Part Two: Dr. Sleep: The Australian Psychiatrist Who Made People Sleep Themselves To Death
84 min
•Mar 5, 2026about 1 month agoSummary
Part Two of Behind the Bastards examines Dr. Harry Bailey, an Australian psychiatrist who operated Chelmsford Hospital and administered 'deep sleep therapy'—prolonged drug-induced comas paired with electroconvulsive therapy—resulting in dozens of deaths, brain damage to hundreds, and unauthorized surgical procedures. The episode details how Bailey's charisma, financial influence, and systemic regulatory failures allowed him to operate unchecked for nearly two decades before his 1985 suicide.
Insights
- Charisma and institutional prestige can enable medical abuse at scale; Bailey's charm, awards, and financial contributions to the hospital community insulated him from accountability despite repeated complaints and deaths
- Regulatory capture and financial incentives create perverse outcomes; hospital administrators and government regulators ignored evidence of harm because Bailey generated significant revenue and employment
- Consent obtained from heavily sedated patients is not valid consent; Bailey's practice of waking unconscious patients to sign surgical consent forms while under barbiturates exemplifies how power imbalances invalidate informed decision-making
- Institutional complicity extends beyond individual perpetrators; nurses, doctors, and administrators who witnessed harm remained silent or complicit due to job security, loyalty, or cultural norms normalizing medical misconduct
- Whistleblowing can be co-opted; Scientology's involvement in exposing Bailey's crimes undermined victims' credibility and legal cases, demonstrating how third-party agendas can weaponize legitimate evidence
Trends
Psychiatric institutional abuse enabled by weak regulatory oversight and professional self-policing failuresCharismatic authority figures exploiting vulnerable populations (mentally ill, grieving, depressed) with pseudoscientific treatmentsFinancial incentives in healthcare creating perverse outcomes where patient harm is profitableGender-based exploitation in medical settings; disproportionate targeting of female patients for abuse and sexual misconductDelayed accountability mechanisms allowing decades of harm before formal investigation and reformInstitutional memory loss and record destruction as tools to obstruct investigations and shield perpetratorsNormalization of medical misconduct across professional cultures reducing peer accountabilityVulnerability of patients in psychiatric care to experimental, non-consensual proceduresReputational immunity through professional credentials and institutional prestigePost-incident regulatory reform as primary accountability mechanism rather than prevention
Topics
Deep Sleep Therapy (DST) and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) abuseMedical ethics violations and informed consent failuresPsychiatric institutional abuse and patient safetyRegulatory capture and government oversight failuresCharismatic authority and institutional corruptionBarbiturate overdose and iatrogenic harmPsychosurgery and non-consensual brain proceduresSexual misconduct in medical settingsWhistleblowing and institutional retaliationMental health treatment standards and reformChelmsford Hospital scandal (1963-1985)Royal Commission investigations and accountabilityScientology's role in psychiatric reform advocacyMedical record destruction and obstruction of justiceMortality rates in psychiatric institutions
Companies
Chelmsford Hospital
Private psychiatric hospital in Australia where Dr. Bailey administered deep sleep therapy, resulting in dozens of de...
iHeartRadio
Podcast distribution platform hosting Behind the Bastards and multiple sponsor podcasts featured in ad reads
Atlas Obscura
Content partner producing Charlie's Place podcast about historical figures, featured in sponsor ad read
Reese's Book Club
Book club brand with associated Bookmarked podcast featuring celebrity interviews, featured in sponsor ad read
Church of Scientology / CCHR International
Religious organization that co-opted whistleblower Rosa Nicholson's evidence against Bailey, undermining victims' leg...
People
Dr. Harry Bailey
Australian psychiatrist who operated Chelmsford Hospital, administered deep sleep therapy resulting in 24-27 deaths a...
Gabe Dunn
Podcast guest and co-host discussing Bailey's crimes; hosts Best Game Ever and A Thousand Natural Shocks podcasts
Dr. John Heron
Bailey's colleague and mentee at Chelmsford who administered deep sleep therapy; implicated in kidnapping and assault...
Craig McKay
14-year-old patient who died in 1969 after four months of deep sleep therapy and electroconvulsive treatment at Chelm...
Barry Francis Hart
Patient who sued Dr. Heron for administering deep sleep therapy without consent; case attracted media attention and t...
Toni Lamond
Australian performer who underwent deep sleep therapy with Bailey in mid-1960s; documented experience in autobiograph...
Rosa Nicholson
Chelmsford nurse whistleblower who spent 18 months undercover smuggling hospital records (1977-1979) with Scientology...
Sharon Hamilton
Prominent dancer and patient/lover of Dr. Bailey who died by suicide in 1977; her death destabilized Bailey and fuele...
Elaine McKay
Mother of Craig McKay; only relative allowed to stay in sedation ward; witnessed her son's deterioration and death fr...
