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

Robert sits down with Gabe Dunne to discuss Australia's "Dr. sleep" a man who spent twenty years prescribing two and three weeks comas to his patients for no real reason at all. 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?

  Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans, and those of you watching this will notice, those of you listening shouldn't notice shit, that I'm recording in a different location today. Instead of being in my dank basement in Portland, Oregon, I am in a house in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple. Anyway, here to not be in New Orleans with me, but here to podcast with me, the great Gabe Dunn. Welcome to the show, Gabe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Thank you. As I said before, I'm so excited, probably too excited. I am a big fan of you guys. I would listen to you overnight at my warehouse job for hours and hours. And then I would get home and realize that I had only heard your voices for eight hours.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:00Robert Evans?

  That actually happens to Sophie and I sometimes, too.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, sometimes when I, I made this, I said this as a joke to somebody the other day, and then I realized it wasn't a joke. Sometimes I'll, I'll think things, but instead of it being in my voice, it's in Robert's.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Wow, you've melded.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Ten years, ten years.

• 1:18Robert Evans?

  And when I'm at a party and someone's like, hey, Robert, do you want to shoot this mystery powder into, you know, your, your veins? And I'll be like, I'll hear Sophie's voice saying, yes, Robert, I think you should, don't, don't test it. Don't test it at all. Don't take any precautions. Just inject anything you find into your body.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  That doesn't sound like-

• 1:36Speaker 01

  That's gonna do you well in New Orleans. That's gonna be good for you in New Orleans.

• 1:40Robert Evans?

  It is, it is. I mean, you know, Sophie's motto is live moss. Taco Bell actually stole it from her. The lawsuit is ongoing.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I believe it.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Low key would love to sue-

• 1:51Robert Evans?

  You want to plug things here at the top?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  I would love, I was gonna say, I would love to sue Taco Bell. If somebody could give me a reason, it just sounds-

• 1:59Robert Evans?

  For stealing live moss from you.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  But I think what Robert was saying is, Gabe, do you have any pluggables you want to plug up top here? Want to let the audience know who you are? Because this is your first time on Bastards.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  It is, believe me. I would have, like, if I had been on it before, I would have been like, I can't come back because my life has peaked.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I am a writer. I am an activist out of LA, so I do a lot of anti ICE on the ground stuff. My life got taken over by it in June when the National Guard invaded. So that, and then I do a fun time show called Best Gabe Ever, which is a spin off of Just Between Us, the show I've been doing for like 12 years. And then I have a Substack called 1000 Natural Shocks and a related podcast called 1000 Natural Shocks that used to be called Bad With Money, but then the world, financial advice became even more irrelevant than it already was.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think the best thing you can do is, I don't know, try to have money. Do your best.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, truly. I like tried to girl boss my way to whatever, and then it just ended up being, I don't know, buried in the ground. Turn it into gold blocks. I don't know how to help you.

• 3:14Robert Evans?

  You're talking about anti ICE activism in LA, and I've been thinking about a surface level aspect of this for a while, which is in Seattle and to a lesser extent in Oregon during the 2020 protests, a major symbol of like the protests in those cities were, especially Seattle, was the use of umbrellas. And it was kind of a significant thing because even though it rains all the time in the PNW, people don't use umbrellas here. Like, the fastest way to tell someone is not from here or is not a resident is that they're using a fucking umbrella. And so there was all sorts of graffiti in Seattle during, you know, the height of the protest that was like, we never needed umbrellas before because we never saw a real storm. And anyway, I think there's something, there's some, there's some good bit in like,

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  Los Angeles never had to deal with ICE before because it's LA, so now we have to figure out.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Something. We also, well, they have those signs that are like, California melts ICE, you know?

• 4:08Robert Evans?

  Right, it does. That's actually a major problem that we have here.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And we also, I thought you were gonna say, because we've been using umbrellas to block stuff, and I think in California, people are buying umbrellas for the first time.

• 4:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not a city that had a lot of utility for umbrella owners.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  No, they go, where is car culture? And I was like, where do we even buy umbrellas? Is that, is that a, is that at the supermarket? Where do you get umbrellas?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I grew up in LA. I don't remember ever having an umbrella, so.

• 4:38Robert Evans?

  It's one umbrella, Michael. How much could it cost? A thousand dollars?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  And that's the people in Beverly Hills.

• 4:45Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 4:49Speaker 03

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• 4:53Speaker 04

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• 5:23Robert Evans?

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• 5:58Robert Evans?

  So, Gabe, it's probably time we get to the actual focus of our episode. This is a guy I don't think you have heard of. It's not a guy I had heard of before I started doing research on this.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 6:08Robert Evans?

  The episode title that I've got working is called "The Real Doctor Sleep," which is the title entirely because I'm pretty sure Stephen King wrote a novel called Doctor Sleep. I don't know what it's about. I've certainly never read it. I don't think it has anything to do with our episode, and it's a bad joke to make, because I don't know anything about the Stephen King novel, but I did it, and I can't take it back.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I think that's the one his son wrote. I think his son wrote it.

• 6:31Robert Evans?

  Maybe, maybe. But you know that's just Stephen King ghostwriting.

• 6:35Speaker 01

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

• 6:38Robert Evans?

  Well, that said, I could also imagine a Stephen King nepo baby just being Stephen King writing books for his kid and pretending they're his kid's book. He has time. He could put out five or six extra books a year. That's nothing. That's like three hours of work for Stephen King.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  You're imagining, like, you're imagining a kid, like, you're imagining a 10-year-old and Stephen King's writing for him. But I'm like, okay, so he's a 45-year-old man and Stephen King is still writing his books for him?

• 7:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. As long as he's alive, you know?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:10Robert Evans?

  So, obviously, Behind the Bastards is a podcast. I'm not complaining, but it takes a lot of work, right? These are generally 8,000 to 10,000-word scripts every week. I average reading probably one to one and a half books a week, sometimes two books a week, for doing, like, research for these episodes. And that's all year round, you know, 50-some weeks out of the year. The Epstein four-parters that we just did thankfully didn't require me to go through books, because that does take a lot of extra time. But I spent hours trawling through the Epstein archives and hours more reading everyone else's coverage of what's in there. Then I had to write, like, 16,000 words on the motherfucker. So, there's a lot to do, which is why I appreciate it whenever fans of the show are so good to suggest episode topics on the mega thread in the Behind the Bastards subreddit. Because

• 7:53Robert Evans?

  a lot of people will be like, you know, "Oh, I want to, when are we finally going to get the Mao episodes? Or you should do Stephen Miller." And yeah, we'll get to all the big guys. Those guys do require a lot of work. What I really like from the episode suggestions is that people often help me find subjects who are really interesting and really fun to hear about, but they're also, like, kind of obscure. And there's not a ton written about them, which means I can read everything written about them in the space of a couple of days, which is a lot lower research burden to me. And that's the kind of episode that we've got here. So, first off, I want to thank the admins of the subreddit for making the episode suggestion mega thread that I asked about during the Q&A episodes. Because

• 8:34Robert Evans?

  that came in handy this week. Somebody posted an unusually detailed thread, user Captain Ravioli, about an Australian

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Great name.

• 8:42Robert Evans?

  whack doctor who killed a shitload of people by making them sleep themselves to death. We are talking about Australia's doctor's sleep. Gabe, have you heard of this story at all?

• 8:53Speaker 01

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

• 8:58Robert Evans?

  How is that? It is. This is an interesting quack medical treatment. Both in that first, it starts in a good place. It's not a quack medical treatment that starts quack. It starts with some real doctors and scientists being like, shit, this might help. This like might be a therapy that actually does something. And then it winds up not working, but this guy decides to make it his entire life. And he gets a lot of people killed. But it is this, when I, when I explain how this is supposed to work, you're going to be like, well, shit, I want to try that.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  That's the problem. And that's, and that's ultimately the, the dark humor of my whole thing is I'm like, oh, tell me more, what did he use? That's so bad. That's so bad.

• 9:39Robert Evans?

  I'd have to be on line for a week. Shit.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And how gentle is the sleep? Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 9:45Robert Evans?

