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 for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alsome Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
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's. Instead of being in my dank basement
in Portland, Oregon, I am in a house in the

(00:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
As I said before, I'm so excited, probably too excited.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
I am a big fan of you guys.

Speaker 4 (00:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Wow, that actually happens to Sophie and I sometimes too.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, I was like, sometimes the one I made this,
I said this is a joke to somebody the other day,
and then then I realized it wasn't a joke. Sometimes
I'll think things, but instead of it being in my voice,
it's in Roberts.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Wow, you've melted. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah. And when I'm in a party and he's like, hey, Robert,
do you want to shoot this mystery powder uh 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.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
Thank you well in New Orleans. That's going to be
thank you in New Orleans.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
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. Wow, I believe it low key
with things here at the top, I would love, I
was gonna say, I would love to suit Taco Bell.
Nobody could give moss.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
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 this is your first time of bastards.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
It is.

Speaker 4 (02:12):
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. 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

(02:34):
fun time show called Best Gabe Ever, which is a
spin off of Just Between Us, the show I've been
doing for like twelve years. And then I have a
substack called A Thousand Natural Shocks and a related podcast
called A Thousand Natural Shocks that used to be called
Bad with Money.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
But then the world.

Speaker 4 (02:53):
Financial advice became even more irrelevant than it already was.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, yeah, I think the best you do, you know,
So I don't know, try to have money, do your best, ye.

Speaker 4 (03:03):
I mean truly, I like tried to girl boss by
way to whatever, and then it just ended up being
I don't know, buried in the ground.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Turn it into gold blocks.

Speaker 4 (03:12):
I don't know how to help you.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
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 then the lesser
extentt in Oregon during the twenty twenty 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

(03:35):
the time in the PNW, people don't use umbrellas here.
Like the fastest way to tell someone is not from
here or it is not a resident is that they're
using a fucking umbrella. And so there was all sorts
of like graffiti and 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 Los Angeles never had to deal with ice

(03:58):
before because it's La So now we have to figure
out something.

Speaker 4 (04:03):
We also, well they have those signs that are like
California melts ice.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
You know, right, it does. That's actually a major problem
that we have here, right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:13):
And we also I thought you were going to say,
because we've been using umbrellas to block stuff, and I
think in California people are buying umbrellas for the first time.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, not a city that had a lot of utility
for umbrella owners.

Speaker 4 (04:27):
They go, where is the car culture and like where
Where do we even buy umbrellas?

Speaker 3 (04:31):
Is that? Is that? A? Is that at the supermarket?
Where do you get umbrellas?

Speaker 1 (04:35):
I grew up in La I don't remember ever having
an umbrella.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
So on an umbrella, Michael, how much could it cost?
One thousand dollars?

Speaker 3 (04:43):
That's the people in Beverly Hills.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Right, right, 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 a guy
I had heard of before I started doing research on this.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
Love it.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
Can't take his son wrote I think his son.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Maybe maybe, But you know that.

Speaker 4 (05:28):
When you're a neo baby, you have to do exactly
what your parents did.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Well that said, I can also imagine a Stephen King
Neppo baby, just being Stephen King writing books for his
kid and pretending they're his kid's book. He has time,
he can put out five or six extra books a year.
That's nothing. That's like three hours of work for Stephen King.

Speaker 4 (05:47):
You're imagining like you're imagining a kid, like you're imagining
a ten year old, and Stephen King's writing for him.
But I'm like, okay, so he's a forty five year
old man and Stephen King is still writing his books
for him.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, as long as he's alive,
you know. Yeah, So obviously Behind the Bastards is a podcast.
I'm not complaining, but it takes a lot of work, right,
These these are generally eight to ten thousand words 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

(06:21):
year round, you know, fifty 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 spend 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 sixteen thousand 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

(06:43):
topics on the mega thread and the Behind the Bastards subreddit,
because a lot of people will be like, you know, oh,
I want to when are we finally gonna get the
MAO episodes? Or you should you Steven 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,

(07:05):
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 I first off, I want to thank the admins
of the subreddit for making the episode suggestion mega thread

(07:25):
that I asked about during the Q and A episodes,
because that came in handy. This week, somebody posted an
unusually detailed thread user Captain Ravioli about an Australian black
doctor who killed a shitload of people by making them
sleep themselves to death. We are talking about Australia's doctor
sleep Gabe. Have you heard of this story at all?

