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

Robert concludes the story of Dr. Bailey by describing how he lost his mind and eventually his practice See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast filmed in front of a live studio audience. If the words "live studio" audience refer to the other people in my Airbnb who can probably hear me through the door. We are giving our part two on Doctor 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.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Hey, we got a little, we like to do a little warm up before every episode, you know, where we just like, ask a little questions to the audience and get to know the guest better. Where were you on the night of May 17th, 2007?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I was a freshman in college, so probably, in Boston, probably with a boyfriend who is cheating on me. But I don't know if he specifically cheated on me on that day.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Many such cases. Many such cases.

• 1:21Robert Evans?

  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?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Did it happen in Boston, the murder?

• 1:33Robert Evans?

  Uh, a lot of murders do.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Again, Boston.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  You know what? Touche, touche, touche.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 1:45Speaker 04

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• 2:15Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 2:50Robert Evans?

  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?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  I don't trust anyone who seems trustworthy.

• 3:27Robert Evans?

  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 most, 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.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:57Robert Evans?

  Neither do the QAnon people.

• 4:00Robert Evans?

  Tom Hanks is the deep state.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Very true, very true.

• 4:04Robert Evans?

  So, uh, yeah, he's a charming guy. Multiple people who knew him all noted that Harry Bailey was always well-dressed, and as his career went on, he was able to afford fine, tailored suits. He was, as the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography notes, both a, quote, "cherub-faced charmer" and prone to, quote, "occasional drunken rages."

• 4:23Robert Evans?

  There's not enough detail about those occasional drunken rages. Unfortunately, we do not have nearly the context I'd like to have on this guy's drunken rages.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  There are two wolves. There are two wolves that live inside you.

• 4:34Robert Evans?

  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.

• 4:45Speaker 01

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

• 4:50Robert Evans?

  Maybe. I can't say that, like, there's just very little detail on this, but kind of from other things people said, I kind of think maybe he, at least, maybe it was because it may have just been like work parties and stuff that sometimes he got too drunk at, right?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Okay, fuck Mary, kill, fuck Mary, kill, cherubic, well dressed, drunken rage.

• 5:08Robert Evans?

  Let's see. Uh, fuck well dressed, merry drunken rage, merry drunken rage, and kill the cherub. Yeah.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Okay, wow, didn't see that coming.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I did. I fear I did.

• 5:24Robert Evans?

  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 noticed this about him, too.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  I relate. I get it.

• 5:47Robert Evans?

  He's 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's, 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?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:11Robert Evans?

  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."

• 6:31Robert Evans?

  So that's not-

• 6:32Speaker 01

  That's where that sleep stuff gets real creepy.

• 6:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, with, just wait, Gabe. And again, this is-

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 6:41Robert Evans?

  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.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear what a-

• 6:57Robert Evans?

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

• 7:00Speaker 01

  My, my grandfather was such a square. He was a doctor around that time. And he, my grandmother's, 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, I, he would ice him. He'd be like, I hate that guy. Like, 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 guy.

• 7:31Robert Evans?

  Can you believe he's got a problem with Dr. fucks every nurse? My God. Can you believe it? That's his, his, yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:42Robert Evans?

  I can't hang out with you. You're a sex pest.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Robert Evans?

  That does, you, every now and then you see some like- Like, you got some of this during like Me Too where there would be, you would find out, because usually you found out, oh, the celebrity that I like are kind of like, kept his mouth shut and knew about Weinstein. But every now and then you'd find out about one who was like from the jump, like, no, fuck, fuck this guy. I won't work with him. And it was all, it was usually someone who you were like, oh, I wonder why their career hadn't taken off more. Oh, because they had ethics. Ah, okay.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:13Robert Evans?

  Because they were mean to the rapist.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. My, my grandpa wasn't climbing the ranks at the hospital.

• 8:19Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yeah. Why you want to stop everybody from having fun, you know?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  And that's the kind of doctor, that's how Bailey is. And again, that's also how he's seen this. 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.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  He dixitized them.

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  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.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  So it's not just the woman he's sleeping with, it's beyond that. So he's not dixitizing.

• 9:02Robert Evans?

  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 like leaves him eventually for cheating on him, you know?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. It's like, it's like Keith Raniere, Manson, it's like that kind of shit.

• 9:20Robert Evans?

  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.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:47Robert Evans?

  And maybe that's kind of what's going on with this guy is that he's just likeable in person for a long time.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 9:53Robert Evans?

  I kind of think that is the case to a lot of people. I mean, some people do note, wow, those drunken rages aren't great. But a lot of people are able to put up with them and it's because he's giving them something, like providing them something socially that they value. So I don't know, he's just, it's an interesting guy, right? He's, he's got something going on that makes this work for him.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  I feel like it's narcissism, but I don't know. I can't, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a doctor putting people to sleep in the 60s. What do I know?

• 10:22Robert Evans?

  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 like, you kind of can't be both of those things. Like, you can't be the kind of guy who like, just makes up his mind, no matter what countervailing evidence shows up, and

• 11:05Robert Evans?

  also be a really strong practitioner of the scientific method. Because kind of the whole point of the scientific method is like, you gotta kill your darlings, you know?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Right. Yes. I learned that in the fifth grade.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This really seems like it should work, but it doesn't. So we're gonna stop doing it, is what good scientists and doctors did with deep sleep therapy. Dr. Bailey can't do that. Um, so, and 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?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Lebotomies?