  Not, we will talk about all this. But first let's talk about our bastard. Let's introduce this motherfucker to the, the audience and to, and to the Gabe. Harry Richard Bailey was born on October 29th, 1922 in Pickton, New South Wales, Australia. His hometown was a tiny place and it still is today. There's only about 5,000 people who live in Pickton now. So it was even smaller, one presumes back then. And it was, it hadn't been, it had been like a town about a hundred years when he was born, just a little over. Pickton was declared within the area of legal settlement in Australia in 1821. The town was named for a British army officer who died at Waterloo and had been,

• 10:30Robert Evans?

  quote, feared for his irascible temperament. Which I just find funny that like, there's this dead guy who's claim to fame was he was a real asshole. Let's name a town in Australia after him.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Is that angry? Like he's angry?

• 10:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's a dick, he's mean. Yeah, he's honorary. Cuss it.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  That might be a good quality to have for that kind of person. I don't know.

• 10:52Robert Evans?

  I can see being honorary being a benefit as a Napoleonic era military officer. Although again, he dies at Waterloo, so he can't have been that good, right? You know, I like soldiers who don't die at Waterloo.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm such a flouncy little gay boy that I'm like, I don't know what qualities would be good for a soldier at Waterloo.

• 11:12Robert Evans?

  Don't sell yourself short, Gabe.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 11:15Robert Evans?

  I believe if you were taken back in time to Waterloo, you could kill a lot of Frenchmen or Englishmen, depending on, you know, where you stand. Or Austrian.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 11:24Robert Evans?

  You know, I believe in you.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  I think I'm just off to the side, like, does anyone want chips? I think I'm sorry.

• 11:29Robert Evans?

  Yes, try to stay away from the cannons. But you guys are just like walking at guns? No, I don't want to walk towards a gun. That's a horrible idea.

• 11:37Speaker 01

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

• 11:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm gonna introduce the concept of ducking behind cover to the Napoleonic era militaries and then get executed.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Well, this is, this is my problem, like, with, like, confronting ICE and DHS where I am in LA, because my whole thing is, like, they'll just come do their little army thing. And I'm like, my thought, I'm so autistic that I'm like, you don't have to do this. Does any of us have to do this? None of us have to do this. I feel like I'd be out on the battlefield being like, guys, I think we should just go home. Oh, like the general from the dispatch song.

• 12:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly like that. So, anyway, that was a digression. Harry Bailey was the eldest child of his parents, Jack Bailey, a railway night watchman and eventually station master, and Ruth Smith, a homemaker. Smith was his mom's maiden name, at least, obviously, so she's Ruth Bailey, I presume, by the time that Harry is born. She and her husband came up, like, grew up in the same general area in New South Wales, and they'd known each other most of their lives. They send Harry to a private Christian school for his basic education. And unfortunately, this is one of those bastards where we just have very little about their childhood and early life, like, basically nothing. We don't have any quotes that he was an ambitious boy.

• 12:53Robert Evans?

  We don't even have any, anyone talking about the fact that he was like a good student, which I presume he was, given, you know, what he does with the rest of his life. So we're just gonna have to move forward, knowing this guy's early backstory is kind of a black box to the world. The only hint of any kind of color or detail about his day to day life as a child came from this entry, uh, came from his entry in the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography. Quote, "Harry enrolled in science at the University of Sydney in 1940. Lacking money, he did not finish the course and found work as a pharmacist's assistant." And in fact, there seem to have been, I think there's two times where Harry is trying to go through a degree program and has to drop out for financial reasons. And from that, I

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  think it's reasonable to infer, he comes from a kind of poor family. You know, maybe probably not unusually poor for Picton, probably as poor as basically everybody else in Picton. But he doesn't have money growing up, right? Like you don't have to drop out of school twice to, to work full time if your family's flush, generally speaking.

• 13:52Speaker 01

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

• 13:56Robert Evans?

  For sure. And it, I think is, he is going to really follow the money his entire career in some very evil ways. And I think maybe that's kind of where it starts. Like he grows up really poor and that is kind of, that seems to be his primary motivation in life is I want to make money even more than the medical stuff he's talking about doing. He wants to get paid, right?

• 14:19Speaker 01

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

• 14:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I, I get it. Cause like, you know, I have, like as in my career, I have not done what a lot of other reporters do and focused on like getting staff jobs. I focused on, my reporting is usually been like my secondary job and I did something else in comedy and entertainment because it paid better. Cause I did grow up like poor and with a lot of economic anxiety. And so as a kid, there was this, growing up, there was this like, I have to at least, I, I don't want to like deal with the fear that I, my parents dealt with their whole childhood. I want to be more stable than they were.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:59Robert Evans?

  But Harry, I think it becomes like a, I have to get rich at all costs and it doesn't matter whatever I have to do to people to do it as opposed to, maybe I won't work full time for a newspaper. Cause that doesn't seem like a, like a future forward position.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Right. Yes.

• 15:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Chip on your shoulder, entitlement. It starts like that.

• 15:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yep. Yep. So, and this is reading between the lines a bit by me here, so take it with a grain of salt, but I, the fact that he is, he's really committed to trying to get a scientific degree, right? Like a medical degree eventually, because he tries a couple of times. He's to drop out and save up money. I see this as evidence that we've got this kind of, we've got a smart, determined, broke ass boy who's desperate to make something of himself, right? Like, he really has to try.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't wanna, yeah, I don't, I don't wanna say that that's, I think that that's a really admirable thing.

• 15:51Robert Evans?

  It can go well or badly.

• 15:53Speaker 01

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

• 15:59Robert Evans?

  And he is kinda admirable at the start here, at least he seems that way. Um, yeah, to continue with a quote from the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography, "On January 19th, 1945, at the Registrar General's Office, Sydney, he married Margery Jocelyn Noonan, a cashier. He studied medicine at the University of Sydney and got his MB and MS, uh, winning the Norton Manning Memorial Prize for Psychiatry and the Major Ian Vickery Prize for Pediatrics." So, again, not a lot of color here, but he does finally get to graduate and as soon as he starts working as a psychiatrist, because obviously you're doing like your internship and stuff, he's like winning awards very quickly. He is, in very short order, within a few years of starting, he is an award-winning psychiatrist.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  He's a psychiatrist for children, do we know?

• 16:47Robert Evans?

  He's, that he, child psychiatry is a major area of his interest, yes. Like, he is like specializing in pediatrics for a period of time. Yeah. Well, um, so, yeah, he's, uh, he's, at this point, by the time he's, you know, in his early twenties, he's got his, his, uh, medical degree, he's won some awards, he's married a working-class girl, you know, who we presume kinda busted her ass the whole time he was in school to make his dream come true. And then it does. He seems to be doing really, really well, right? Everything's coming up Bailey. Um, now, I will say the fact that, cause he's, when he's working on his medical degree, he did not initially want to be a psychiatrist. It's a choice he makes kind of late in his

• 17:29Robert Evans?

  scholastic history. And there's a reason for this. By the 1950s, and this is true in Australia, but it's true all throughout like the Western world, psychiatry is not a super popular field for doctors, right? And because of this, in many parts of the West, including Australia, there are not enough psychiatrists to meet the need. It's a very underserved job, right? Just like, I think a good example today, there's not nearly enough anesthesiologists, right? Like, if you're a nurse anesthesiologist or a fucking doctor, you are going to be working as much as you want to work, because there is no limit to the amount of need for you.

• 18:05Speaker 01

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

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  No, not, no, of course not.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  It's huge. It's one of the most important parts.

• 18:13Robert Evans?

  And as a result, if you are getting into a medical field today, and it's something that you have an inclination for, you make a lot of money as an anesthesiologist. And the same thing is kind of true of a psych in the 50s, right? There's not enough of them to meet the need. There's a lot of demand. And so Bailey Bing's kind of poor kid looking for a place to make his mark would both say, well, it'll be easy to get work as a psychiatrist. Like, this is a field where they need more people, but also, it's a new field, and there's a lot of shit being discovered every day. I have a chance to get in, kind of on, not on the ground floor, but pretty close, and make a name for myself, because there's less of us. So if I'm good at this, it'll be a lot easier for me to stand out than if I were to become, you know, a heart surgeon or whatever.