Speaker 4 (07:47):
I have not, but so darkly my first thought was like,
how is that bad?

Speaker 2 (07:53):
How is that it is? This is an interesting quite
both in that first art's 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

(08:13):
this guy decides to make it his entire life and
he gets a lot of people killed. But it is this.
When I explain how this is supposed to work, you're
going to be like, well, shit, I want to try that.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
That's the problem.

Speaker 4 (08:23):
And that's and that's ultimately the dark humor of my
whole thing is I'm like, oh, tell me more, what
did he use?

Speaker 3 (08:31):
That's that's so bad?

Speaker 2 (08:33):
I don't have to be on lie for a week?

Speaker 3 (08:35):
Shit, yeah, exactly. And how gentle is to sleep? Okay,
I'm sorry I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Not We will talk about all this, but first let's
talk about our bastard. Let's introduce this motherfucker to the
audience and to the Gabe. Harry Richard Bailey was born
on October twenty ninth, nineteen twenty two, in Picton, New
South Wales, Australia. His hometown was a tiny place and

(09:01):
it still is today. There's only about five thousand people
who live in Picton now, so it was even smaller
when presumes back then, and it was, it hadn't been.
It had been like a town about one hundred years
when he was born. Just a little over Picton was
declared within the area of legal Settlement in Australia in
eighteen twenty one. The town was named for a British

(09:22):
Army officer who died at Waterloo and had been quote
feared for his irascible temperament, which I just find funny that, like,
there's this dead guy who's claimed a fame. Was he
was a real asshole, let's name a town in Australia
after him.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Is that angry? I think he's angry.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, he's a dick, he's mean, Yeah, he's Honrey Well
cussin that.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
Might be a good quality to have for that kind
of person.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I wow, I can see being Henri being a benefit
as a Napoleonic era military officer, although again, he dies
at Waterlo, so he can't have been that good, right
I like soldiers who don't die at Waterloo.

Speaker 4 (09:58):
Yeah, I'm such a a flouncy little gay boy that
I'm like, I don't know what qualities would be good
for a soldier out Waterloo.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Don't. Let's tell yourself short gabe. 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 Austria. I you know, I believe.

Speaker 4 (10:19):
I think I'm just off to the side, Like does
anyone want chips?

Speaker 3 (10:23):
I think I'm.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Trying to stay away from the cannons. You guys are
just like walking at guns. No, I don't want to
walk towards a gun. That's a horrible idea.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
I'll be here with juice when you come back.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yeah, I'm going to introduce the concept of ducking behind
cover to the Napoleonic era militaries and then.

Speaker 4 (10:40):
Get well, this is my problem, Like with like a
confronting Ice in 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.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
Does any of us have to do this? None of
us have to do this.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
I feel like I just go home being like guys,
I think we should just go home. Oh like the
general from the Dispatch song.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
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

(11:26):
Harry is born. She and her husband came up, 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 in early life,
like basically nothing. We don't have any quotes that he

(11:46):
was an ambitious boy. We don't have any even have
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 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. Came from his entry in the Australian

(12:09):
Encyclopedia of Biography. Quote Harry enrolled in science at the
University of Sydney in nineteen forty 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 think it's reasonable to infer he

(12:31):
comes from a kind of poor family. You know, maybe
it probably not unusually poor for Pickton, probably as poor
as basically everybody else in Pigton, but he doesn't have
money growing up, right, Like you don't have to drop
out of school twice to work full time if your
family's flush generally speaking.

Speaker 4 (12:47):
Yeah, that'll put a kip on your shoulder in medical
school for sure.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
I feel like that happens.

Speaker 4 (13:14):
To men, Like men are poor and then they grow
up and they're like, I gotta be evil about it.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, I mean I get it because, 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 but been like my secondary job and I
did something else in comedy and entertainment because it paid
better because I did grow up like poor and with

(13:40):
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 don't want to like deal
with the fear that my parents dealt with their whole childhood.
I want to be more stable than they were. 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

(14:02):
to maybe I won't work full time for a newspaper
because that doesn't seem like like a future forward position, right.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yes, yeah, chip on your shoulder entitlement. It starts like.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
That, Yeah, yep, yep. So and this is reading between
the lines a bit by me here is to 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,

(14:33):
broke ass boy who's desperate to make something of himself,
right like he really has to. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:38):
I don't wanna, Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't want
to say that. That's I think that that's a really
admirable thing, and I.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Go well or badly, I will maintain.