Glenn Whitty
DST patient who discovered metal plates surgically implanted in her skull without consent 18 years after treatment at...
Dr. Ian Sargent
UK psychiatrist who corresponded with Bailey and competed over who could keep patients in deeper comas; pioneered dee...
Jan Eastgate
Scientologist who worked with whistleblower Rosa Nicholson to expose Bailey; later became president of CCHR Internati...
Michael Perry
Reuters journalist who reported on Chelmsford scandal in 1990; cited higher death toll (183) and brain damage figures...
Quotes
"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."
Robert Evans (describing Bailey's theory)•Mid-episode
"We called dr bailey the science professor because he was experimenting on all us we are all damaged brain damaged and she blames that on his little horror hospital"
Elaine Gainsborough (Chelmsford patient)•Mid-episode
"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 they'd given me. Next thing I knew, I woke up three weeks later, unable to remember my children's names."
Anonymous DST patient•Mid-episode
"always remember that the forces of evil are greater than the forces of good i always tried to be a good doctor and i think perhaps i was"
Dr. Harry Bailey (suicide note)•End of episode
"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."
Whistleblower nurse•Mid-episode
Full Transcript
call zone media ha 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 um we are giving our part two on 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 like to do a little warm up before every episode, where we just ask a little questions the audience can get to know the guest better um where were you on the night of may 17th 2007 i was a freshman in college so probably oh probably in boston probably uh with a boyfriend who is cheating on me 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? Did it happen in Boston, the murder? A lot of murders do. Again, Boston. You know what? Touche. Touche. Touche. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Danielle Robay, host of Bookmarked, the podcast by Reese's Book Club. And this week, we are talking about a monster, or maybe the woman who refused to be one. I'm sitting down with Maggie Gyllenhaal to unpack her new film, The Bride. And trust me, this isn't your grandmother's bride of Frankenstein. What I was more interested in was the monstrousness inside of each of us. You can spend your life running from those things, or you can turn around and shake hands with them. Listen to Bookmarked, The Reese's Book Club podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Sino Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Adish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. I'm an alcoholic. And without this proof, I'm going to die. Listen to Sino's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie. You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable? Because I want to get confident. This is DJ Hester Prince's Music is Therapy. A new podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist. 12 months, 12 areas of your life. Money, love, career, confidence. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy for your entire year. Listen to DJ Hester-Prince's Music is Therapy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, you know, 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, right. Like when I need someone to like watch my car or my cat for a weekend, like I make my way through the 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 movies taught us. That is what it taught us. No, I just mean if you like if you're like a celebrity, if you're like someone who's like Tom Hanks, what's Tom Hanks up to? I don't trust that guy. Neither do the QAnon people. Tom Hanks is the deep state very true very true so 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 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. There are two 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 sometimes is a real problem. You're at work drunk as a doctor, well-dressed, cherubic? Maybe. I can't say that. Like, there's just very little detail on this. But kind of from other things people have said, I kind of think maybe he at least, maybe It may have just been like work parties and stuff that sometimes he got too drunk at, right? Okay. That's happening too. Fuck, marry, kill, cherubic, well-dressed, drunk in rage. Let's see. Fuck well-dressed, marry drunk in rage, marry drunk in 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'd 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 relate. And this kind of goes into him being a 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 lie to patients 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. OK. 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. 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 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 maybe it wasn't that high but i bet it was my my grandfather was such a square he was a doctor around that time and he my grandmothers uh 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 like yeah and all the other doctors would be like boo 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 Dr. Fuck's Every Nurse? My God. Can you believe that? He's, yeah. I gotta think the other, like, he didn't have a lot of friends, because he would be like, I can't hang out with that guy. He's immoral. I can't hang out with you. You're a sex pest. Yeah. That does every now and then. And he was the odd man out. 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 this guy, I won't work with him. And it was usually someone who were like, oh, I wonder why their career hadn't taken off more. Oh, because they had ethics. Ah, okay. Yeah. Because they were mean to the rapist. Yeah, my grandpa wasn't climbing the ranks at the hospital. Right, right, right. Yeah, why do you want to stop everybody from having fun, you know? Right. And that's the kind of doctor, that's how Bailey 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 widespread 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 dixpotized them. Something about this guy, it's not just like the women he's romantic with, 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 dickmatizing. Yeah, it's not just the dick stuff, right? 