kind of a good guy on the story,

you know things are bad.

Oh, holy shit.

Yeah.

So, fuck all is done in this case, too.

The regulators ignore.

Sure, of course, of course.

The warning.

It must have seemed to a lot of people

to the former patients of Dr. Bailey

that we're still dealing, even in the late 70s,

with the same old Teflon Harry.

But he wasn't.

Dr. Bailey is beginning to fray

under the constant barrage of lawsuits and bad press

and he starts to lose his mind.

Some of this may have been caused, been stressed.

Well, well, well.

Yeah.

But isn't the consequence of my own actions?

This is my own actions.

Shit.

Shit.

I should also say, I think some of his derangement

is that for like decade, like 20 years now,

he's rich.

He's been rich.