Speaker 4 (14:49):
My admiration toward him until inevitably something.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Happens and he is kind of admirable at this start here,
at least it seems that way. Yeah, to continue with
a quote from the ins Australian Encyclopedia of Biography. On
January nineteenth, nineteen forty five, at the Registrar General's Office, Sydney,
he married Marjorie Jocelyn Noonan, a cashier. He studied medicine
at the University of Sydney and got his MB and MS,

(15:14):
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 your internship and stuff, he's like
winning awards very quickly. He is in very short order,

(15:34):
within a few years of starting he is an award
winning psychiatrist.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
Is a psychiatrist four children.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Do we know he's that child psychiatry is a major
area of his interest. Yes, Like he has like specialized
in pediatrics for a period of time. Yeah, well so, yeah,
he's he's at this point by the time he's you know,
in his early twenties, he's got his medical degree, he's
on some awards, he's married a working class girl, you

(16:02):
know who we presume kind of busted her ass the
whole time he was in school. They he'll make his
dream come true, and then it does. He seems to
be doing really, really well. Right, everything's coming up Bailey. Now,
I will say the fact that because he's when he's
working on his medical degree, he did not initially want
to be a psychiatrist. It's a choice heans kind of
late in his scholastic history, and there's a reason for

(16:27):
this by the nineteen fifties. 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 antistesiologists.

Speaker 5 (16:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
You're a if you're a nurse, antastesiologist 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.

Speaker 4 (16:59):
Sure, and that's not a super important part of the
surgery or anything.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
No, of course not, it's huge.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
It's one of the most important parts.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
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 fifties, right, there's not enough of them
to meet the need. There's a lot of demand, and
so Bailey being's kind of poor kid looking for a
place to make as Mark would both see, well, it'll
be easy to get work as a psychiatrist, like this

(17:30):
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 a hard surgeon or whatever.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
And the state of mental health is not what we
want it to be.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, we'll talk about that too. But 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.
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

(18:17):
Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic and Leichhart, which is a suburb
of Sydney that I'm sure I have mispronounced.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
And we have a giant Australian audience, so they will
let you.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Know, Roicky he going room. That's my Australian. That's gonna
piss him off more or sorry, guys, that was uncalled for.
That was uncalled for.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
This is like when you spell something wrong on purpose
in a TikTok so that you get a bunch of engagement.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
You're doing this on purpose.

Speaker 4 (18:48):
So the more common, the more emails, the more popular
the show is.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
Yeah, I've discovered something with Australians, which is that they
respond really well to negging. So I'm just kind of
doing that to build our audience over there.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Well, I just want to give a spoiler that Roberts
actually never intentionally mispronounced a single word a day in
his life.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
And never I've never mispronounced a word, I'd.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Argue, Yeah, he's never mispronounced a word, and if it happened,
it wasn't it was.

Speaker 3 (19:14):
The job's done.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
What do you want from him?

Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yeah, flood the emails, let us know.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, please don't let them know.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
I won't read the emails. I don't care.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
So he starts working at this this clinic in a
suburb of Sydney, and he seemed to be really good
at it. Opportunity to start flooding in for him at
this point, and he's so in demand that in the
fall of nineteen fifty four, he begins a fifteen month
tour for the World Health Organization, which is going to
take him all across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
Remember the World Health Organization?

Speaker 5 (19:44):
Everyone, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is I mean, he
doesn't do anything bad while he's with the WHOW, but
his time with the WAH Show does kind of lead
to something bad. It's not really the but part of
what this is is he's a young up and coming
and the WHO is having him shadow prominent psychiatrists in
other countries right to see their methods, to work with them.

(20:07):
You know, it's a good professional development thing. 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 electronic
devices that are being used in therapy, like electroconvulsive therapy.
He's really drawn too, right, and that is that's a

(20:29):
real therapy.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
People use it. It's used today on for example, people
like epilepsy, But at this time, people are just kind
of being electrocuted because they figure maybe that'll shock shake
him out of it. Right, It's not great. It's wildly
overprescribed at this period of time in a way that
is like often just torture. And he's also really interested.