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 leaves him eventually for cheating on him. Sure, sure. Or her. It's like Keith Raniere, 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 were 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 um 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, these drunken rages aren't great, but a lot of people are able to put up with him. And it's because he's giving them something, like providing them something socially that they value. So I don't know, he's just, 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 riz, 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 you kind of can't be both of those things. You can't be the kind of guy who 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 you got to kill your darlings. Right. Yes. I learned that in 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. Lobotomies. He is not giving lobotomies, thankfully. I'll say that. What is he doing? What is he doing? So modern day psychosurgery is, these are generally very targeted and kind of minimal physical impact operations directly on the brain to deal with treatment resistant disorders, right? Okay. Like today, a lot of the focus is we want to have as little a 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. That was 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. Because 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 got 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 family. It's a really big issue. And someone says, two weeks of sleep, and they'll be back to normal. They'll be back to the version of themselves. You remember, if a doctor sits down and looks you in the eye and promises you that and his wall's filled with awards, you're probably gonna say, okay, do it, right? You know? You're at your last straw, why not? Yeah, and 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 so he doesn't think you can sleep the gay away but he thinks you can know he can chop it out of you because uh 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 scratch it. It's a very delicate procedure. And yeah, he did a little slip. Incredible. 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. This guy sucks. Fuck, fucking asshole. Yeah, he's, again, he's promising these people everything. Like, they will talk about how compassionate he seemed, and then he'll be like, can you believe these fucking losers? You know? There's a Royal Commission report after his death that aggregates accounts from a bunch of his coworkers, employees, and patients. And this report concludes that he was, quote, two-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 in 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? A 13-year-old girl, no anesthetic, no consent. Huh? What year is this? This is, I think, 63 or 64. He starts practicing deep sleep therapy at Chelmsford in 63. I think this is a fairly early patient. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like, how do we know that that's what happened? Who told? Because they take they take doc, 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 aware 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 maybe 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 what 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 that is some body whore fucking Cronenberg ass shit. Yeah. Yeah. Tetsuo Iron Man bullshit. The next year another metal plate emerged. Right. And she has no explanation for what the fuck has happened other than that these must have been surgically inserted to her at Chelmsford. Elaine Gainsborough who visited Chelmsford the same year as Glenn Witte 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 witty told reuters we called dr bailey the science professor because he was experimenting on all us we are all damaged brain damaged and she blames that on his little horror hospital I don't know why Frankenstein ass fucking shit Okay wait You have metal in your head You don't know You're hit by lightning Or you don't know You go through a metal detector You gotta know there's metal in you Or a fucking MRI that can kill you You can't put metal in people And not tell them You sure can't It's wild I don't know why he did this These are both I think from the same year, like 64 was it? I would like to note 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. A lot of his patients are women. Yeah. Oh, shocking. A lot of women. Unintended, I guess. So I don't know 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? This shows you 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 signed. You know, 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 barbiturates. Today, no reputable doctor or facility would consider this proper consent. You absolutely cannot consent to surgery when you are woken up and still want enough barbiturates to drop a fucking mule, right? That is not consent, even if you say yes and sign a piece of paper. It doesn't work that way. Your signature is just like looping down the whole paper, just going down the whole paper. It's a line. Yeah. Yeah. Now, this is also, and I should note, at the time, this should have been a problem, but it wasn't. 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? Okay. Like nothing gets referred, like nothing makes it to a point where he has to suffer consequences. So people aren't taking this seriously, and he is getting reported to regulators and to the government. So there are choices being made by professionals in Australia who are supposed to be regulating the medical industry that when patients complain about stuff like this, his answer is sufficient. No, they signed a paper. They're just crazy. Crazy people never remember things. Here's the signature. You know, thanks for coming in, Dr. Bailey. Sorry, we knew it was bullshit. I mean, these 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 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 ads for the Washington State Highway Patrol. It's a crapshoot. I don't know. Oh, God. Hi, this is Jo Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius, like, are misunderstood. A sun and Venus in Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses, in different places, but just an embracing of the is-ness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart-side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology creativity and real life This episode is a must listen Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. I hate those words. They make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo was born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me. And it's the old them. Everybody's on their journey. And your journey's different to theirs. This Woman's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx. I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much use my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place. Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I got to be better. I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it. Unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Almost 30 years together, four kids, and some of reality TV's most unforgettable moments, we know a thing or two about living life out loud. We're taking you behind the scenes in our new podcast, Between Us, with me, Heather Dubrow. And me, Terry Dubrow. Between Us isn't about perfect lighting or curated Instagram grids. It's the unfiltered, behind-closed-doors conversations you wish you could eavesdrop on. Equal parts smart, funny, and a little bit scandalous. Every week, Heather will bring you an unapologetic take on the headlines, the trends, and the cultural moments everyone's texting about. And Terry will deliver insider beauty, health, and wellness insights you won't find on TikTok. Together, we'll tell the stories, spill the secrets, and share the hacks that keep life, marriage, and everything in between feeling fresh and fun. We may live in a gated community, but there's zero gatekeeping here. And plenty of, did they just say that moments? Listen to Between Us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Gabe and I have both joined the Washington State Highway Patrol. I did not. It was a really convincing ad. Really convincing ad. They didn't want me. I forced it. I wrestled you both. You're both free now. The recruiter promised me I could serve in Hawaii. I don't know why the Washington State Highway Patrol is there. 