• 18:57Speaker 01

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

• 19:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll talk about that, too. But, you know, a big part of why he becomes a psychiatrist is psychiatry is what you want to get into if you're looking to make your mark in the medical field, and you want the easiest time of it possible. Um, so, after graduate, getting out and getting his degree, our boy spends a year interning at the Prince Alfred Hospital, and then gets a full-time, regular gig at the Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic in Leichhardt, which is a suburb of Sydney that I'm sure I have mispronounced.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  And we have a giant Australian audience, so they will let you know.

• 19:35Robert Evans?

  Hey, got it wrong. That's my Australian. That's gonna piss him off more.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  Sorry, guys. That was that was that was uncalled for. That was uncalled for.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  This is like when you spell something wrong on purpose in in a TikTok so that you get a bunch of engagement. You're doing this on purpose. So the more comments, the more emails, the more popular the show is.

• 19:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I've discovered something with Australians, which is that they respond really well to nagging. So I'm just kind of doing that to build our audience over there.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Well, I just want to give a spoiler that Robert's actually never intentionally mispronounced a single word a day in his life. And uh,

• 20:12Robert Evans?

  Never. I've never mispronounced a word, I'd argue.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's never mispronounced a word and it and if it happened, um, it wasn't, it was, the job's done. What do you want from him?

• 20:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Flood the emails. Let us know.

• 20:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Please don't.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Let them know. I won't read the emails. I don't care.

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  So he starts working at this this clinic in a suburb of Sydney, and he seems to be really good at it. Opportunities start flooding in for him at this point, and he's so in demand that in the fall of 1954, he begins a 15 month tour for the World Health Organization, which is going to take him all across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Remember the World Health Organization, everyone?

• 20:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 20:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, I, I mean, he's, he doesn't do anything bad while he's with the WHO, but his time with the WHO does kind of lead to something bad. It's not really the WHO's fault, but part of what this is, is he's a young up and coming doctor, and the WHO is having him shadow prominent psychiatrists in other countries. Right? To see their methods, to work with them. You know, it's a good professional development thing.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:16Robert Evans?

  And he finds himself, as he's meeting these guys and he's seeing these new cutting edge treatments they're working on, he finds himself gravitating to these like sexy new medications and and electronic devices that are being used in therapy, like electroconvulsive therapy, he's really drawn to, right? And that is, that's a real therapy. People use it. It's used today on, for example, people with like epilepsy. But at this time, people are just kind of being electrocuted because they figure maybe that'll shock it, shake them out of it, right?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  And it did, right?

• 21:47Robert Evans?

  It does. It's not great. It's wildly over prescribed at this period of time in a way that is like often just torture. Um, and he's also really interested. We're starting by the 50s. You have to remember, drugs aren't great until like the 1900s is really when we start to figure out drugs and especially we start to figure out sedatives, largely like Benzos. Like Benzos have hit the have hit the floor and doctors are like, a pill that makes my patient just go away so I can do whatever I need to do on them and they won't say anything? Amazing, right? Um, and he loves sedatives. He finds himself like fascinated by Benzos in particular.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Honey, me too. Like, what?

• 22:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Who doesn't love a good Benzo? Am I right?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're good. But he's not taking them himself, right? He's just over prescribing them or loves to prescribe them?

• 22:44Robert Evans?

  At this point, yeah, he's he's just loves to prescribe them. And it's important, we would say over, but at the time, nobody's calling this over prescription. I don't even know that he's prescribing more than is normal for the day at this point in time because doctors love giving out Benzos in the 50s.

• 22:59Speaker 01

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

• 23:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like 80% of medicine is benzodiazepine and fucking cigarettes. Like, that's most of modern medicine in the 50s.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Bring it back.

• 23:13Robert Evans?

  We should return. We should return.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  That was the gold. That was the golden era.

• 23:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. God almighty. Speaking of gold, you know who might sell you Benzos, you know, under the table if you're nice to them?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Is it the products and services?

• 23:28Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. We might be sponsored by a guy down the street who will sell you Benzos. Or there might just be a guy down the street who will sell you Benzos. And if so, I gotta tell you, that's just gonna be straight fentanyl, folks. Test your shit, you know?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Test your shit.

• 23:42Robert Evans?

  Unless it's from our sponsors.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Test your shit.

• 23:45Robert Evans?

  Do whatever our sponsors give you, or anyone who says they're one of our sponsors. Anyway, here's ads.

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• 24:20Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rasso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Daskolakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big-time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there? Finding a doctor who's not so judgy?

• 25:04Robert Evans?

  And so much more. It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 25:26Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to the Pard Kust. So, I don't know why I said it that way.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  What's happening here? New Orleans is getting to you.

• 25:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's gotta be the Nollans. So, let's take a step back here. We've just been talking about Dr. Bailey's life up to the kind of birth of his career and his tour with the WHO. He's trying out new drugs, he's learning how to electrocute people, meeting fun doctors all over the world. So, let's take a step back and let's talk a little bit about the state of psychiatry and care for the mentally ill at this point, both in the West in general and in Australia in specific, primarily in Australia specifically. So, the first mental health institution in Australia was the Australian Lunatic Asylum in Castle Hill in New South Wales, which they used to just call them that. They used to just call it Lunatic Asylum. Crazy, Ben.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  That's what I call my apartment.

• 26:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Robert Evans?

  So that was established in 1811 and I probably don't have to tell you it wasn't a nice place. The lunatic asylum in 1811, attendance had no training, treatment was not a like people, there's no thought that you treat people. This is just a warehouse to stick crazy people until they die. Right? There's a lot of violence, a lot of brutality, a lot of sickness. It's gross and it gets really crowded really quickly because whenever someone doesn't like fit in and you know, isn't able to like handle life on their own, they're just kind of thrown in here. Right? A lot of these people are just like not even folks that we would say have mental illnesses often. It's just like, oh, poor guy, throw him in the lunatic asylum. He's sleeping in the street, something like that.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I had a boyfriend who was six foot seven and he would sometimes be like, oh, what if about past lives for us? And I was like, uh, I would be in an asylum for being like having depression and being gay and you're six foot seven, you would be in a freak show. There's no romanticizing this.

• 27:20Robert Evans?

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

• 27:29Speaker 01

  We're not having the Pleasantville experience. And I would have been burned at the stake. 100%.

• 27:36Robert Evans?

  So that, that first lunatic asylum gets so crowded that in 1837, a new asylum has to be built and more follow a decade later. Per an article on the Chelmsford scandal blog, quote, mentally ill patients were commonly transferred from jails to these asylums upon their opening. This gives clues as to the attitudes held towards those afflicted with mental illness. It was only in 1867 that an act of parliament made it mandatory for mentally impaired persons to be housed in asylums rather than prisons. This grouped together the mentally retarded or disabled and the mentally ill. In 1900, these categories were made distinct and the patients separated. Those are, yeah, not all terms we use now, but this is what they're calling them at the time. Right?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  They're bringing it back.

• 28:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're bringing it back. Yeah, fucking streamers are. So Yup. Things do start to get better, but even in asylums where the superintendents are promoting like a philosophy of humane care and actually trying to treat people, there are still massive practical issues of there's never enough budget for these places to make them very nice. They're always overcrowded. It's hard to get supplies. And this leads to what's called a custodial approach. So asylums are regulating and housing people and they're acknowledged that they need treatment, but they're not providing treatment. The only thing that they use to control patients, they've got like violence and straitjackets, right? They're basically like beating them and to comply them and putting them in straitjackets.

• 28:58Robert Evans?

  The situation improves gradually and unevenly. By the time Dr. Bailey is in college, the focus had shifted to treating the illnesses people presented. And that's now increasingly a part of the actual like asylum experience is now you're we're still, you know, pretty unpleasant places, but we're actually trying to treat you much more than we were before. And treatment in this case still does just often mean you're pounding people's brains with drugs, though, right? There's not, you're not necessarily getting like useful therapy. They've figured out tranquilizers by this point, which have replaced straitjackets. They're like, look, we're not using straitjackets as much because we're just doping them up to the point where they can't move most of the time.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Would the idea be to reintegrate them into society?

• 29:40Robert Evans?

  Yes, that has finally broken through. And by the 50s and 60s, nurses and attendants, theoretically at least, consider themselves to be working to treat and improve the conditions of their patients, not just to store them. People are often still just stored their whole lives, but there's at least an understanding that you're supposed to try to help these people, you know?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  You send your wife because she's depressed. They put her on benzos, send her back home. Now she just washes the dishes like a zombie. We did it.