(20:51):
We're starting by the fifties. You have to remember, drugs
aren't great until like the nineteen hundreds is really when
we start to figure out drugs, and especially we start
to figure out sedatives largely like benzos. Like benzos hit
the floor and doctors are like a pill that makes

(21:12):
my patient just go away, so I can do whatever
I need to do on them and they won't say
anything amazing, right, And he loves sedatives. He finds himself
like fascinated by benzos in particular.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Honey, me too, Like what Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
Who doesn't love a good benzo? Am I right?

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Yeah? They're good.

Speaker 4 (21:33):
But he's not taking them himself, right, he's just over
prescribing them, or loves to prescribe them.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
At this point. Yeah, he 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 his normal for the day at
this point in time. Because doctors love giving out benzos
in the fifties, Sure do, Sure do.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
That's why boomers are the way they are.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Maybe, Yeah, like eighty percent of medicine is benzo, diacipine
and fucking cigarettes. Like that's most of modern medicine. We
should returnn, we should returnn.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
That was the golden era.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, God Almighty, speaking of gold. You know who might
sell you benzos, you know, under the table, if you're
nice to them?

Speaker 3 (22:20):
Is it the products and services?

Speaker 2 (22:22):
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 going to be straight fentanyl. Folks, test
your shit, you know.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
From our sponsors, Test your shit.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Do whatever our sponsors give you, or anyone who says
they're one of our sponsors. Anyway, here's ads Welcome back
to the Pard Coast. So I don't know why I
said it that way.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
Anyway, happening here New Orleans is getting.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, that's got to be the nolins. So let's take
a step back here. We've just been talking about doctor
Bailey's live 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 are 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

(23:21):
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 him that used to just call them
lunatic asylum crazy.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
That's what I call my apartments. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
So that was established in eighteen eleven and I probably
don't have to tell you it wasn't a nice place.
The Lunatic Asylum in eighteen eleven attendance had no training. Treatment,
was not a 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

(24:06):
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 them in the lunatic asylum.
He's sleeping in the street something like that.

Speaker 4 (24:25):
I had a friend who was six foot seven and
he would sometimes be like, oh, what if about past
lives for us?

Speaker 3 (24:32):
And I was like, uh, I would be in.

Speaker 4 (24:34):
An asylum for being like having depression and being gay
and you're six foot seven. You would be in a
freak show. This is there's no romanticizing this.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
Not having the pleasant bill experience. I would have been
burned at the stake.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
W So that first lunatic asylum gets so crowded that
in eighteen thirty seven 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

(25:19):
with mental illness. It was only in eighteen sixty seven
that an Act of Parliament made it mandatory for mentally
impaired persons to be housed in asylums rather than prisons.
This group together the mentally retarded or disabled and the
mentally ill. In nineteen hundred, these categories were made distinct
and the patients separated. Those are not all terms we
use now, but this is what they're calling them at
the time.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
Right, they're bringing it back.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Yeah, they're bringing it back. Yeah, fucking streamers are. So
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 were still
massive practical issues of there's never enough budget for these
places to make them very nice. They're always over crowded,
it's hard to get supplies, and this leads to what's

(26:03):
called a custodial approach. So asylums are regulating and housing people,
and they're acknowledge 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 straight jackets. Right, they're
basically like beating them and to comply them and putting
them in straight jackets. The situation improves gradually and unevenly.

(26:25):
By the time doctor Bailey is in college, the focus
had shifted to treating the illnesses people presented, and that's
now increasingly a part of the actual asylum experience is
now 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

(26:48):
you're not necessarily getting like useful therapy. They've figured out
tranquilizers by this point, which have replaced straight jackets. They're like, look,
we're not using straight jackets as much because we're just
doping them up to the point where they can't move
most of the.

Speaker 4 (27:00):
Would the idea be to reintegrate them into society.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yes, that has finally broken through, and by the fifties
and sixties, nurse's 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.

Speaker 4 (27:23):
You know, you said your wife, because she's depressed. They
put her on rinzos, send her back home. Now she
just washes the dishes like a zombie.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
We did it exactly exactly, and honestly, theoretical fifties housewife,
send me your benzos please, I will put them to
good use, so not as a job. I would never
you did, never do something like that. Now. Unfortunately, this
is a primitive time still for mental health care treatment,
and many doctors find themselves overwhelmed by the difficulty and

(27:53):
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. 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

(28:16):
to an artificially maintained coma for long periods of time. Right,
how long? Great question? You know, we'll talk about that.
But 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

(28:37):
knock you out for twelve hours, then you catch up
on your sleep, right, And that's initially a lot of
the first tracks they are just trying for like a day,
but 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 McCloud, and he
experimented with knocking people out for long periods of time

(28:58):
as a treatment for skit. It's aphrenia, right, his.