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  He is not giving lebotomies, thankfully. Like, I'll say that.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  What is he doing?

• 11:55Robert Evans?

  What is he doing? So, modern day psychosurgery is, you're usually, these are very, generally very like, targeted and kind of minimal, like, physical impact operations directly on the brain to deal with like, treatment resistant disorders, right?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:12Robert Evans?

  Like, today, a lot of the focus is, we want to have as little of physical impact on, 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, uh, in Dr. Bailey's time and day, right? Um, and he's also convinced that homosexuality, uh, is an illness, and an illness that can be cured by psychosurgery. So he does prescribe brain surgery to a lot of gay people.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  That was the one thing he was right about. Everybody knows that.

• 12:41Robert Evans?

  Everybody knows that. Yeah. Um, now, as I stated, his patients are at first, in the early days, very loyal to him, in a way that borders- For some people, kind of on being, seeming like drug dependency, which it may have been. Cause some people do really regularly come in for like re-up bouts of sleep therapy. And part of me is like, are they just addicted?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:04Robert Evans?

  You know?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:07Robert Evans?

  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 face. 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, you know, the, the, 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?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  You're at your last straw, why not?

• 13:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and if you're, if it's you going in and your anxiety is so bad that 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.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  So he doesn't think you can sleep, so he doesn't think you can sleep the gay away? But he thinks you can, he can chop it out of you?

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Cause uh... And I don't know that he did this, but it kinda sounds like he thinks if maybe he could knock you out and then surgery the gay away. But I can't find, I, I don't know that he actually did this.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  They tried to do that to me, but I just ended up trans, so we had to scrap it.

• 14:26Speaker 01

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

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 14:34Robert Evans?

  So the Chelmsford blog notes that, "As far as Dr. Bailey was concerned, he had many loyal and dependent patients, yet would often make callous comments about them in private circles."

• 14:42Speaker 02

  This guy sucks.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Fucking asshole.

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  Again, he's, 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?

• 14:55Robert Evans?

  There's a royal commission report after his death that aggregates accounts from a bunch of his coworkers, employees, and patients. Uh, 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?

• 15:15Robert Evans?

  One of his early patients was a 13-year-old girl who was admitted suffering symptoms of anorexia nervosa.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Ah, no.

• 15:22Robert Evans?

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

• 15:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:26Robert Evans?

  Then the "treatment" began.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:29Robert Evans?

  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.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 15:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  What year is this?

• 15:58Robert Evans?

  A 13-year-old girl, no anesthetic, no consent, huh?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  What year is this?

• 16:02Robert Evans?

  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.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 16:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, that's like-

• 16:13Speaker 01

  How do we know? How do we know that that's what happened? Who told?

• 16:16Robert Evans?

  Because they take, they document it. Like, they're taking, they're keeping notes and stuff. Like, these are patients, they're being treated, you know?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 16:23Robert Evans?

  The files are not, right, yeah. 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.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:33Robert Evans?

  Um, 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, Glen Witty, 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 side of her head, and it grows to the

• 17:16Robert Evans?

  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.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Shut the fuck up.

• 17:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  That is some body horror fucking Cronenberg ass shit.

• 17:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some Ted Suo, Iron Man bullshit.

• 17:37Robert Evans?

  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 Gainesborough, who visited Chelmsford the same year as Glenn Witty, 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. Now, I don't know why.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Frankenstein ass fucking shit. Okay, wait, okay. You have metal in your head, you don't know, you're hit by lightning, or you don't know and you go through like a metal detector. You go, you gotta know there's metal in you.

• 18:37Robert Evans?

  Or a fucking MRI that can kill you. You can't put metal in people and not tell them.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  You sure can't.

• 18:45Robert Evans?

  It's, it's, it's wild. I like, I don't know why he did this. These are both, I think, from the same year, like 64, was it?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:04Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. Lot of his patients are women, yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Oh, shocking.

• 19:08Robert Evans?

  Lot of women and kids.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Unintended, I guess.

• 19:12Robert Evans?

  So, I don't know like why he did this, but it does kinda, 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.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Oh, no, okay.

• 19:40Robert Evans?

  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?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:53Robert Evans?

  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 did, we woke you up to feed you and asked if we could do this, and you said yes, and you signed the paper. But of course, you're barred the fuck out. You have no idea what you've done." So, this is something that happened periodically throughout the days and weeks that people were kept unconscious. They generally did not remember their conscious moments, because again, their brains were drenched in 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.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  And your signature is just, your signature is just like looping down the whole paper, just going down the whole paper.

• 20:41Robert Evans?

  It's just a line, yeah?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:45Robert Evans?

  Now, this is also, and I should note, at the time, this should have been a problem, but it wasn't. It, this is not, even at the time, considered to be great medical ethics. But it's also not considered bad enough that anyone does anything, right? Like, nothing gets referred, like, nothing, nothing makes it to a point where he has to, like, suffer consequences. So, people aren't taking this seriously, and he is getting reported to regulators and to the government. So, there are choices being made by professionals in the Australia who are supposed to be regulating the medical industry that when patients complain about stuff like this, his answer is sufficient. "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.