• 30:07Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Exactly. And honestly, theoretical 50s housewife, send me your benzos, please. I will put them to good use. Um, so nah, it's a joke. I would never, you'd never do something like that. Um, now unfortunately, this is a primitive time still for mental health care treatment and many doctors find themselves overwhelmed by the difficulty and horror of dealing with certain illnesses. This makes them desperate to find chemical solutions that are fast and simple. And this brings us to deep sleep therapy.

• 30:40Robert Evans?

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

• 30:57Speaker 01

  How long?

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  Great question, you know? Um, we'll talk about that, but it's, it's anywhere from, in some cases, because one thing they're using this for, where it might actually kind of help. I mean, the drugs are probably still making a net negative because of how much they're pumping, but like people who are insomniacs, they'll be like, okay, well, I can knock you out for 12 hours. Then you catch up on your sleep, right? And, and that's initially, a lot of the first tries, they are just trying for like a day, but they, they start trying it for like a couple of days at a time, a week at a time, two weeks. Like they'll do various versions of that as they explore it more. The first psychiatrist to try this, as far as we can tell, was a Scotsman named Neil MacLeod. And he experimented with knocking people out for long periods of time as a treatment for schizophrenia, right? His attitude is-

• 31:37Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, I mean,

• 31:39Robert Evans?

  It resets them maybe.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Bipolar disorder, mania could be goo- it could be good for that.

• 31:43Robert Evans?

  Yep, sleep it, sleep it off, right? You can see why people would think this. He's not, MacLeod is not a bad guy for wondering, fuck this, maybe if I just help let this person sleep for like five days, they'll wake up better. I don't know, it's worth a try at the time, right? Um, now, as you probably know, all sleep is not created equal. You got your light sleep, uh, or slow wave sleep, and you've got deep sleep, and you've got rapid eye movement sleep, better known as REM sleep, because when you enter the REM stage of sleep, you, the human subconscious naturally generates the image and voice of Michael Stipe. We all experience this, right? That's why they call it REM sleep.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  You got me.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  I was not expecting it.

• 32:26Robert Evans?

  I, I, I'll always make a good, an R A M joke, you know? It's, it's a- It's a band. It's a band. They're definitely a band. Each stage of sleep has different effects and does different things for you. By this point, kind of the mid 20th century, scientists had started to understand that deep sleep is particularly important for healing, right? Like from physical ailments and stuff, you know, like it's what you're like, you're supposed to sleep if you're sick, you know, to get more sleep because your body does actually like heal and kind of restores itself during the sleep process. And deep sleep is really important for that, which is why if you don't get enough deep sleep, your health starts to suffer. Deep sleep also plays a role in memory consolidation, right?

• 33:08Robert Evans?

  Your brain does a lot of its like sorting and filing memories, I guess, during the deep sleep stage. I want to quote from an article by the editorial team at neurolaunch.com. Proponents of deep sleep therapy hypothesized that by artificially extending the deep sleep phase, they could enhance its restorative properties and provide therapeutic benefits for individuals suffering from mental health disorders. The theory suggested that prolonged deep sleep could allow the brain to reset natural neural pathways, reduce stress and alleviate symptoms of various psychiatric conditions. However, it's important to note that the mechanisms proposed by deep sleep therapy advocates were largely speculative and lacked robust scientific evidence. The human sleep cycle is a complex and finely tuned process and artificially manipulating

• 33:52Robert Evans?

  it for extended periods of time carries significant risks and potential consequences.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say the opposite. The opposite of that is you're sleeping so much that you have a fog in your, your, like your brain is actually working worse.

• 34:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, and that's the thing with depression, right? You want to sleep all the time, or it's one thing that can happen with depression. People tend to want to just knock themselves out for long periods of time.

• 34:17Speaker 01

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

• 34:28Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:29Robert Evans?

  But I think you also, I feel like I get, I think you get why a well-meaning doctor or a patient would feel like, oh yeah, that makes sense. I see why that would help. Yeah, like, sure, you know, let's give it a try.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Well, it's like you're depressed or you're stressed out, right? They do give you still a benzo.

• 34:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if you're lucky. So let's talk about how deep sleep therapy works. Once a patient was identified as a good candidate for this treatment, they'd be administered a heavy dose of various sedatives, described by the people at NeuroLaunch as "a cocktail of barbiturates and other sedative drugs", which if I'm honest-

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Oh, lucky.

• 35:07Robert Evans?

  I know, it sounds pretty great, right?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  This is the worst two people to do this episode, I find.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. As I was reading, as I was like doing my research, I kept being like, "Fuck, I didn't want to try this. This sounds rad." So the cocktail has three major ingredients. Chloral hydrate is a big one. This is a chemical that had come out of Germany as a popular sedative in the 1870s, and it works very well, but it's also extraordinarily dangerous. Just being close to the vapors of chloral hydrate can fuck you up. It's also super addictive, which is a problem, because if you're keeping someone unconscious and giving them this every day for two weeks, their body can wake, they can wake up addicted to chloral hydrate, right?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 35:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 35:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's also, and it also causes lots of physical problems for patients, including because it's a central nervous system depressant, heart and lung failure. So people can die-

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 36:01Robert Evans?

  -pretty easily overdosing on this stuff.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Oh my god, that's so much more dangerous than I thought.

• 36:07Robert Evans?

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

• 36:13Speaker 01

  No, but how much are you taking? Is it like a tincture, or you're taking a lot of it?

• 36:17Robert Evans?

  Great question. Great question. It varies on the doctor. It varies on the doctor-

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 36:22Robert Evans?

  And sometimes it is administered via IV, sometimes it's administered via like a series of pills, right? Usually they're taking pills to put them down initially, and then an IV kind of keeps them topped up during the period of time while they're unconscious, right? Another major ingredient of the cocktail is amobarbitol, which is a barbiturate derivative that was known as a street drug under the name "Blue Heavens" and sounds awesome. It is also super addictive and causes horrific withdrawals that can straight up kill you. Benzos are one of those things, if you are addicted to benzos and you stop, it can just kill your ass, like the withdrawal can. Like you have to, you have to taper off, often with medical assistance. It can be a real problem.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Blue Heaven?

• 37:05Robert Evans?

  Blue Heavens is the street name for Mobarbitol. And yeah, another major part of the cocktail was sodium theopental, which is used as a general anesthetic, but is better known as one of the more popular truth serums.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Truth serum.

• 37:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I knew that. I knew truth serum.

• 37:25Robert Evans?

  Now, it's also a rapid onset barbiturate, like Mobarbitol. So in addition to, this is like chloral hydrate and two rapid onset barbiturates is what you're taking together in this cocktail.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Your heart and lungs are failing.

• 37:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely. You ain't breathing shit.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Dope out of your mind on something called Blue Heaven and you won't stop telling your secrets.

• 37:49Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Perfect.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Wow. That's a Friday night, baby.

• 37:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice Friday night. If you've never been on like, if you've never taken like a heavy dose of Xanax or something. When I was a kid, and I'm, by kid, I mean like 20 years old. Uh, the person I was seeing at the time gave me what we both thought, we each took a quarter bar of Xanax. This is my first time taking Xanax.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 38:12Robert Evans?

  She'd been taking it for a while, but it was street zans. And what we got was thankfully, this was not the era of fentanyl yet. It was definitely alprazolam that was pressed into that street pill. But when you get a street pill, sometimes it's the strength of a normal pill. Sometimes it's much stronger. So I took a quarter bar, which should just kind of mellow you out. And I took it and I remember stepping down the street out in front of my house. And then I came to myself sitting on my couch 30 years, uh, hours later without any memories of the intervening period whatsoever.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  I would do that. It would totally wipe.

• 38:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, it totally wipes.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  I would not even know how I got.

• 38:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Were you living in New York? Where were you?

• 38:53Robert Evans?

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

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Oh, Texas. Okay.

• 38:57Robert Evans?