Speaker 4 (29:01):
Attitude bipolar disorder mania could be good.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
It could be good for that.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, sleep it, sleep it off right, you can see
wipe up. People would think this, He's not McLoud is
not a bad guy for wondering fuck this. Maybe if
I just helped let this person sleep for like five days,
the wake up better. I don't know, it's worth a
try at the time right now. As you probably know,
all sleep is not created equal. You got your light
sleep or slow wave sleep, and you've got deep sleep,

(29:30):
and you've got rapid eye movement sleep, better known as
rim sleep because when you enter the rim stage of sleep,
the human subconscious naturally generates the image and voice of
Michael Stipe. We all experience this, right, That's why they
call it rim sleep.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
You got me?

Speaker 4 (29:45):
Yeah, I was not expecting it.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
I I I'll always make a good an ram joke.
You know 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 twentieth century, scientists had started to
understand that deep sleep is particularly important for healing, right,

(30:11):
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 your brain does a lot

(30:33):
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 dot com. Proponents
of deep sleep therapy hypothesize 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.

(30:54):
The theory suggested that prolonged deep sleep could allow the
brain to resetural 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

(31:16):
it for extended periods of time carry significant risks and
potential consequences.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yes, I was going to say the opposite.

Speaker 4 (31:23):
The opposite of that is you're sleeping so much that
you have a fog in your your brain is actually
working worse.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah. Yeah, 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.

Speaker 4 (31:40):
Yeah, you lose track 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 an inception.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Sure, yep, 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.

Speaker 4 (32:06):
Look, you're depressed or you're stressed out, all right, they
do give you still a.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
Benzo, 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
neuro Launch as a cocktail of barbituates and other sedative drugs, which,
if I'm honest lucky, I know it sounds pretty great. Right.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
This is the worst two people to do this episode.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
I know.

Speaker 4 (32:36):
I know.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
As I was reading that, as I was like doing
my research, I kept being like, fuck, I do want
to try this. This sounds rad So the cocktail is
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 eighteen seventies and it works
very well, but it's also extraordinarily dangerous. Just being close
to the vapors of chloral hydrate can fuck you up up.

(33:00):
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 chlorohydrate. Right. It is not ideal. Yeah, yeah,
it's also and it also causes like lots of physical
problems for patients, including because it's a central nervsystem depressant,

(33:21):
heart and lung failure. So people can die pretty easily
overdosing on this stuff.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
Again, my god, that's so much more dangerous than I thought.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
It's a it's a serious drug. Chlorohydrate is a real
ass drug, and it's not the only one in this cocktail.

Speaker 4 (33:38):
Are you taking? Is it like a tincture or you're
taking great question?

Speaker 2 (33:41):
Great question. It varies on the doctor. It varies on
the doctor, and sometimes it is administered via ivy. Sometimes
it's administered via like a series of pills. Right. Usually
they're taking pills to put them down initially, and then
an ivy kind of keeps them topped up during the
period of time while they're unconscious. Right. Another major ingredient
of the cocktail is ammo barbital, which is a barbituate

(34:03):
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

(34:26):
a real problem.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Blue Heaven.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Blue Heavens is the street name for uh m O
barbital and yeah. Another major part of the cocktail was
sodium theopentol, which is used as a general anesthetic but
is better known as one of the more popular truth serums. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
I knew that. Therem Now it's also a rapet onset

(34:51):
barbituate like m O barbitall. So in addition to this
is like chloral hydrate and two rap it onset barbituates.
Is what you're taking to in this doctor, her.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Heart and life are failing you.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Absolutely, you ain't breathe shut.

Speaker 4 (35:07):
Your mind on something called Blue Heaven and you, baby,
stop telling your secrets.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
Exactly perfect.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
Wow, that's Friday night, baby.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
Yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice Friday night. If
you've never been on like a if you've never taken
like a heavy dose of xanax or something. When I
was a kid, and I'm a kid, I mean, like
twenty years old. 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. She'd been taking it for a while, but
it was street zan's and what we got was thankfully,

(35:40):
this was not the era of fentanyl yet. It was
definitely alpras a lamb 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,

(36:02):
and then I came to myself sitting on my couch
thirty years hours later, without any memories of the intervening
period whatsoever.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
I would do that it would totally work.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, Yeah, it totally wasn't even.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
Yeah, were you living in New York? Where were you?