• 21:29Robert Evans?

  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?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:43Robert Evans?

  And we'll, we'll talk more about why he's allowed to get away with this, but you know what you can get away with, listeners?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 21:50Robert Evans?

  A deal, a hell of a deal. Or ads for the Washington State Highway Patrol. It's a crapshoot, I don't know.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

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• 22:30Robert Evans?

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• 23:29Robert Evans?

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• 24:10Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Gabe and I have both joined the Washington State Highway Patrol.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  I did not.

• 24:15Robert Evans?

  It was a really convincing ad, really convincing ad.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I rest you do.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  They didn't want me. I forced it.

• 24:21Speaker 02

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• 24:25Robert Evans?

  The recruiter promised me I could serve in Hawaii. I don't know why the Washington State Highway Patrol's there, but...

• 24:32Robert Evans?

  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."

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 24:39Robert Evans?

  Of course you won't be fighting, son!

• 24:42Speaker 01

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

• 24:44Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah.

• 24:47Robert Evans?

  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 it's, 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 gotta 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.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:21Robert Evans?

  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.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  I've heard "death by misadventure" used before.

• 25:49Robert Evans?

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

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Great name for a book, though.

• 25:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, oh, absolutely. So it turns out that, you know, death is kind of unavoidable when you're pounding people's nervous systems with enough downers to fuck up an elephant. By 1969, per a very good article in the Sydney Morning Herald, quote, "Bailey and Heron had been sending patients to Chelmsford for 'a good rest' for six years. 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...

• 26:27Robert Evans?

  Not a great-

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Holy shit. And the hallucinations like, don't really go, like, I'm sure they're, they're kind of, like, permanent. There's things that are permanent even though you're alive.

• 26:37Robert Evans?

  They're, yeah, I don't think, I don't know that they'll lose, but they're a permanent call. I mean, for one thing, if you're not moving physically in a coma for like, two or three weeks, that causes long-term health issues. You have to go to rehab to-

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:49Robert Evans?

  Like, move right again. It's bad to not move for several weeks at a time.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:55Robert Evans?

  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.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 27:25Robert Evans?

  Psychiatric hospitals were not generally nice places, and most people preferred not to think about them, right? Including most people in government. You wanna look into this? I don't wanna 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?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:45Robert Evans?

  You know? "Croaky! Why worry about that?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  No, I was gonna say-

• 27:48Robert Evans?

  We got shrimp on the barbie."

• 27:50Speaker 01

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

• 27:54Robert Evans?

  No.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Even in an Australian accent.

• 27:56Robert Evans?

  Nah. So, Elaine McKay was the mother of a 14-year-old boy named Craig, who suffered from cerebro-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."

• 28:43Robert Evans?

  What loving parent, hearing those words from an award-winning medical expert, wouldn't say yes, right?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:50Robert Evans?

  You know?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:51Robert Evans?

  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.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Parents of sick kids are so vulnerable.

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  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 bad. Like, you should have known not to do that to your kid. This one, there, she, she, they did nothing wrong.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:19Robert Evans?

  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've 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,

• 30:01Robert Evans?

  he's paying to be here. Plus, whatever fucking drugs we give him, and whatever fucking treatments we cook up, right?

• 30:08Robert Evans?

  Great. Keep him in as long as we can. Why ever let him go?

• 30:11Speaker 01

  The hairdresser part really threw me.

• 30:14Robert Evans?

  Great stuff. 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, 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."

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:37Robert Evans?

  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, 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.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:04Robert Evans?

  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's 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 you.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 31:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, crazy.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. There was a fire in that one cabinet?

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  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.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 31:55Robert Evans?

  So she waits with her son that day and then she heads home. Later that night, she gets a call from Chelmsford and they tell her and her husband that their son is dying. So she calls the hospital frantic and the hospital, the person who picks her up is like annoyed that she's freaking out. It's like, calm down. You've got yourself into a bit of a mess. She was talked down to, quote, "Like I was an idiot. I kept calling that night. I drove them nuts, ringing them every half hour. We got a taxi over to the hospital about a seven o'clock in the morning. We knocked on the door. The matron said, "We just lost him, my dear, and that was it. I was a mess, as you can imagine. They took me off and started popping pills into me to calm me down. We were a couple of dills. We believed everything they told us."

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Oh, no. They're gonna get the mom in too.

• 32:42Robert Evans?

  No, they're, 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.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  No, I know.

• 32:53Robert Evans?

  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. They gave him, they give a 14-year-old four months of regular massive doses of Binzos and fucking a chloral hydrate. Like, that's insane.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  So this is where it becomes like, it's not just Bailey. The nurses have this attitude. Everyone at the hospital has this attitude.

• 33:22Robert Evans?