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. 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 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, you know, death is kind of an 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. Ten 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 in a mixed-sex ward. So not a great place. And the hallucinations don't really go. I'm sure they're kind of permanent. There's things that are permanent even though you're alive. Yeah, I don't know that the hallucinations, but they're a permanent. I mean, for one thing, if you're not moving physically in a coma for 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. Um, 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. Wow. 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 um you know crikey why worry about that we we got shrimp on 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, in 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 I'll have your boy back. And what loving parent hearing those words from an award-winning medical expert wouldn't say yes, right? Right. Yeah. You know, it's not her fault. Like she did. 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 kids are so vulnerable. Yeah. And it's it's yeah. And the part of the sad thing is that, like, a lot of times, like today, you hear a lot of parents getting their kids killed with quack therapies. But it's obviously a bad like you should have known not to do that to your kid. This one there, she did. They did nothing wrong. Right. Per 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 where 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 um Um, 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 he just 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. 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 extracurricular surgeries or drugs he may have experimented with using. But on August 19th, 1969, Elaine 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 is like calm down, you've got yourself into a bit of a mess she was talked down to 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 7 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 dills. Oh, no. We believed everything they told us. Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, no. 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 dills for trusting a hospital. No, I know. And second, this is where the real crimey crime shit starts going down because they killed this kid. They kept him in way longer than they needed to. Yep. They gave a 14-year-old four months of regular massive doses of benzos and fucking a chloral hydrate. Like, that's insane. So this is where it becomes, like, it's not just Bailey. The nurses have this attitude. Everyone at the hospital has this attitude. They have—that is mixed. Because, again, the nurses trust Dr. Bailey. They're not doctors. They don't always know— 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, like the doctors definitely are, but 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 Yeah, you still don't dismiss a mother who's freaking out Like, I mean, and it's also just this kid's problem is that he's going blind. You're not going to fix it. 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. Yeah. On Craig's death certificate, his cause of death was listed as bronchopneumonia. 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 at 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 I mean that's insurance now uh huh yeah 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 pill doses of different sedatives. God knows what they're putting in with IVs, right? Oh, my God. I'm going to guess that had 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 benzos in four months at age 14. while electrocuting them every night. I was going to 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 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 been done to me shouldn't be done to a dog. That's so sad. 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 something this isn't the dad i know this isn't my dad something's wrong like well that's bad when someone 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, it's so evil. It ripples. Yeah. 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 they'd 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 seriously dark. This guy doesn't remember his 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 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 him out of my eyesight. Get him out of my eyesight. Drug him. Yeah. So the nurses might be like, you know what? She'll recover. And at least now she's not being weird. Right. And I think that's a really good point. And I think in order, like also on the case of how people would have thought this was working, a lot of his patients are people who are being like referred from other like from asylums and stuff they're schizophrenic 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 problems return and they have new ones now because of what's happened to them But yeah, exactly. I think that's 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 is 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. Quote, 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 barbiturates killed them and they faked and said it was pneumonia they do that or her they do that a lot the question i did think that i was being a bit about how do you do that okay yeah they were lying as it turns out they i think they 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, blah, blah, blah, about like, you know, what's going on in the world. And she would be like, I feel like if you were at this high a level and 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 stress about being a school teacher. And nobody's like, yeah, that seems right. Everyone's like, you gotta get rid of that. Yeah. Like, 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. Right. That's so insane that, like, people. Oh, it's fucked. Yeah. 