Speaker 5 (36:17):
No?

Speaker 2 (36:17):
And I was I was in Texas at this point
in time. Okay, okay, but you've had some hot hot
zands 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 were
just that were just way too hot. Because if you're
I mean, xanx is not a great drug, you don't
if you can kill yourself. Mixing it with alcohol really

(36:39):
dangerous to mix with like fucking coke or whatever, 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 besides
the end of your finger and you're just gone for
a full twenty four hours or more, right, And these
people are taking way more out yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(37:01):
which is why they're throwing in the chlorohydrate and they
don't want you functioning for shit. During this I.

Speaker 4 (37:07):
Was taking ambient 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.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Mm hmm. Yeah. It's fucking wild stuff.

Speaker 4 (37:22):
I was like, what is a food would be missing.
I'd be like, I guess I ate something.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
I must have done something, yeah, who knows? Who knows?

Speaker 4 (37:30):
One time I looked in my Google searches and I
had googled scary horses.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
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 while I
was fucked up, and I'll look over and it'll just
say something like completely incomprehensible, 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

(37:57):
and then four paragraphs of unreadable sqwriggles around it. I'll
turn this into a book immediately, brilliant.

Speaker 4 (38:05):
That's like that thing where they're like artists have to
be like fucked up to me, I'm like, N So,
I don't know about.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
That, Na, Na. 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 a deal with
the pharmaceutical manufacturer Roche because he only used their barbituates

(38:32):
in his cocktail. Per an article on the website mad
in America by doctor Philip Hickey quote in Clacy's first
publication on this matter, he acknowledged that three of the
twenty six patients had died during the study due to
broncho pneumonia or cardiac hemorrhages. This is about twelve percent. Nevertheless,
the method achieved some popularity in the fifties and sixties
and was used by William Sargent in the UK and

(38:53):
Donald Cameron in Canada, both considered imminent psychiatrists. So the
first guy to try deep sleep therapy kills twelve percent
of the twenty six patients that he.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
This is because people didn't talk to each other.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
I mean no, unfortunately not they're reading this. Sergeant and
Cameron find out about this because they read this study
where he kills twelve percent of his patients and are like,
I gotta do. I gotta get on that.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
I gotta people. The people don't know, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. The people taking agreeing to the
treatment are not being told. So yeah, and the first
study we did on this. It killed three of the
twenty six people in it. You want to you want
to roll those dice?

Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:30):
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 fifties and
sixties is not what we would call consent today because
a big thing doctors. There's a bit doctors don't like
explaining stuff to patients in this period of time. I'm
not don't always do it like.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Explaining stuff to patients now at all.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah, this is like but it's considered it's like offensive
to a lot of doctors that a patient would have
any input at all.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
Oh, it's like, how dare you question my expertise?

Speaker 3 (40:02):
I'm a doctor.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
La la la la la la la.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (40:05):
Yeah, not to victim blame, but I think you should
ask every time you're prescribed something, has this killed twelve
percent of the people?

Speaker 5 (40:13):
Kid?

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Has this killed twelve percent of the people who do it?

Speaker 4 (40:16):
I mean, if they say no, and they really killed
thirteen percent, that's on you.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
That's on you.

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Solid question to ask.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
One of the problems here because these are doctors often
working in like public health for the mentally ill in
the sixties. One of the issues is that a lot
of the people that are being sent are not compassmentis anyway,
so they're not able and often not asked to consent
to anything. But there's certainly these guys's attitude. No one
outside is going to come in and say, like, well,

(40:45):
you're giving all these guys a treatment that might kill
twelve percent of them. Everyone else who is in the
government is in like a local, ohose 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 fuck it. Right, That's not all because obviously regular
people who are out in society and stuff and not

(41:05):
institutionalized get these therapies too. But a lot of them
are institutionalized people and just nobody gives a fuck what
happens to them, right, That's why they're doing like this. Yeah,
still now, So, the amount of time you're kept under
during deep sleep therapy varies pretty widely. The vast majority
of therapeutic treatments in Europe seem to have been a
day or less. It's very uncommon for the credible doctors