  They have, that is mixed, because again, the nurses trust Dr. Bailey. They're not doctors. They don't always know, this, increasingly, they start to. But it takes some time, right? I, I do say, there are nurses who are definitely complicit, and doctors who are definitely complicit. It's hard to say how much and who at this point in time, other, like, the doctors definitely are. But like, it's hard to say which nurses had enough, like, should have known something was wrong, and at what point, right? This is probably one of the points, though, four months.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you still don't dismiss a mother who's freaking out.

• 34:00Robert Evans?

  Like, oh, I mean, and it's, it's also just, this kid's problem is that he's going blind. You're not gonna fix, you, no, there's no way this is gonna fix that. The therapy was because he's depressed and acting out. Four months? For that?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:14Robert Evans?

  That's crazy.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:17Robert Evans?

  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.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  I mean, that's insurance now.

• 34:53Robert Evans?

  Uh huh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In this, 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?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 35:13Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna 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 Binzos in four months at age 14 while electrocuting them every night.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, they charge for the therapy, too.

• 35:29Robert Evans?

  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." Um, it's real, because like, you gotta think, too.

• 36:15Robert Evans?

  This guy's talking about like, he comes home, his son is deaf, so he's not hearing his father's words, purely by the way his dad looks in his physical language, the instant he sees him, this kid is like, this isn't the dad I know. This isn't my dad, something's wrong. Like, that's bad.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:50Robert Evans?

  It ripples, yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:52Robert Evans?

  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.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 37:01Robert Evans?

  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."

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my God!

• 37:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's fucking, like, this guy doesn't remember his kids' names!

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's horrific.

• 37:30Robert Evans?

  How can you, and this is where I get to the point that like, okay, yeah, there's gotta 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."

• 37:48Speaker 01

  It must be, okay, I think there's like, and this comes down to the asylum of it all. I think there's this deep mistrust, even now, but probably even, you know, more back then, of anyone doing anything remotely differently. Like, I see so many people that get so freaked out by, let's say, like, a homeless person because they move their arm weird. And I'm like, "Relax." Like, I think there's like a deep, unless you're moving the exact way, or your face is the exact way, or your temperament is the exact way, that, like, it's, you know, conformed, societally conformed, then people are deeply off-put by you. And so, that's

• 38:32Speaker 01

  why they're like, "Oh, this person, you know, is feeling a little sad," or is kind of like, exposing that probably you have some sadness after giving birth. Get them out of my eyesight.

• 38:43Robert Evans?

  Get them out of my eyesight, drug them. Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  So the nurses might be like, "You know what? She'll recover, and at least now she's not being weird."

• 38:54Robert Evans?

  Right. And I think, I think that's a really good point. And I think in order, like, also on the case of how, how people would have thought this was working, a lot of his patients are people who are being, like, referred from other, like, from 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? The problems return, and they have new ones now because of what's happened to them. But, yeah, I think that's, that's probably accurate. So Craig was, as far as I found, the only child to die in Chelmsford.

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  But children were often admitted the youngest of Dr. Bailey's patients for deep sleep therapy was 10 years old.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:43Robert Evans?

  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 to 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?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  That's really good of them to have.

• 40:13Robert Evans?

  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."

• 40:45Speaker 01

  What is this pneumonia? What's going on?

• 40:48Robert Evans?

  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.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:07Robert Evans?

  They do that, or her. They do that a lot.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  I did think that after I asked the question, I did think that I was being a bit of a how do you do that? Okay.

• 41:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  They were lying, as it turns out.

• 41:15Robert Evans?

  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.

• 41:31Robert Evans?

  Because they're stressed out at work.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  I know.

• 41:35Robert Evans?

  That's not how you solve that problem.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  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 stressed about being a school teacher. And nobody's like, yeah, that seems right. Everyone's like, you gotta get rid of that.

• 42:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, it's, it's, it's so fucking hard for me to believe. And I wonder what he told this, this, this teacher. I wonder if she knew it was supposed to be 28 days, because people report being under, 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.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  So insane that like, people-

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  It's fucked, yeah.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  They have no idea. And then they're there for weeks.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  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.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:58Robert Evans?

  This offers some explanation as to why 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 legitimately thinks they need that much time. He just wants money, right?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  He's a greedy master. Got it.

• 43:19Robert Evans?

  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.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:27Robert Evans?

  Entirely.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 43:28Robert Evans?

  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's like, these people are sending me a lot of bodies, and the bodies they're sending me do not look good. I am a coroner. I am used to dealing with dead people from hospitals. This is not normal.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Hero coroner.

• 43:57Robert Evans?

  Well, he tried to be. Uh, he tried to be. Um, 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."

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 44:32Robert Evans?

  And that explains why the hospital lets him get away with this, that he kinda part owns. But it's also, that explains why I think local elected leaders and local regulators, like the officials, don't wanna fuck with this, cuz there's a lot of money here.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Money, yeah.

• 44:47Robert Evans?

  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 and the community needs it, or you know, whatever. I don't entirely know. Um, but he should be getting in trouble more often than he does.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Right?

• 45:00Robert Evans?

  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?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And the cities like that.

• 45:41Robert Evans?

  The cities like that, the staff likes that. You know, to quote Fallout New Vegas, "Everybody likes that." Um, you know what else everybody likes?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Ahhh. Is it products and services?

• 45:52Robert Evans?