  But you've had some hot, hot zans too, I'm guessing. And that's part of why, especially in the mid aughts, there were a lot of deaths due to zans that had fent in them or who were just, that were just way too hot. Cause if you're, I mean, Xanax is not a great drug. You don't want to, if you can kill, kill yourself mixing it with alcohol. Really dangerous to mix with like fucking coke or whatever. Um, e- especially in high quantities. And if you have no idea how strong the pill you're taking is, like, that's particularly dangerous. But I bring this up to be like, that's how powerful this shit is. You can take a pill the size of the end of your finger and you're just gone for a full 24 hours or more. Right? Um, and these people are taking way more than that.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Which is why they're throwing in the chloral hydrate and they don't want you functioning for shit during this.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  I took, I was taking Ambien for a while and I stopped because I would, I would go to bed wearing one thing, take the Ambien and then wake up in different clothes in a different part of my house.

• 39:55Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's fucking wild stuff.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I was like, what is, a food would be missing. I'd be like, I guess I ate something.

• 40:02Robert Evans?

  I must have done something. Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 40:05Robert Evans?

  Who knows?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  One time I looked in my Google searches and I had Googled scary horses.

• 40:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I have a couple of notebooks from times like that in my life where it'd be like, oh, I had a really great idea for an article. Well, I was fucked up and I'll look over and it'll just say something like completely incomprehensible.

• 40:26Robert Evans?

  Um, or I'll just not be able to read my own handwriting. It's like, thanks, drug me. Like, really the idea of the century there. The word purple and then four paragraphs of unreadable squiggles around it. I'll turn this into a book immediately.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Brilliant. That's like that thing where they're like, artists have to be like fucked up to be. I'm like, mm, I don't know about that.

• 40:47Robert Evans?

  Nah, nah, nah. There's, there's certainly limits to when it's, how much of that can be handy or useful. So, one of the first physicians to explore the use of deep sleep therapy, or DST, was Jacob Kleisi. He was a Swiss psychiatrist who seems to have had to deal with the pharmaceutical manufacturer Roche, because he only used their barbiturates in his cocktail. Per an article on the website Mad in America by Dr. Philip Hickey, quote, "In Kleisi's first publication on this matter, he acknowledged that three of the 26 patients had died during the study due to bronchopneumonia or cardiac hemorrhages. This is about 12%. Nevertheless, the method achieved some popularity in the 50s and 60s, and was used by William Sargent in the UK and Donald Cameron in Canada, both considered eminent psychiatrists.

• 41:32Robert Evans?

  So, the first guy to try deep sleep therapy kills 12% of the 26 patients that he-

• 41:38Speaker 01

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

• 41:42Robert Evans?

  I mean, no, unfortunately not. They're reading this. Sergeant and Cameron find out about this because they read this study where he kills 12% of his patients and are like, I gotta, I gotta get on that.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  But the people, the people don't know about it.

• 41:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the people taking agreeing to the treatment are not being told, so yeah, in the first study we did on this, it killed three of the 26 people in it. You wanna, you wanna roll those dice?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 42:06Robert Evans?

  And this is part of the problem is it is the standard to have consent in this period of time, but what they, what consent means in the 50s and 60s is not what we would call consent today. Cause a big thing, doctors, there's a bit, doctors don't like explaining stuff to patients in this period of time. I'm not, they don't always do it now.

• 42:25Speaker 02

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

• 42:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  This is like.

• 42:29Robert Evans?

  It is, but it's considered, it's like offensive to a lot of doctors that a patient would have any input at all.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Oh, it's like, how dare you question my expertise. I'm a doctor, la, la, la, la, la, la.

• 42:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Not, not to victim blame, but I think you should ask every time you're prescribed something, has this killed 12% of the people who take it?

• 42:49Robert Evans?

  Does this kill 12% of the people who do it?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  And if they say, if they say no, and they really killed 13%, that's on you.

• 42:57Robert Evans?

  That's on you.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Solid question to ask.

• 43:00Robert Evans?

  One of the problems here, because these are doctors often working in like public health for the mentally ill in the 60s, one of the issues is that a lot of the people they're being sent are not compos mentis anyway. So they're not able and often not asked to consent to anything. But there's certainly, these guys' attitude, no one outside is gonna come in and say like, well, you're giving all these guys a treatment that might kill 12% of them. Everyone else who is in the government is in like the local, who should be a watchdog for this, is just like, we want these people off the streets. Keep them away from where anyone will watch them. I don't care. You're a doctor, do whatever you want. Fuck it. Right? That's not all the, because obviously, regular people who are out in society and stuff and not institutionalized, get these therapies too. But a lot of them

• 43:45Robert Evans?

  are institutionalized people and just nobody gives a fuck what happens to them. Right? That's why they're doing shit like this. Um, yeah, still now. Um, so the amount of time you're kept under during deep sleep therapy varies pretty widely. Uh, the vast majority of therapeutic treatments in Europe seem to have been a day or less. It's very uncommon for the credible doctors doing this at the time to keep people under for more than a day at a time. But some researchers experiment with extended periods of time, up to like two weeks long. Per NeuroLaunch

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 44:18Robert Evans?

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

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 44:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Two weeks.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  That's a coma. Legally, that's a coma.

• 44:26Robert Evans?

  That's a fucking coma. Um, per neurolaunch.com quote, "During this time, patients were kept in a state of unconsciousness with brief periods of wakefulness for feeding and basic care. Monitoring and safety protocols were essential components of deep sleep therapy, given the risks associated with prolonged sedation. Medical staff closely monitored patients' vital signs, including heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory function. Intravenous fluids and nutritional support were provided to maintain hydration and prevent malnutrition." Sophie's gonna put a picture up, you can see on the video version. If not, I will describe it.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 44:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You're seeing a feeding of a patient here. So you've got a man in a hospital bed, a 60s looking one, unconscious. Uh, there's a doctor or, or an orderly, I can't really tell, standing behind him who's got his, he's holding his head. He's got a hand on either side of this guy's head to keep his head straight. And then there is, you know, like a beer bong?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, they're beer bonging food into him.

• 45:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's like the, what they're using is like a funnel attached to a tube that goes into his nose and this guy's just pouring from, honestly, it looks like a carafe of coffee. I'm sure it's some like nutritional supplement or just hydration or whatever, but it looks like he's just pouring coffee into this guy's nose.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Me in the morning trying to get up. Two people have to nose feed me coffee.

• 45:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You gotta nose feed. I can't, I can't get out of bed until I've had an entire liter of coffee poured up my nose, you know? Sophie will tell you, that's the only way I work in the morning.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  True. Right. And then, and then as soon as they're done, my eyes pop open and I pop out of bed like, don't wake daddy.

• 46:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Thank you for the don't wake daddy reference. That's really going, that's going, that's gonna be really popular with the chunk of our audience whose knees are starting to fail.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Oh, and R E M. Isn't? Oh, and Michael Stipe isn't?

• 46:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's okay. The people who would most get the Michael Stipe joke can't hear anymore. They're Gen X. Like, their, their, their bodies failed long ago.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Stop insulting the people that support us.

• 46:27Robert Evans?

  I know.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  I love you guys.

• 46:28Robert Evans?

  The Gen X listeners know.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  I love you, Gen X listeners.

• 46:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So what I just described is how deep sleep therapy was supposed to work. The fact that you are supposed to generally be under for no longer than a day at a time, and you're woken regularly to be fed, um, to be like moved, to be like, you should be walked around to help prevent bed sores. But you know what that takes? Work. You gotta have people who like are keeping track of everybody's schedule and like waking guys and putting them back down and moving them around and cleaning them. And if you really want to cut costs, why not just keep them knocked out instead? And just have them unconscious the whole time?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Like, they need to stand you up and like weekend at Bernie's you around.

• 47:12Robert Evans?

  Cheaper, cheaper is better. Cheaper is better.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  They just have one guy that's kind of making you walk?

• 47:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I, I mean, usually they just don't do that. Usually just leave you unconscious. That, that becomes increasingly, in big facilities, right? In large, in like psychiatric hospitals. Um, because they often don't have adequate staff too, but they are supposed to. And I should note, even though the good places, they are waking you up regularly, moving around, feeding you, you don't remember any of that. You're still benzed out the whole time. So for you, it's still like you were just gone for two weeks or whatever. So the most common early treatment deep sleep therapy is used for is schizophrenia, but it's also used for severe depression. And as I said, insomnia. Over time, doctors explore treating anxiety disorders and addiction with this therapy as well. And you can see the logic here, right? Oh, somebody wants to sober up from whatever? Knock them out for a few days until they detox, right? Great idea.