(41:30):
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 neuro launch cod yeah, oh and it
gets just read yeah, two weeks doctor coma legally that's
a coma. That's a fucking coma per neural launch dot

(41:53):
com quote. During this time, patients were kept in a
state of unconsciousness with brief periods of wakefulness for feeding
and basic care monitoring in safety protocols were essential components
of deep sleeve therapy given the risks associated with prolonged sedation.
Medical staff closely monitored patient's vital signs, including heart rate,
blood pressure, and respiratory function, and travenous fluids and nutritional
support were provided to maintain hydration and prevent malnutrition. Sovie's

(42:17):
gonna put a picture up you can see on the
video version. If not, I will describe it. Yeah, you're
seeing a feeding of a patient here. So you've got
a man in a hospital bed a sixties look in
one unconscious. There's a doctor or an orderly I can't
really tell standing behind him, who's got his he's holding

(42:37):
his hat. 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. You know
it's a funnel beer. Yeah, it's like 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

(42:59):
it looks like he's just pouring coffee into this guy's.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
No me in the morning trying to get up coffee.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, you gotta know, Fee, I can't I I can't
get out of bed until I've had an entire leader
of coffee poured up my nose, you know, So if
you'll tell you that's the only way I work in
the morning, true, Right, And then and.

Speaker 4 (43:18):
Then as soon as they're done, my eyes pop open
and I pop out of bed, like don't.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
Wait, daddy.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
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. Oh,
and R E.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
M isn't. Oh, and Michael Stipe isn't.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, it's okay. The people who would most get the
Michael Stipe joke can't hear anymore. There gen X like
they're there. Their bodies failed them long ago.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
Stop people that support us.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
I know I love gen X listeners know I love you. Yeah,
So what I just described is how deeply 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, to
be like moved, to be like you should be walked

(44:11):
around to help prevent bed sores. But you know what
that takes work. You got to 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
having me in conscious a whole.

Speaker 4 (44:32):
Need?

Speaker 3 (44:32):
Did they? They must stand you up and like weekend
at Bernies, you around.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Cheaper, Cheaper is better, Cheaper is better.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
They doesn't have one guy that's kind of making you walk.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, I mean, usually they just don't do that, usually
just leave you unconscious. That that becomes increasingly in big facilities,
right in large and like the psychiatric hospitals, 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 benzoed out the

(45:03):
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

(45:24):
for a few days until they detox. Right, great idea.
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 who 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

(45:47):
addicted to, and you deeply depress their central nervous system
for days on end with huge doses of benzos. So
people die sometimes why wait, what do you mean, how
like they stop breathing. It's a CNS depressive Yeah, so
they just they just 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. There

(46:10):
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, And they're not always being as careful
as they should be right an allergies. And again, oftentimes

(46:30):
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

(46:51):
types who it's all about talk therapy. But they're a
psychiatrists whose whole thing is drugs. Drugs give them something
to you know, that's all that matters is is dosum. Right.
There's a place for aspects of that, obviously, 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 should I want them knocked out and
then I can give them whatever medication I think will

(47:14):
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.

Speaker 4 (47:20):
Were these people brought in by their families or like, so,
if they died, would somebody care?

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, Okay. 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 they're non confishmentous, 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.
So it's a mix of ways people get into this,

(47:49):
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 Freudian and maybe it'll help you, but it'll

(48:09):
take years of therapy or not your problem mount in
two weeks you're not even awake.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (48:15):
God, that's what they haven't ad on on Santa Monica
and Kouanga for whatever that thing is that's like the
Neurow link or something where it literally says like don't
be like depression gone.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
I'm like that can't be right.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
And I'm always you should and you should always be
super on guard whenever anyone is talking about like a
serious mental health harming like and this just knocks it out.
Has that ever happened?

Speaker 3 (48:45):
Mental health?

Speaker 2 (48:46):
There's some stuff like the thing that changed when I
was a kid in very anti drug the thing that
like changed my mind about pot legalities. I had a
friend with multiple sclerosis who like she was my Wow guild,
and she got at we got on like a webcam
chat so she could show me how her hands were
shaking as her friend prepared to join for her so
she can like out. And I was like, oh, of course, right, oh,

(49:10):
right now, that was all it took for me. Right,
Sometimes you do get stuff that is that miraculous for
certain things, but not for something that's as complex and
as wide ranking as just depression. Right right, It's just
I don't trust anybody making claims like that. So as
time goes on, it becomes clear that deep sleep therapy

(49:31):
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,

(49:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
For the for the video people that can see my face,
you get it.