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 the way he may have done stuff like put plates in 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 just 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 like, I don't know. Right. Entirely. Some of his behavior makes me think that may have been part of what was going on. It's certainly 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 is 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 detail 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 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 that explains why the hospital lets him get away with this that he kind of pardons 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 yeah 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 you know whatever i i don't entirely know um 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 leapt 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 jade and Persian carpets. Another example of his extravagant lifestyle was his regular attendance at Sydney's most exclusive restaurants. So he is spreading the money around, right? And the city's like that. The city's like that. The staff likes that. You know, to quote Fallout New Vegas, everybody likes that. You know what else everybody likes? Is it products 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 unconscious for 28 straight days. Jesus Christ. Look, 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 kind of good. I'm not unconvinced. Yeah, sounds all right. Can I just have 28 days of benzos? Can I just be barred out for a month? Would that be okay? no it would not be okay drug economy it's bad we don't know what it is anymore don't fuck around with benzos people i i try to make even jokes about drugs anymore because you never know what people are going to take seriously don't fuck with benzos folks it's really easy to kill yourself if you're stupid um if you prescribe them you know whatever they're great they work but they're also interact with a bunch of shit hi this is joe winterstein host of the spirit daughter podcast where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A sun and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses, in different places, but just an embracing of the is-ness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart-side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must-listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. to hate those words. They make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo is born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me. And it's the old them. Everybody's on their journey. And your journey's different to theirs. This Woman's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx. I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much used my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place. Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I got to be better. I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it. unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Almost 30 years together, four kids, and some of reality TV's most unforgettable moments, we know a thing or two about living life out loud. We're taking you behind the scenes in our new podcast, Between Us, with me, Heather Dubrow. And me, Terry Dubrow. 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Listen to Between Us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. so i think one of the most horrifying things about all of this to me is that at no point did 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 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 he doesn't? And I was wrong. I was wrong. But Robert, they said he loves the scientific method. He's super into science, 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. Haley explained 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. It is 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. Your son's doing heroin? Have you tried turning them off and on? I get the concept. Your daughter's schizophrenic? Have you tried turning her off and on? Sorry, Sophie. I was going to say, I get the concept because sometimes I'm like, you know, maybe I just need to like, you know, use the right kind of phone charger on my body. And I'll be back. right it'll be back to full spring maybe and obviously part of why this is compelling and why people believe this is this is a little how sleep works yeah it doesn't unlearn traumatic stuff like addiction and no but it is quite but it does having a little reset's good yeah yeah it's also like one of the problems with benzos because 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 because you're not really like healing necessarily. You're not like working through. It's why they're really hesitant to prescribe it for PTSD today because of that reason. So you have to be very careful when you're utilizing benzos with patients who are dealing with like trauma and stuff. And if you're just keeping them barred out for 28 days while they're in contact, they're not working through anything. They're not processing anything. They're gone. Yeah. The ideal situation, at least as I understood it, was with mania 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 tries doing— Oh, my God. Right. That's the norm. But as time goes on, he's like, well, shit, let me do 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 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 holy shit And they're not even bicycling your legs For you No they don't give a fuck about that They're not 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 I actually found in the post from the subreddit user who suggested this. He suggested that there's an autobiography of an Australian actress who undergoes this treatment. So, Toni Lammond 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 Toni. You can see her on screen if you can, but if you can't. Great hair. She's a lady. She looks nice. Yeah. Now, I'm going to tell all our Aussie listeners off the bat, I have no goddamned idea who this woman is, other than, you know, I skimmed Wikipedia. It's 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, 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 widower. Oh, man. So they give her a fuck-ton of drugs she doesn't need? Sure do. Toni 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 barbiturates. habituates. Quote, I had not allowed myself to stop and mourn, but had thrown myself into work out of 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 doling 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 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 was like, I'm going to start taking some real steps to get myself better. You know? Okay. Great. 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 also, that's barbiturates again. Yeah, but more than that. Just what she 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 eminent psychiatrist. So she's first told I should talk to this guy about my problems. 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 supervisions 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 got to put you down for a few days and then you'll be better. And she's like, maybe, right? She's going to 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 ten 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. I was thinking that. I was thinking that it's going to start being about weight loss. Yeah, well, there's at least, she's the one who talks about it, but he must have been pitching this to others. He 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 That's so much weight in such a short time Yeah, this means they were not taking care of you Is she fired? Great question Really focused on the right stuff I know, I know She's immediately shocked that someone 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 in 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 worked things out with her employer tony comes yeah he just he just straight up bullshatter and tony gets fired while she's under and asleep and replaced wow you like how that's my biggest problem i have real millennial bullshit in my mind. I was like, was she fired? Did she really have to? She missed work. She missed work? Yeah. Now, that said, she does write, 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 angry that I fired because my brain wasn't working at all. He fried her brain. I was in such a fog. I couldn't function. Wow. Green fog is so scary. It's so scary. Yeah, especially when you shouldn't have it because it only exists because some guy fucking force fed you barbiturates while starving you. 