• 48:04Robert Evans?

  Now, there's some downsides to this. There's some reasons why this is not as good an idea as it seems, which is that withdrawal from drugs you are physically addicted to often carries physiological effects. And, you know, most withdrawals are not fatal, right? But it can become fatal when someone is going through withdrawal from a drug they're physically addicted to, and you deeply depress their central nervous system for days on end with huge doses of benzos. So, people die sometimes.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Why? Wait, what do you mean? How?

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  Like, they stop breathing. It's a CNS depressant. Yeah. So, they just stop. I mean, there's other ways this kills them too, but a lot of times they just stop fucking breathing or their heart just stops, right?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 48:46Robert Evans?

  There are other ways this cocktail kills people. Some people are just allergic, right, and have bad reactions, or some people are more vulnerable to benzos than others, and so a dose that's okay for one is dangerous or fatal for another person, right?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I didn't think about allergies.

• 49:01Robert Evans?

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

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Allergies.

• 49:05Robert Evans?

  And again, oftentimes, this is being done in facilities where they're trying to deal with as many people as quickly as possible, and they're not overly concerned with stuff like, you know, safety, as much as they should be, right? That said, physicians love this, because psychiatrists love this, because it gives what certain kinds of psychiatrists, because obviously you got your Freudian types, who it's all about talk therapy, but there are psychiatrists whose whole thing is drugs, drugs, give them something to, you know, that's all that matters, is dose them, right? There's a place for aspects of that, obviously.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 49:40Robert Evans?

  But when you take it to the too far extent, you're like, I just don't want to deal, I don't want to talk to the patient at all. I don't want to deal with their shit. I want them knocked out, and then I can give them whatever medication I think will help them, because I'm the doctor, and it's only my opinion that matters, right? That is how a lot of these guys think.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Were these people brought in by their families, or, like, so if they died, would somebody care?

• 50:02Robert Evans?

  Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:04Robert Evans?

  Some of these people are basically wards of the state or are brought in by the state. They're arrested or something. They're sentenced to this place because they're

• 50:13Robert Evans?

  they're non compos mentis, but they've committed a crime. But a lot of people take themselves in because like, I can't sleep. I'm depressed. I'm suffering horrible anxiety. Right? Um, so it's a, it's a mix of, of, of ways people get into this, but a lot of doctors are very enthusiastic about it. And in terms of when you're talking about the practitioners who are advocates of this therapy, they will tell patients that they can get relief from their symptoms after just a couple of weeks that they won't even be awake for. Instead of, basically they're saying, look, you can go to the, the Freudian and maybe it'll help you, but it'll take years of therapy. Or knock your problem out in two weeks. You're not even awake.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Wow. Oh, God. That's like those, they have an ad on, on Santa Monica and Coanga for whatever that thing is. That's like the neuro link or something where it's like,

• 51:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  It literally says like, don't be like depression gone. I'm like, that can't be right.

• 51:07Robert Evans?

  And I'm always, you should, and you should always be super on guard whenever anyone is talking about like a serious mental health problem like, and this just knocks it out. Well.

• 51:20Robert Evans?

  Has that ever happened?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Mental health.

• 51:23Robert Evans?

  There's some stuff like, I, the, the thing that changed my, when I was a kid and very anti-drug, the thing that like changed my mind about pot legality is I had a friend with multiple sclerosis who like, she, she was in my wow guild. And she got, we got on like a webcam chat so she could show me how her hands were shaking as her friend prepared a joint for her. So she can like how, and I was like, oh, of course.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:46Robert Evans?

  Oh.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:47Robert Evans?

  No, that was all it took for me, right? Some, sometimes you do get stuff that is that miraculous for certain things, but not for something that's as complex and as wide ranging as just depression. Right?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:58Robert Evans?

  That's just, I don't trust anybody making claims like that. Um, so as time goes on, it becomes clear that deep sleep therapy has a lot of deadly issues with it. Patients undergoing it have a high tendency to contract pneumonia. They get bed sores that often get hideously infected, in part because since these people are unconscious for days on end, the orderlies are supposed to be taking them to the bathroom. But if you're just letting someone sleep, maybe they're not. Maybe they're putting them in a diaper. Maybe the diaper overflows. Maybe they're not changing the diaper often enough. And so you have bed sores that then people get shit wedged into. Not good for your health.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  For the, for the video people that can see my face.

• 52:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  You get it. But for the audio listeners, I would say through like 75% of what Robert's been saying, my mouth is just wide open.

• 52:51Robert Evans?

  It's not pleasant.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  I am so shocked.

• 52:55Robert Evans?

  And this is not everywhere that does this. There are good facilities where, and in the good facilities, people still die because the treatment is inherently dangerous and a bad idea. But they're not dying of bed, they're not getting bed sores, right? They're not sitting in their own shit. But there are places where that happens, right? And in all cases, even when you're doing this well, there's a risk of blood clots because people are on their backs, laying down for days at a time. And when you do that, you can, sometimes you pop a fucking clot, right?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 53:23Robert Evans?

  Like, it's, you know, not, not.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  The medical term is pop a clot.

• 53:27Robert Evans?

  Pop a fucking clot. There's a lot of risks with this shit. And it becomes very clear as time goes on. And so a lot of doctors start criticizing the therapy. And people pull back from it. A number of practitioners stop using it. A number of hospitals stop using it. And the practitioners that are using it, most of them substantially narrow the scope of its prescription, right? They start sending out less and less and are more discriminating about when they use it. By the time World War II ends, the vast majority of patients who are getting deep sleep therapy in the UK are war veterans with what we now describe as PTSD.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 54:00Robert Evans?

  And I gotta tell you, thinking back to 2017 was when I had my first really bad PTSD break. There was like a three to four week period where I was borderline psychotic. Like, I, I was not making rational decisions. I could, like, I couldn't hold a thought together. Like, I was, I don't know how to describe you if you haven't been there, like, how disorienting and debilitating it was. If I could have just been unconscious for three or four weeks, I probably would have said yes.

• 54:26Speaker 01

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

• 54:28Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. The data says it wouldn't have, right? But I do understand, I can see how in good faith, a doctor would be like, this is probably the best thing for this guy. And I can see how a fucking vet would be like, please just knock me unconscious for a while. Like, as long as I, you, you promise I won't dream? Yeah, let's fucking do it, you know? Like, I, I get why people try this.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I have, I have bipolar disorder and during mania, I've, I would have, I could see like, people well-meaning family members or something being like, knock him out.

• 54:59Robert Evans?

  Knock him out.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  So that he can't do anything to himself.

• 55:02Robert Evans?

  Right. And it's the, I should also note here that by this point in time in the UK, when they're prescribing these soldiers, they're not knocking him out for days at a time. The standard length of treatment is less than a day, right? They're doing that sometimes for, like regularly, like periodically you'll go in and they'll knock you out for hours. Um, but they're not, they're not being unconscious for days at a time. So.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  What did help you?

• 55:26Robert Evans?

  Oh, me? Uh, time, some, I mean, some of it was therapy.

• 55:35Robert Evans?

  It's mostly just like time.

• 55:38Robert Evans?

  Honestly, like it's, it's, it's mostly just time, like kind of PRN in the moment. There's some, some medications that offer some benefits to some people. But when you actually look into PTSD medicine, there's a lot of like, efficacy is not always very high for the medications that have been prescribed traditionally for PTSD.

• 55:58Robert Evans?

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

• 56:00Speaker 01

  And these people don't want time.

• 56:03Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, they, they don't want time and the doctors are like promising them they don't need it, right? So you see both, these are not, this is not like a lot of concures where like, parents are shooting bleach into their kids to stop them from having autism or something. I understand and sympathize with the people who would think this might work, with the patients who would agree to this, right? It'd make, I probably would have at this point, at that point in time, if I'd been dealing with fucking war trauma or something. I could see myself being like, yeah, man, knock me the fuck out, right? Um, so, uh, among.

• 56:37Robert Evans?