  That's right, baby. Everyone loves a good product, a solid service, you know? Maybe there's even an ad for a mental hospital that will knock you unconscious for 28 straight days.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 46:04Robert Evans?

  Look, even, even after doing all this research, I kinda am like, "Oh yeah, that might fix my work stress. I don't know, man. 28 days of sleep? Ooh, sounds kinda good."

• 46:12Speaker 01

  I know, I'm not, I'm not unconvinced.

• 46:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, sounds alright. Could I just have 28 days of benzos? Could I just be barred out for a month? Would that be okay? No, it would not be okay.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Not in this current drug economy.

• 46:25Robert Evans?

  It's bad for you.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  We don't know what it is anymore.

• 46:27Robert Evans?

  Don't fuck around with Benzos, people. I tried 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. If you prescribe them, you know, whatever. They're great, they work, but they're also interact with a bunch of shit.

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• 48:14Robert Evans?

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• 48:54Robert Evans?

  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 they, I assumed that they thought this worked, but I figured, well, Dr. Bailey's a doctor. He's got to have a more substantial reason for why he thought this was a good idea.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  And he doesn't?

• 49:34Robert Evans?

  And I was wrong. I was wrong. Here's how-

• 49:36Speaker 01

  But Robert, they said he loves the scientific method.

• 49:40Robert Evans?

  He's a, he's super into sci- 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.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:00Robert Evans?

  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.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  It is what you thought. It's exactly what you thought.

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  What?

• 50:17Robert Evans?

  I was joking. You really think it's just like, have you tried turning it off and on again?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  That's the exact thing he's saying. Exactly.

• 50:27Robert Evans?

  Your son's doing heroin? Have you tried turning him off and on?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  I guess so. I get the concept.

• 50:32Robert Evans?

  Your daughter's schizophrenic? Have you tried turning her off and on? Sorry, Sophie.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  I was gonna 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.

• 50:44Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  And I'll be back to full strength.

• 50:47Robert Evans?

  I mean, obviously- Part of why this is compelling and why people believe this is this is a little how sleep works.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:54Robert Evans?

  It doesn't unlearn traumatic stuff like addiction and

• 50:57Speaker 01

  No, but it is quite helpful.

• 50:59Robert Evans?

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

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:04Robert Evans?

  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. That's why they're really hesitant to prescribe it for PTSD today, because like, because of that reason.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:24Robert Evans?

  So you have to be very careful when you're utilizing benzos with patients who are dealing with like, trauma and stuff.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:30Robert Evans?

  And if you're just keeping them barred out for 28 days while they're unconscious, they're not working through anything, they're not processing anything, they're gone.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:57Robert Evans?

  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.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 52:17Robert Evans?

  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, like, his normal prescription was a 10 to 14 day session, but as time went on, he tries doing-

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  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 3 weeks, let's try 4 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

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Of course they are.

• 53:01Robert Evans?

  If not months or years of physical therapy to recover.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:06Robert Evans?

  Like, a 39-day coma is a calamity to your body.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yes. Holy shit. And they're not even bicycling your legs for you?

• 53:15Robert Evans?

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

• 53:18Speaker 01

  They're not even moving your arms around?

• 53:20Robert Evans?

  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?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:28Robert Evans?

  And this comes from, this I actually found in the post from the subreddit user who suggested this. He suggested, there's an autobiography of an Australian actress who undergoes this treatment. So Toni Lamon 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.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:47Robert Evans?

  Here's a picture of Toni. You can see her on screen if you can, but if you can't.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Great hair.

• 53:53Robert Evans?

  She's a lady. She looks nice.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:58Robert Evans?

  Now, I'm gonna 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, she's got this really high-pressure job where 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.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Oh, man. So they give her a fuck-ton of drugs she doesn't need? Sure do.

• 54:39Robert Evans?

  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. Quote, "I had not allowed myself to stop and mourn, but had thrown myself into work at a financial necessity." She writes in her autobiography, "First Half." "Seeking comfort, she winds up reading a book about an American widow," convinces her that she's made a mistake by dulling her mind to the pain of her husband's death with pills, right? And this inspires her to start exploring mental health care options. So, so far, a great story about the positive ways books can impact our lives, right?

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:15Robert Evans?

  This woman's in a rut. She reads a book about another person who dealt with a similar thing and she's like, "I'm gonna start taking some real steps to make, get myself better," you know?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:24Robert Evans?

  Great. We're so, it's so hard to do. It's so hard, Tony, to get to that point with a problem like this. Unfortunately, when she starts talking about, telling her friends that she's exploring mental health care options, one of them advises her, "Hey, I know about this famous, award-winning local doctor who has a private, who just helped open a private hospital."

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's also, that's, that's barbiturates again.

• 55:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Just what she was doing.

• 55:51Robert Evans?

  I'll, 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."

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 56:07Robert Evans?

  "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 gotta put you down for a few days and then you'll be better." And she's like, "Maybe." Right?

• 56:41Speaker 01

  She's gonna take time off her job?

• 56:44Robert Evans?

  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.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 57:05Robert Evans?

