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Deep Sleep: Harry Bailey and the Scandal of Chelmsford

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Nowadays, when people are treated by psychiatrists they are generally dosed up with drugs of varying degrees of effects and toxicity, with a bit of shock therapy thrown in occasionally. However, until fairly recent times, someone suffering from depression could find themselves rendered unconscious for weeks on end, with multiple courses of shock therapy administered concurrently.

This book is a first class piece of investigative work into psychiatrists Harry Bailey, John Herron and Ian Gardiner, who between them, and with the assistance of co-owner Dr. John Gill and various nursing staff, succeeded in killing at least 24 people from the 1960s onwards. Treatment involved people being nursed naked in mixed wards, subjected to tube feeding. Occasionally patients escaped and residents occasionally witnessed people running naked down the street, a tube dangling from the nose. Reportedly, the stench of urine on the ward was overpowering. Harry Bailey engaged in sexual relations with some of his patients and had a special room at the private hospital where he worked in order to have private time there with selected patients.

One of the matrons to work with Bailey said that he was "a bloody nice guy ... clever, intelligent, witty to talk to". In a lecture to his staff he said how he used to get people out of coma by performing a lumbar puncture, draining out all the cerebrospinal fluid and then pumping it back in again. Patients reported how they experienced hallucinations such as being gnawed alive by rats during moments when they were conscious. Bed sores were not uncommon.

Bailey and co. were lightly investigated and given approval to continue several times by the Australian Health Department. The decision to delegate sedation administration to nursing staff was approved of by the Health Dept. Poisons Branch in 1971. Bailey had a paper published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1973 in which he claimed a 99% success rate.

No referring doctors to his private hospital ever questioned anything. No nurses raised any issues with any investigative authority. A trainee nurse shocked by what she saw contacted the Health Dept in 1972, but got no response. It was only when the Church of Scientology got involved that a process was set in motion to get psychiatric coma treatment banned. However, the medical profession closed ranks and only Bailey got the blame. There was no compensation for the victims.

Bailey eventually killed himself and the book prints his suicide note, in which he blames his suicide on the pressure of Scientologists. However, he also states: "Doctors like ... are equally to be abhorred. They are ego-centric crazies almost as bad as the Scientologists." The book doesn't say who the "..." refers to, but according to the radio documentary Revealing the Mindbender General, British psychiatrist William Sargant was cited in the suicide note. For further reading see Unquiet Mind: The Autobiography of a Physician in Psychological Medicine for details of how luckless British patients were kept asleep for weeks on end. In Britain there has been no enquiry into psychiatric coma treatment and Sargant continues to be defended by the likes of the Royal College of Surgeons and Dr. David Owen (a.k.a. "Lord Owen"). So who knows, maybe one day "Deep Sleep Therapy" will make a comeback.