  Most psychiatrists then who are still using deep sleep therapy have significantly like tempered down it, right? You're not knocking people out for days at a time anymore. You're only using it in a couple of cases. But some psychiatrists, a small number, still see deep sleep therapy as having a massive value. And the primary use it has is that when someone is unconscious, they can't stop you from doing stuff to them. Right?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Huge if true.

• 57:05Robert Evans?

  I don't mean if in like the gross, although that probably does happen. I mean electroconvulsive therapy, which is at this point, as I said, a common treatment for all manner of mood disorders and compulsive behaviors. Because it's scary and unpleasant, a lot of patients refuse to have it done to them. So doctors start telling them, okay, what if I knock you out and you're not awake? And we use electroshock therapy, you won't be aware of it or remember it. So some patients say, okay, we'll try it then. Some doctors though, and that's fine, right? I mean, again, it's time proved it's not a good idea, but that's consent. If a doctor's saying, hey, can I knock you unconscious and use ECT on you? And you say, yes, that's, that's consent, right? Some doctors are like, well, if they're already unconscious, why do I need to get consent?

• 57:50Robert Evans?

  I can just shock them. Like fuck asking them, I'll just do it, you know? What are they gonna do? Right? Well, they'll be barred the fuck out. If they say, why did you do ECT on me? I'll say, you agreed to it while you were barred the fuck out.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  That's what I was gonna say. Are they, are they later saying that they did it? Or is the person like not aware that that's what happened?

• 58:10Robert Evans?

  Usually, often people don't find out. And when they do, they're generally, because we have a good amount of, generally when they find out and complain, they're told, no, no, you agreed to this. You know? Right? Here's the paperwork, right? So this is not a high point for medical ethics. Dr. Donald Cameron, the famous Canadian.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Such an understatement.

• 58:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:32Robert Evans?

  Dr. Donald Cameron, the famous Canadian physician who experimented with deep sleep therapy, was later criticized for drugging and shocking patients without their consent and exploring practical torture techniques as a psychiatrist. He was advising, I think, the government on how to torture, how theoretically torture should work, right?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Oh, theoretically.

• 58:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Dr. William Sargent, the prominent UK physician that I mentioned earlier, wrote this about electrocuting patients without their consent in a medical textbook that was published in 1972.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  That's so recent!

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  It's really recent. Here's Billy Sarge. "Many patients unable to tolerate a long course of ECT can do so when anxiety is relieved by narcosis. What is so valuable is that they generally have no memory about the actual length of the treatment or the numbers of ECT used. After three or four treatments without narcosis, they may ask for ECT to be discontinued because of an increasing dread of further treatments. Combining sleep with ECT avoids this. All sorts of treatment can be given while the patient is kept sleeping, including a variety of drugs and ECT, which together generally induce considerable memory loss for the period under narcosis. As a rule, the patient does not know how long he has been asleep or what treatment, even including ECT, he has been given. Under sleep, one can now give many

• 59:45Robert Evans?

  kinds of physical treatment, necessary but often not easily tolerated. We may be seeing here a new exciting beginning in psychiatry and the possibility of a treatment era such as followed the introduction of anesthesia to surgery." So Sargent is saying DST isn't valuable because sleep therapy in and of itself works. This is the future of all psychiatry, because the future of psychiatry is knocking your patient out and doing whatever the fuck you want to them until you fix them.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Well, one, how do you even define fixed at that point? You're just like a blank.

• 1:00:19Robert Evans?

  And two- I got a lot of questions!

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Well, sure, yeah, I'm asking, yes, right. And, and two, your body still remembers. Like, if you, if someone broke your leg and then knocked you out and then you woke up and your leg had been healed, you would still have effects of like, a broken leg.

• 1:00:36Robert Evans?

  Right, right, yes. Yes, the body keeps the score.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  As it was, yeah.

• 1:00:41Robert Evans?

  Which is certainly true in the case of a broken leg. Um, speaking of bodies, you know who's killed a lot of people?

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:00:50Robert Evans?

  Not the sponsors of this podcast.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:00:52Robert Evans?

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• 1:02:32Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, deep sleep therapy speaks to a powerful desire among many mental health care practitioners. We want to be able to treat our patients under the hood without interference from their conscious objections or comments.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:02:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not great. This brings us back to Dr. Harry Bailey. Bailey became aware of Dr. Sargent and his methods while he was doing his 15-month world tour with the WHO. He worked alongside Dr. Sargent for a period of time and observed him treating his patients. When Bailey returned to Australia, he was full to bursting with exciting new ideas. He quickly convened Callan Park Mental Hospital to establish a cerebral surgery and research unit, which opened in 1957 with him as the director.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Can we talk about how menacing Dr. Sargent sounds?

• 1:03:19Robert Evans?

  It's a pretty cool name. It's a cool name.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Several times and I was like, oh, I don't know about that guy.

• 1:03:25Robert Evans?

  What I would like to find is a guy with the last name Sargent to make him do a doctor, and then a guy with the last name Doctor, and you have him join the military and becomes a sergeant, and then you've got Dr. Sargent and Sergeant Doctor.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  And they get married.

• 1:03:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't know what to do after that point, but yes, you go. And they get married and hyphenate their names, so it's now Dr. Sargent Doctor and Sergeant Doctor Sargent.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  The dream. The dream.

• 1:03:50Robert Evans?

  The dream. Bailey begins experimenting with new ECT methods, often using various barbiturates and downers to knock patients unconscious first. Per Dr. Philip Hickey, Sargent and Bailey would mail each other, bragging about how many patients they'd knocked out each week, keeping score like Gimli and Legolas during the Battle of Helm's Deep. Like, they're literally being like, haha, there's how many people I put into a coma this week. Oh, man, you're falling behind. Better knock some more people out. Which you might think maybe leads to them knocking people unconscious and drugging them who don't need it at all, even under their own standards, just because they want to win a contest. Maybe. So, this all seems pretty fucked up, a lot of what we've talked about,

• 1:04:31Robert Evans?

  but I gotta say, what Sargent and Bailey are doing is still fairly widely accepted behavior within their professional circles. Not all of them, but within psychiatry, generally speaking, this is not controversial at this point in time. It's certainly not something people are angry about. There is general criticism of deep sleep therapy, but Dr. Sargent and Dr. Bailey are both award-winning, prominent, and respected members of the, of the profession within their field, within their countries. Now,

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Do you know if those same medications were being used for other stuff? Like, were they giving you?

• 1:05:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, tons, tons, yes.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Like, were they, they were giving you benzos for, for like, physical ailments and other things?

• 1:05:10Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Like, okay.

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  One of the reasons why it's so hard to get benzos now is that in, from the 50s through the 70s, they were handing them out like fucking candy, especially to like depressed housewives, um, who also drank because it was the 50s and 60s. And so a shitload of people lost their moms because they would overdose on benzos and alcohol. It happened a fuckload in, in during this period of time.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Depression. I'm talking about like, do they give AMO barbitol to someone who's like, my kidneys hurt?

• 1:05:36Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, you wouldn't, I mean,

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  It's all psychiatric.

• 1:05:40Robert Evans?

  And it is, I think you, I, I think there is a degree, because some of these, some of these are used before surgery and stuff. So yes, some of these, I don't know if it's AMO barbitol, but some of the stuff they use in this cocktail are used to help knock people out for other procedures, right? Because they're, they're, they're good for that.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:56Robert Evans?

  Um, but no, someone's probably not getting prescribed AMO barbitol because like they've got a fucking stomach ache or whatever. That would be kind of weird. Um, so one of the issues at this point in time, and it's still somewhat of an issue today, but it's much worse back then, is that to people outside of the medical system, including people in the government, mental health care is basically a black box. No one really knows what goes on in these facilities that doesn't work or, you know, get admitted to them. And the people who don't work or get admitted to these facilities kind of don't want to know anything about them, right? Um, so Dr. Bailey is primarily, the only people who know what he's doing are his peers and they love him. He receives the Norton Manning Memorial Prize for Psychiatry,

• 1:06:39Robert Evans?

  as I said, and then, uh, yeah, a prize for pediatrics. Per the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography, "His reputation high, in 1959 Bailey was appointed Medical Superintendent of Cowling Park, a large institution suffering from years of neglect in a culture of confinement. He proved to be an impatient reformer. Within a few months, he submitted a report to the Public Service Board with detailed allegations of staff cruelty, patient neglect, and daily pilfering from hospital stores. Subsequent police and Department of Public Health investigations found nothing to substantiate the charges. Undeterred, Bailey blew the whistle." And dramatic newspaper headlines embarrassed the Heffron government, particularly the responsible minister, William Sheehan. Despite the resulting Royal Commission report into Kallan Park by John McClemmons, confirmed many of Bailey's allegations while concluding that some are exaggerated.