  She was put up in a semi-private room and along the way, she saw several beds lining the corridors filled with sleeping people. Quote, "Although it was mid-morning, the stillness was eerie for a hospital that looked to be full to overflowing. I was given a handful of pills to take and the next thing I remember was Dr. Bailey standing by the bed, asking me how I felt. I told him I'd had a good night's sleep. He laughed and informed me it was 10 days later. And what's more, he had taken some weight off me. He sure had, nearly seven kilos. I didn't mind that, as I have always had trouble with my weight, but that much in 10 days? I was checked out of the hospital and this time noticed the other patients were still asleep or being taken to the restroom while out on their feet." And that's fucked up.

• 57:50Robert Evans?

  A lot of that, the fact that-

• 57:50Speaker 01

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

• 57:55Robert Evans?

  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 in-

• 58:08Speaker 01

  That's so much weight in such a short time.

• 58:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This means they were not taking care of you.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Is she fired?

• 58:17Robert Evans?

  Great question.

• 58:19Robert Evans?

  Um, so-

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Really focused on the right stuff.

• 58:22Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. She's immediately shocked that so much. It's also interesting to me that like, mid-conversation, basically, they say, "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.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  No!

• 58:48Robert Evans?

  Tony comes-

• 58:49Speaker 01

  No!

• 58:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he just, he just straight up bullshit her. And Tony gets fired-

• 58:54Speaker 01

  No!

• 58:54Robert Evans?

  While she's under and asleep and replaced.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  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-

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  She missed work? Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  She missed work?

• 59:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, 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 I got fired because my brain wasn't working at all." He fried her brain. "I was in such a fog. I couldn't function."

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Wow. Green fog is so scary. It's so scary.

• 59:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you shouldn't have it because it only exists because some guy fucking force fed you barbiturates while starving you. Um, so the sleep therapy itself did nothing for Tony. Once she had, 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."

• 1:00:13Robert Evans?

  Like, this doesn't help her, right? It's only bad.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Oh my god. Oh my god.

• 1:00:19Robert Evans?

  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 problems. They've got to, you know, recover physically and stuff and mentally from it. But they get better, more or less. Their problems don't really go away. And maybe they continue to suffer some physical consequences, but overall their life continues and they just move on with things, right? And Tony does. She never, doesn't sue the doctor.

• 1:01:01Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Robert Evans?

  Can't say that for a lot of these people. Um, and again, even though her story works out okay, she still suffers terribly for no reason. You know, it takes her a long time to recover and she's more, there are more than 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?

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:38Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah. Uh, there's a quote from Dr. Philip Hickey's article about, um, 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.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  What the fuck? This is not fucking John Tucker must die. What are we doing here? What are we doing here?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Why are men this way?

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Why are men?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  I can't believe I abandoned everything to join you all in this fucking bullshit.

• 1:02:22Robert Evans?

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

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Robert Evans?

  Men, I don't know. I think, I think we need to create men 2.0, um, which is like,

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:02:34Robert Evans?

  Maybe we have like a governor chip or something that shuts down when you get, when you get too into certain things.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like it. I like it.

• 1:02:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like if you get a Punisher tattoo on your body, it just, you know, you're out, you're out.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  You're done.

• 1:02:47Robert Evans?

  That's it.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Gotta be honest, don't like the, don't like the phrase men 2.0. Made me, made me queasy, didn't love it.

• 1:02:56Robert Evans?

  You're right. We should go, we should start with men 3.0. We'll add a tail.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Afraid.

• 1:03:00Robert Evans?

  It'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 I, if every like reputable article is a little different. Okay. 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 eight, 19 further DST patients committed suicide within a year of undergoing his therapy.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask. Oh my God, 1979?

• 1:03:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, 79 is when this all starts.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  So recent.

• 1:03:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, um, and depending on who you count also, the direct death toll could be as high as 27. I found at least one higher number, but it seems to be somewhere between 24 and 27. Depending on how you counted, people die directly as a result of justice therapy.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  That's so awful.

• 1:03:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  How many patients has he seen in total? Do we know?

• 1:04:02Robert Evans?

  Yes, kind of. I'll tell you. By the mid 1970s, enough people had been permanently injured or killed, uh, and there'd been enough complaints and investigations into what Dr. Bailey was doing. That resistance had started to build to Dr. Bailey's methods. Other Australian psychiatrists began speaking out slowly at first against deep sleep therapy. But what would really change things was the case of Barry Francis Hart. In February of 1973, he entered the Chelmsford Clinic. He'd been an actor and a model until a botched cosmetic surgery caused him like lifelong injury. This leads to depression, you know? It's a bummer. So he seeks professional help for the depression. A nurse came up to him while he was still sitting in the waiting area.

• 1:04:46Robert Evans?

  So he hasn't even, the way he says it, Hart says, he goes to Chelmsford because he wants to talk about getting help for his depression. And a nurse walks up to him while he is in the waiting area and gives him a glass of water and a pill to quote, calm you down. He takes the pill, having never agreed to treatment and wakes up naked in a hospital room two weeks later.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:08Robert Evans?

  Like, holy shit.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Horror movie shit.

• 1:05:12Robert Evans?

  Holy shit.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Horror movie shit.

• 1:05:15Robert Evans?