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. 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 and 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 they've got to you know recover physically and stuff and mentally from it um but they get better more or less their problems don't really go away um 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 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 OK, she still suffers terribly for no reason. You know, it takes her a long time to recover. and there are more than a thousand people with versions of that story as 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, Ian 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. What the fuck? 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 Min, I don't know I think we need to create Min 2.0 I love it Maybe we have like a governorship or something that shuts down when you get too into certain things Yeah, I like it, I like it Yeah, like if you get a Punisher tattoo on your body, it just, you know, you're out, you're out. You're done. That's it. Gotta be honest, don't like the phrase, men 2.0, made me queasy, didn't love it. You're right, we should start with men 3.0. We'll add a tail, we'll be fine. 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, every reputable article is a little different, in part 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 19 further DST patients committed suicide within a year of undergoing this therapy. I was going to ask. I was going to ask. Oh, my God. 1979? 79? Yeah, 79 is when this all starts. So recent. Yeah. 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 die 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 lifelong injury. This leads to depression. You know, it's a bummer. 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 it, 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, calm you down. He takes the pill Having never agreed to treatment And wakes up naked in a hospital room Two weeks later No This is horror movie shit This is horror movie shit In terms of Breaches of medical ethics That's about the breachingest You get He was like this botched plastic surgery Is going to be the worst medical experience Of my And I'm up Let me take. Yep. Oh, my God. 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 physician. Dr. Heron is. But Dr. Heron is basically Bailey's like fucking like a mentee. Right. And works. Right. And he's doing the same treatment. so Hart 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 unfortunately yeah which he did should have happened however his records are modified by the hospital and the records say he consented to the procedure so it's a he said he said sort of deal right now ultimately 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 herring 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 is the news about to get a hold of this 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? 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 it didn't work, right? Now they have some evidence like, oh, maybe I was mistreated by my doctor Yes Yeah And also there are patients who probably had complained but as we stated before the complaints went nowhere The regulators ignored them And those patients now realize maybe the wall of immunity that been protecting this guy is starting to fail So maybe I can try to complain again and it'll get somewhere. Lawsuits 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. 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, right? The original ones were not good. But those numbers are also different from the other numbers that I have found in reputable. Reuters is obviously a generally reputable source. So is the Sydney Morning Herald. And the Sydney Morning Herald says that Dr. Bailey only treated 1,127 people with deep sleep therapy okay um 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 possible 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 183 patients died in the hospital or within a year of getting out of the hospital while 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 still wrote for Reuters as 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 they're just 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 in 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 Rose is undercover, you know, for years, feeding information about Bailey's operation. But that begs the question, to whom is she feeding the information? You would hope she's sending it to a journalist. No, no. So she has helpers who are helping to fund her quest and 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 is Scientology with a steel chair. Oh, my God. I love it. I love it. Oh, yeah. And so I wonder if maybe Perry's article. Well, what the hell was Scientology doing to help? Great question. Part of why, so I do wonder, is maybe Perry's numbers high because he, Scientologists gave them to him? But per the Sydney Morning Herald, quote, two Scientologists, Ron Siegel and Jan Eastgate, had worked with a 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 that 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 L. Ron Hubbard, because Scientology starts as Dianetics, which Hubbard billed as a replacement science for psychiatry. right and as a result he taught that because psychiatrists don't embrace dianetics he teaches his followers that psychiatry is a murderous cabal that tortures and kills people for money and power fortunately it just so happens that does kind of describe the psychiatrists at Chelmsford a little bit oh no broken clock is right yeah these guys are as evil as the church of Scientology thinks all psychiatrists are um now it just so happens that dr bailey and his colleagues at chelmsford were that bad um 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 are trying to get the clinic shut down like a scientology plan did not go well and ended up damaging many individuals oh who could have thought of that wow who'd have thunk it i am shocked to hear this information yeah oh no for the sydney morning herald the scientist the scientologist's involvement enabled chumsford to smear the whistleblowers and patients hart would be accused of being a scientologist himself which still raises a rare laugh ha ha yes i had a botched plastic surgery nearly got myself killed all so i could be an agent of the scientologists Well, nowadays I'm like, maybe, maybe. Yeah, it's just crazier shit. So this elaborate scheme also was not necessary to cause Dr. Bailey's downfall. The same year Hart 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 government regulator and be like, hey, a lot of people are dying at this hospital. Oh, my God. 