• 1:07:23Robert Evans?

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

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  He's a whistleblower.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  He's a whistleblower. There's real problems at this facility. But you're also seeing some of the signs of the later problem this guy's gonna be, because even though there's real problems that he's right about, he's lying too. He's pretending stuff's worse than it is. He's exaggerating. He's kind of a showman. He likes drama, right? He's also got this problem of he's knowingly judges up or just the truth or just lies. But he also gets very convinced of his own rightness and righteousness. Uh, and even when people around him are convinced he's wrong, that just convinces him further that he's right. And in this case, that's a good thing, because this hospital did need to be investigated. But that's not gonna be the case much longer. Yeah.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's like, he's like, it's not gonna be bad enough to tell them this one thing. So I'll just make up a bunch of stuff and then it'll be undeniable.

• 1:08:18Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. And one of the issues here is that this is a good thing he does. And it makes him one of the most famous doctors in Australia at the time. Because he's in the news, or at least in New South Wales at the time. Because he's in the news a lot, because it's a big story that they should get covered up. So you've got, at this point, Dr. Bailey is not just an award-winning psychiatrist with widespread professional acclaim in several continents, but a crusading activist for medical ethics. Obviously, this is the guy you trust if your loved one needs mental health care. He's the best guy to go to. Dr. Bailey, at this point, yeah, not gonna be good.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, too much power.

• 1:08:58Robert Evans?

  Yep. The lesson here, folks, is if anyone ever does anything good, you need to...

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Look into it.

• 1:09:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, look into it. Throw him into the ocean. If the instant someone does anything good, toss him into the sea, you know?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  I just think, I just think when you do that, like, I see the merit of it. Like, he's trying, but when you do that, you don't get to the actual heart of the issues. Because you're just compounding stuff. So like, your actual, uh, thing that you're worried about doesn't... It's not in the conversation. Because you're just making stuff up to have some sort of sweeping, you know?

• 1:09:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, part of the issue is that like Dr. Bailey probably even did hamper the reform efforts by lying about shit.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:42Robert Evans?

  But regular people don't know shit about that, right? He's the hero doctor. So he starts a private practice and it's immediately a success. He's making a fuckload of money because I don't know if y'all have noticed this, but a lot of people don't trust doctors. And so if you're the guy who's all over the news because he's the doctor who blew the whistle on a bunch of bad doctors.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:04Robert Evans?

  You might attract a really loyal following of people who don't trust doctors. This is kind of what hap- I mean, in a different way, this is kind of what Andrew Wakefield does, right? I mean, Wakefield doesn't ever actually bust any real pro- he doesn't ever bring up any co- like, solve any real problems. But he's a doctor who's trying to warn people about the bad other doctors. And if you're someone who doesn't trust a doctor, that's a really appealing kind of guy, right?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  I was thinking about him, yeah.

• 1:10:30Robert Evans?

  Yep. Bailey is very appealing when he starts in private practice. This is 1962, when he begins his private practice, and in 1963, he works out a deal with two other doctors, Ian Gardner and John Gill, to treat patients together at the Chelmsford Private Hospital. This is not a normal medical employment situation for Dr. Bailey. Chelmsford was a small for-profit hospital, and Bailey had helped to fund it. He's a part-owner in the hospital. The NSA on the website waking.io. The financial arrangements revealed by the Royal Commission painted a picture of systemic exploitation. Bailey received both his standard consultation fees and a percentage of the hospital's revenue from each patient he admitted.

• 1:11:14Robert Evans?

  This created a perverse incentive to extend treatment duration regardless of medical necessity. To admit patients with minor conditions who didn't require hospitalization, to discourage early discharge, even when families requested it, and to maximize the use of expensive medications and procedures. Every time someone comes in and Dr. Bailey, he's like, oh, this- he knows this person doesn't need to be hospitalized, but he tells them, you need to be hospitalized for three days. He knows exactly how much of that money goes directly into his pocket, right? Not just from seeing a patient, but from the- he gets a cut of the cost of their treatment. Every time.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Robert Evans?

  So every new thing he can stick on, money in the bank, right? Why wouldn't he use as much expensive drugs as possible and as many expensive, right? That's part of why he's doing, he likes ECT on unconscious people is it allows him to charge for an expensive procedure that he doesn't have to get them to agree to. And he can basically double his money on the fucking sleep therapy.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  He doesn't even have to do it.

• 1:12:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  He could just say it.

• 1:12:16Robert Evans?

  And he doesn't even have to do it, right? Right, right. Or have one of his, because he's got other doctors here. He often has them do it, right? Um.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Just gonna say it, this Dr. Bailey guy, not great guy.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:12:28Robert Evans?

  Uh, so by the time he starts at Chelmsford, Dr. Bailey considers deep sleep therapy to be more than just a subject of intellectual interest. It is the core of a financial enterprise that he is starting to build with DSD.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:12:39Robert Evans?

  You can keep patients down for weeks at a time and they're paying for every day in the hospital and you're getting money for every day they spend in the hospital. Dr. Bailey used his prestige in the fact that his hospital was the only one offering this treatment in the area to charge patients between 400 and 600% more than comparable treatments cost from other practitioners. He regularly kept people unconscious and sedated for days beyond what his treatment plan suggested to maximize the amount of time he could build. Via that same essay, quote, "Some families reported bills exceeding their annual income."

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Did the other doctors, the two other doctors that were working with him, did they know that he was scamming?

• 1:13:18Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. All, several of the doctors at Chelmsford are directly implicated. They are helping him, they are benefiting, so one way or the other benefiting as well from the scams. Yes, the doc, the other doctors are very implicated in this. Now, I don't know if they're, they're fully aware, especially at the start of, of, of how bad this is. There's some, especially the doctors and nurses working early on, might think they're really doing the best because again, we don't, less is known, right?

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:47Robert Evans?

  But he's doing this for almost 20 years. It becomes clear at a certain point, this is just a grift that's hurting people.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Speaking of grifts that hurt people, you know what my favorite grift is?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Products and services?

• 1:14:01Robert Evans?

  No, ending this podcast for the day, um, cause I'm tired. We'll be back Thursday with more. You want to plug your pluggables at the end here, though?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:15Robert Evans?

  Uh, that's right.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  You can, uh, you can go to my Substack, a thousand natural shocks, dot Substack dot com. There's also a

• 1:14:22Robert Evans?

  Just like ECT, by the way.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, didn't even think that. Mine's a Hamlet reference because I'm unbearable. Uh, and then there's the a thousand natural shocks podcast. Uh, I also do a podcast called Best Gabe Ever. That's more lighthearted. Uh, and that's, and that's it.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 1:14:41Robert Evans?

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

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Is it shocking people?

• 1:14:46Robert Evans?

  Well, not, not exactly. I'm a doctor in the state of New Jersey, according to this plaque I received once. So we open a clinic and I give people huge doses of benzos to knock them out. And then instead of giving them electroshock therapy, we play your podcast of shock.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Ooh, I really thought you were gonna say we play R E M. I really thought you were gonna say we play R E M.

• 1:15:10Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 1:15:11Robert Evans?

  Michael Stipe gets enough fucking money. Um, all right, Gabe, thank you very much. We'll be back with part two on Thursday, folks. Until then, go to hell. I love you.

• 1:15:24Speaker 06

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

• 1:15:58Speaker 04

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• 1:16:29Speaker 07

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.

• 1:16:58Speaker 08

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow, I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow, I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation. Most of us aren't trying to become completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day. That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you, and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories. It can be from the small habits you create and how you honor your needs on a daily basis. So many of us are great at prioritizing even the smallest things for our loved ones. But what about ourselves?

• 1:17:43Speaker 08

  With thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries, BetterHelp is making therapy more accessible so more people can keep moving forward, one conversation at a time. Better is personal. Therapy should be too. Visit betterhelp.com to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.