  In terms of breaches of medical ethics, that's about it, the breaching-est you get.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  He was like, he was like, this botched plastic surgery is gonna be the worst medical experience of my. And I'm up and.

• 1:05:28Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 1:05:30Robert Evans?

  Uh oh. So he recalls, quote, "When I got out, I was jumping at noises and couldn't concentrate. I had brain damage and post-traumatic stress disorder."

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Robert Evans?

  Now, Dr. Bailey's not his physician, Dr. Heron is, but Dr. Heron is basically Bailey's like. Uh, fucking, uh, pro- like, or minty, right?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's lackey.

• 1:05:49Robert Evans?

  And he's doing the same treatment.

• 1:05:52Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Fuck, yeah.

• 1:06:03Robert Evans?

  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, the hospital settles with him. So they're worried enough that they, they give him a small amount of money, right? But he does not get, you know, he doesn't get Dr. Heron arrested. He doesn't get a lot of what he wants, but his case starts to attract attention. The news covers it, right?

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  I was about to say, is the news about to get a hold of this? Thank God.

• 1:06:36Robert Evans?

  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 Hart's 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 someone who's like, oh, maybe I was mistreated by my doctor?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And also there are patients who, who probably had complained, but as we've stated before, the complaints went nowhere. The regulators ignored them and those patients now realize maybe the wall of immunity that's been protecting this guy is starting to fail. So maybe I can try to complain again and it'll get somewhere. Lawsuits begin piling up against the hospital and against Dr. Bailey after this point.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Okay, Barry.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  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, the, the next set of numbers I'm going to give you is questionable for some reasons I'll explain. Well, I'm about to read you a quote from a Reuters article I've read from a couple of times before. It was written by a journalist named Michael Perry in 1990. 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.

• 1:08:10Robert Evans?

  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. 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.

• 1:08:53Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:09:37Robert Evans?

  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. This is all true. You're about to get, you're feeling happy and you shouldn't be, right?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:14Robert Evans?

  This is behind the bastards. Good things don't happen here.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Sure, of course.

• 1:10:18Robert Evans?

  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-

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  His competitors?

• 1:10:30Robert Evans?

  She's sending it to a journalist? No, no.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:35Robert Evans?

  So, she has helpers who are helping to fund and, and her, her question, who are taking the information that she gathers. And those helpers are the Church of Scientology.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Because they hate psychiatry.

• 1:10:53Robert Evans?

  Because they hate psychiatry. That's right, baby. Surprise second villain. The Church's Scientology with a steel chair.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:06Robert Evans?

  I love it. I love it. Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:11:09Robert Evans?

  And so, I wonder if maybe Perry's article-

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  What the hell was Scientology doing to help?

• 1:11:13Robert Evans?

  Great question. Part of why, so I, I do wonder, is maybe Perry's numbers high because he, Scientologists gave them to him? But, uh, 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, I think that's pretty much true. Unfortunately, at the actual times that she was in place trying to stop Dr. Bailey,

• 1:11:56Robert Evans?

  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 has 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- Embraced ionetics, he teaches his followers that psychiatry is a murderous cabal that tortures and kills people for money and power. Unfortunately, it just so happens that does kinda describe the psychiatrists at Chelmsford a little bit.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Oh no, Broken Clock is right.

• 1:12:37Robert Evans?

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

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Fuck.

• 1:12:45Robert Evans?

  Um, now, it just so happens that Dr. Bailey and his colleagues at Chelmsford were that bad. But the way the Scientologists go about trying to release the information that's gathered for them backfires and it actually damages the cases of former patients who were trying to get the clinic shut down.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Oh no, a Scientology plan did not go well and ended up damaging many individuals. Oh, who could have thought of that? Wow.

• 1:13:13Robert Evans?

  Who'd have thunk it?

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  I am shocked to hear this information.

• 1:13:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Oh no.

• 1:13:18Robert Evans?

  For the Sydney Morning Herald, "The Scientists, the Scientologists' involvement enabled Chelmsford 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 and nearly got myself killed, all so I could be an agent of the Scientologists."

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Well, nowadays, I'm like, maybe.

• 1:13:39Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  Oh my god, how many people have to tell you that?

• 1:14:16Robert Evans?

  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. Like, oh, holy shit.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Robert Evans?

  So, fuck all is done in this. This case to the regulators ignore.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Sure, of course, of course.

• 1:14:34Robert Evans?

  The warning. It must have seemed to a lot of people to the pay former patients of Dr. Bailey. That we're still dealing even in the late seventies 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.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Well, well, well.

• 1:14:59Robert Evans?

  But isn't the consequence of my own actions?

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  My own actions.

• 1:15:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Shit.

• 1:15:07Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Yes, God, God complex. Yes.

• 1:15:26Robert Evans?

  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."

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  See, what did I say?

• 1:15:45Robert Evans?

  Helped him in right there. 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.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  He really thought he was helping people. It was said.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  It was said.

• 1:16:02Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Maybe.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. 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 behaviors, such as referring to himself as a Martian.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:16:28Robert Evans?

  I have not found more detail on that and I wish I had. I don't know what the fuck that means.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  That's a weird day for me to be wearing an alien sweater.