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 in the story, you know things are bad. Oh, holy shit. Yeah. So fuck all is done in this case, too. The regulators ignore 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? It's my own actions. Yeah. 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, and his day job has given him absolute power over hundreds of people's bodies. And I think that just makes you crazy in a bad way. Yes. God complex. Yes. That destroys your mind. you know um as the years went on his staff goes from adoring him to frightened of him per reuters quote former nurse leslie hosey told the commission bailey once told staff don't call me harry call me god see what did i say healthy man right there yeah i thought god he is mad she said when you work with psychiatrists for that long you sort of get to know the crazy ones he really did believe what he was doing was helping people. It was said, which is a really, he really thought he was helping people. It was said. It was said. I don't know, maybe. I think also when you have all that going for you for so long and then you start to lose that, like, adoration, that's also you go crazy. Yeah. Yep, I think you're probably right on the money with that too. And there's further support for the Mad King Harry thesis. In 1991, the British Medical Journal published an article that claimed Dr. Bailey showed signs of delusional behavior, such as referring to himself as a Martian. Oh, no. I have not found more detail on that, and I wish I had. I don't know what the fuck that means. That's a weird day for me to be wearing an alien sweater. Uh-oh. Because they don't write about it like it was a bit. Scientology. Scientology came by and said, hello. Convinced him who was an alien. So there's a lot. Oh, my God. A lot that's awful about this guy. But one of the worst things is that, perhaps not surprisingly, he was a sex pest and he regularly had sex with his patients. No, we knew it. We knew it. I say I said I had sex, not raped. I don't know that that's entirely true, because given that he's the sleep doctor. Right. The fact that he fucks his patients immediately brings to mind a pretty awful question. Were all those patients awake? And I don't know. Yeah, is this a Kill Bill Volume 1 situation? And also he's their psychiatrist, so it's already non-consensual. Right. He shouldn't be doing it anyway. It's already bad. Yeah, if they're awake, it's still bad. Oh, no, no. The British Medical Journal just notes that he had sex with his patients on multiple occasions. That Reuters piece adds a little more detail. Staff said Bailey had sex with his female patients, often ordering them sent by taxi to his office or home late at night. I really hope those are conscious people being sent by taxi. Oh, no. Even if it is, that's still bad. Even if it is, still real bad. The Australian Encyclopedia of Biography adds, Bailey reveled in the trappings of professional power and exploited the vulnerabilities of those in his care, having sexual relationships with a number of female patients and some employees. Now, the same source claims his wife showed pretty intense loyalty to him for years, And I don't know when that stopped. She's described by one article as estranged prior to his death, along with their two adopted daughters, probably for the best there. I don't know how if his wife was aware of any of the really bad stuff or if she just knew that he was not well, right, and was cheating on her constantly. I don't think there's not any particular reason for me to believe that his family knew anything about like the horrible medical crimes he's committing. Right. Like and also it's like the 70s. There's not a lot of ways his family would have been able to know what was really going on. Right. The walls start closing in on Dr. Bailey in 1977. It starts with the suicide of his patient and lover, a prominent dancer named Sharon Hamilton. she left her entire estate to dr bailey which fueled public speculation that he may have somehow caused her death that right maybe he even murdered her right there's a lot there's like news articles about this and that fucks bailey up first of all the fact that people are talking about it like he killed this woman because he seems to have been in love with her bailey is so distraught after her death that he undergoes dst for the first time himself he puts himself under for days to try to deal with like his feelings in the wake of this he's taking and there are so many twists and turns in this fucking story it's fucking wild right he's drinking his own cool aid he seems to have increasingly started taking his own medications after this point so everything that happens next in the story you have to imagine this guy is on a shitload of xanax or whatever the equivalent was Do not get high on your own supply. Yeah, man, never a good idea. So during my research, I came across an interesting source, TruthAboutECT, that's electroconvulsivetherapy.org, which based its name and – I didn't – number one, that name, not a trustworthy news source to me. Number two, the website looks like a real shitty blog, not a great – and I've quoted from the Chelmsford blog, which is a blog that was like meant because – written by people, I think by people, who are angry that this is not better known. And I used it as a source because it cites its sources extensively. And after looking at those sources, I was able to show that it's a good essay. Everything it says is accurate. So I'm not inclined to trust the website necessarily, but I wanted to look into it. So I like read the article to see if it seemed, you know, reasonable what it was saying. And it hosted a 2020 piece by an author named Jan Eastgate. And that name was familiar to me because Jan Eastgate is one of the two Scientologists who worked with nurse Rosa Nicholson. She is now president of CCHR International. This is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobbying organization for the Church of Scientology. Oh, my God. Yeah. They love to use that. Everything, everywhere, all at once. They love to use that .org website for fake news sites. It's one of their go-tos. Yeah, they love doing that shit. But yeah, but that said, it's still kind of worthwhile to talk about this source because Jan Eastgate is directly involved in this. She's working with Rosa as she's undercover. She did get – So that's an interesting source. The source, yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. The article from 2020 is a memorial that Eastgate wrote for Rosa, her friend who had recently passed on. And in it, Jan makes this claim. I remember there were allegations that Dr. Bailey shot up a residence over the suicide death of one of his patients, Sharon Hamilton, with whom he'd had a sexual affair, and electroshocked her when she became vocal about it. I don't know if this is true. I have not come across other claims of this. What an asshole, though. I wouldn't put it past him. Yeah. Yeah. Right? But he was upset about