• 1:16:38Robert Evans?

  Uh oh. Because they don't write about it like it was a bit.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Scientology Scientology came by and said hello.

• 1:16:46Robert Evans?

  Convinced he was an alien. So there's a lot.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:16:49Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  No, we knew it. We knew it.

• 1:17:00Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:10Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, is this a Kill Bill volume one situation?

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  And also, he's their psychiatrist, so it's already.

• 1:17:25Robert Evans?

  Right. He shouldn't be doing it anyway. It's already bad. Yeah, if they're awake, it's still bad, but.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no.

• 1:17:33Robert Evans?

  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. Um.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Even if it is, that's still bad.

• 1:17:56Robert Evans?

  Even if it is, still real bad. Um, yeah. 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

• 1:18:39Robert Evans?

  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

• 1:19:19Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  There are so many twists and turns in this fucking story.

• 1:19:34Robert Evans?

  It's fucking wild, right?

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  He's drinking his own Kool-Aid.

• 1:19:39Robert Evans?

  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 at the time.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Do not get high on your own supply!

• 1:19:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, man, never a good idea. So, during my research, I came across an interesting source, truthaboutECT, that's electroconvulsivetherapy.org, which it 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, not a great, and you know, 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 the 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

• 1:20:35Robert Evans?

  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, right?

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Oh my god!

• 1:20:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  They love to use that.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Everything, everywhere, all at once.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  They love, they love to use that dot org.

• 1:21:05Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Website for, for fake news sites. It's, it's one of their.

• 1:21:09Robert Evans?

  Major.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's one of their go-tos.

• 1:21:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they love doing that shit. Um, yeah, but I, 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.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Get.

• 1:21:24Robert Evans?

  So that's an interesting source. Yeah.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  The source? Yeah.

• 1:21:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, so.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 1:21:30Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  What an asshole, though.

• 1:21:56Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't put it past him.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  But he was upset about it.

• 1:22:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  And given. But it's giving like.

• 1:22:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Giving, um, what's my call it? What's his name?

• 1:22:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Dahmer. 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.

• 1:22:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Hard to say. I 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, oh, that probably wouldn't have made the news, right? That might have made the news. I don't know. You know, it was easier to get guns in Australia back then. It's pro, pre Port Arthur, but yeah.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  The psychiatric museum of death that's in LA.

• 1:22:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and that's in LA.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  What if it's like, it has all of this information in it?

• 1:22:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, I'm certain. Cause they, they make a big deal about this guy. And I bet they'll use the much bigger numbers Reuters had, which like, again, he, he's bad enough without exaggerating the numbers.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Well, and that, and wow. And isn't that how he would just want it? He would want the numbers to look even more.

• 1:23:06Robert Evans?

  Honestly?

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  He loves that.

• 1:23:08Robert Evans?

  It's kind of an honor to him.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:23:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yep, yep, yep. Um, so, yeah, in 1980, 60 Minutes ran an episode on the death of one of Dr. Bailey's patients, Miriam Podeo, 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.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  You can't make this shit up.

• 1:23:59Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  If this was a movie, you would be like, that's too much.

• 1:24:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, 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 a bit in 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.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Did Scientology kill him?

• 1:24:49Robert Evans?

  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, which is why he had to kill himself, right?

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  I'm like, did they? But wait a minute.

• 1:25:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  The fucking, he writes his degrees? God, if I?

• 1:25:05Robert Evans?

  Crazy.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  I can't, this man is insane. I can't believe I didn't know about this till right now.

• 1:25:11Robert Evans?

  He's deeply unwell.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Truly wild. That is so crazy.

• 1:25:16Robert Evans?

  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 Chelmsford 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,

• 1:25:59Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Wow. Wow.

• 1:26:12Robert Evans?

  It's good shit. It's good shit.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  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, ego, like, it's just, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

• 1:26:35Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. And it's, it's even fucked up even at the end after they, because the guy who writes, you know, the commission, the report is very unsparing about how bad Bailey was and the clinic was. But then at the end it's 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 of 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.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe that. Governments love to do that.

• 1:27:17Robert Evans?

  I, I love government.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  I, there are so many victims just beyond what you can even name.

• 1:27:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:27:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but they're not, they, they should have worked harder to get the government to do something about this.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  I, that is such a triggering word to me right now. That's such a triggering phrase to me right now.

• 1:27:36Robert Evans?

  It's so fucked up.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Fully insane.

• 1:27:38Robert Evans?

  So fucked up. Yeah.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  The, the level to which you like elect someone into office and then they go, you didn't do enough? No, get away from me.

• 1:27:45Robert Evans?

  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?

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  Uh, no, just, uh, just my podcast, Best Gabe Ever, and my podcast, A Thousand Natural Shocks, and also the Substack, a thousandnaturalshocks.substack.com. And thank you so much for having me. Like, I'm such a big fan. This is so crazy.

• 1:28:10Robert Evans?

  Thank you so much for being on. And listeners, until next time, remember, there's no health consequences to eating your body weight in benzos every single day of your life. So just do that.

• 1:28:22Speaker 06

  Jesus Christ, Robert. Don't, don't listen to him. Thank you so much.

• 1:28:29Speaker 06

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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