it. Yeah. but it's giving like it's giving um what's his name yeah it's giving Dahmer right if she's like gonna try to talk or she's he like loves her quote unquote he's gonna try to like leave he's like I'll make her a zombie and then she'll stay with me forever oops she's dead yeah hard to say like I haven't I haven't found like I can't prove any of that obviously and I haven't found I don't believe the shooting thing just because like that probably would have made the news, right? That might have made the news, I don't know. It was easier to get guns in Australia back then. It's pre-Port Arthur, but yeah. The Psychiatric Museum of Death that's in LA. That's in LA. What if it's like, it has all of this information in it? Yeah, oh, I'm certain. Because they make a big deal about this guy. I bet they'll use the much bigger numbers Reuters had, which like, again, he's bad enough without exaggerating the numbers. Well, and that, and wow, and isn't that how he would just want it? He would want the numbers to look even more. Honestly, it's kind of an honor to him. Right? Yeah, yep, yep, yep. So, yeah, in 1980, 60 Minutes ran an episode on the death of one of Dr. Bailey's patients, Miriam Podio, who had passed in 1977. This added fuel to the simmering fire that had been building for quite some time. Per the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography, five years later, a coronial inquest into her death was held, and in 1983, Bailey was charged with manslaughter. Although the charge was dismissed in 1985, the media siege was intense. Sick, tired, dispirited after facing years of litigation, on 8th of September 1985, he drove to Mount White and parked on an isolated track. The next day, police found him dead, the cause of death being attempted barbiturate poisoning. He was survived by his estranged wife and two adopted daughters. You can't make this shit up. No, he kills himself using a dose of the same medicine he gave his patients. Yeah, some people even include him in the death toll of DST. If this was a movie, you would be like, that's too much. Yeah, that's too much. and he it's so fucked up he he has like a he has a suicide note right that he that he leaves in the car with him yeah uh here's his suicide note um always remember that the forces of evil are greater than the forces of good i always tried to be a good doctor and i think perhaps i was at the end of his note he adds all of his degrees and qualifications there's been there he blames the church of scientology for everything with like yeah i mean they're not helping anything but that isn't their fault man they didn't start this you did this did scientology kill him no no no he kills himself uses the drugs that he had fucking done he just blames scientology for making for for ruining his reputation i know but secretly i'm like did they but wait a minute yeah the fucking he writes his degrees god yeah it's crazy i can't this man is insane i can't believe I didn't know about this till right now. He's deeply unwell. That is truly wild. That is so crazy. Yeah. His death does help get wheels moving in the Australian government. In 1998, they issue a proper royal commission to investigate deep sleep therapy. The commissioner ultimately concludes that all of the doctors involved with operating Chelmsworth had likely contributed some amount of fraud, obstruction of justice, and negligence. Bailey though was the spoke of the whole operation and the central figure without whom none of this would have happened the New South Wales parliament ultimately banned his treatment entirely and a blizzard of reforms followed governing how hospitals function and what practitioners are allowed to do today it's genuinely one of the most important cases in the history of Australia's mental health care system like this does yeah and a lot of people argue it doesn't do enough the as always the reforms are imperfect but this does significantly alter the way in which like mental health therapy works in australia wow wow it's good shit it's good shit yeah i keep using i keep saying that things are crazy and i know people don't like that but wow this is this is like a perfect confluence of like ableism misogyny like just like sexism like uh uh ego like it's just wow wow wow wow wow yep yep and it's like it's even fucked up even at the end after they because the the guy who writes you know the commission the the report is very unsparing about how bad bailey was in the clinic was but then at the end is like also none of them get none of the patients or victims get damages because like it they waited too long to report anything and all these people pointed out like but actually immediately a bunch of us immediately reported stuff and were ignored and tried for years to report stuff and just kept being ignored. And he was like, well, yeah, but it's still your job. It's not the government's job. It's your job to make the government do stuff. So you actually didn't do work hard enough to try to make them stop this. So you're not you don't get any money. Sorry. Yeah, I believe that governments love. It's cool. I love government. There are so many victims just beyond what you can even name. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. But they're not they should have worked harder to get the government to do something about this. I that is such a triggering word to me. Right. That's a triggering phrase to me right now. So fucked up. Fully insane. So fucked up. Yeah. The level to which you like elect someone into office and then they go. You didn't do enough. No. Get away from. Yeah. The fuck. Yep. All right. Well, this is run long. Thank you, Gabe, for for coming in and sitting down and listening to these horrible stories. You want to plug anything here? uh no just uh just my podcast best game ever and my podcast a thousand natural shocks and also the sub stack a thousand natural shocks dot sub stack.com and thank you so much for having me like i'm such a big fan this is so crazy thank you so much for being on and listeners until next time remember there's no health consequences to eating your body weight and benzos every single day of your life So just do that. Jesus Christ, Robert. Don't listen to him. Thank you so much. 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. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Danielle Robay, host of Bookmarked, the podcast by Reese's Book Club. And this week, we are talking about a monster. Or maybe the woman who refused to be one. I'm sitting down with Maggie Gyllenhaal to unpack her new film, The Bride. And trust me, this isn't your grandmother's Bride of Frankenstein. What I was more interested in was the monstrousness inside of each of us. You can spend your life running from those things, or you can turn around and shake hands with them. Listen to Bookmarked, the Reese's Book Club podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Sino Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. I'm an alcoholic. Without this problem, I'm going to die. Listen to Sino's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Prune's Music is Therapy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.