Speaker 4 (50:06):
But for the asome listeners, I would say, through like
seventy five percent of what Robert's been saying, my mouth
is just wide open.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
It's not pleasant.

Speaker 3 (50:15):
I am so shocked.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
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

(50:39):
clots because people are on their backs, laying down for
days at a time, and when you do that, you
can sometimes you papa fucking clot.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
Right right, right, you know, the medical term is papa clot.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Papa 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. 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

(51:11):
and less and are more discriminating about when they use it.
By the time World War two 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.
And I got to tell you, thinking back to twenty seventeen,
was when I had my first really bad PTSD break.
There was like a three to four week period where
I was orderline psychotic, like I was not making rational

(51:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
Yes, yeah, but do you think that would have helped you?

Speaker 2 (51:52):
No? No, no, because 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. 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 promise
I won't dream. Yeah, let's fucking do it, you know,
Like I get why people try this.

Speaker 4 (52:13):
Yeah, I mean I have I have bipolar disorder, and
during mania, I wouldn't I could see like people, well
meaning family members or something being like knock them out.

Speaker 3 (52:23):
Knock them out so that he can't do it to himself.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
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 them 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, but they're not they're not being unconscious for

(52:46):
days at a time.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
So what did help you? Oh?

Speaker 4 (52:50):
Me?

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Uh? Time some some of it with therapy. It's mostly
just like time, 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

(53:11):
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. Time is the
thing that's had the biggest impact on me.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
And these people don't want time.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
Well, yeah, they don't want time, and the doctors are
like promising them they don't need it, right, right, So
you see both these are not This is not like
a lot of concres 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 us, right,

(53:49):
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. So among most psychiatrists
then who are still using deep sleep therapy have significantly
like timpered down it. Right, you're not knocking people out
for days at a time anymore. You're only using it

(54:11):
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,
And I don't mean true. I don't mean if in
the like the gross cell, though that probably does happen.

(54:32):
I mean electroc convulsive 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

(54:53):
some patients say, okay, we'll try it. Then some doctors though,
and that's fine, right. I mean again, it some time improved.
It's not by a good idea, but that's consent. If
the doctors 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
don't I need to get consent? I need to shock

(55:14):
them like them, I'll just do it. You know what
are they gonna do? Right, Well, they'll we 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.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
That's what I was gonna say.

Speaker 4 (55:29):
Are they are they later saying that they did it,
or is the person like not aware that that's what happened.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
Usually often people don't find out, and when they do,
they're generally because we have a good amount. 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.
Doctor Donald Cameron, the famous Canadian. Yeah. Doctor Donald Cameron,

(55:57):
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 tour
how theoretically torture should work.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Right, Oh, theoretically yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
Doctor 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 nineteen seventy two. Many
it's really recent here's Billy Sarge. Many patients unable to
tolerate a long course of ECT can do so when

(56:35):
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 if while the patient has
kept sleeping, including a variety of drugs and ECT, which

(56:57):
together generally induced considerable memory law 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 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

(57:19):
followed the introduction of anesthesia to surgery. So Sergeant is
saying DST is invaluable 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.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
Well, one, how do you even define fixed? At that point,
you're just like a blank and.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
I got a lot of questions.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
Well sure, yeah, I'm asking yes, right.

Speaker 4 (57:48):
And two, your body still remembers, like 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.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
Leg, right, right, Yes, Yes, the body keeps the score,
which is certainly through in the case of a broken lake.
Speaking of bodies, you know who's killed a lot of people,
not the sponsors of this podcast. Here's ads and we're back.

(58:25):
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 subjections or comments. Jesus, this brings us Yeah,
not great, This brings us back to doctor Harry Bailey.
Bailey became aware of doctor Sergeant and his methods while

(58:46):
he was doing his fifteen month world tour with the
who He worked alongside doctor sergeant 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 par Our Mental Hospital to establish
a cerebral surgery and research unit, which opened in nineteen
fifty seven with him as the director.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
Can we talk about how menacing doctor sergeant sounds?

Speaker 3 (59:10):
You said, it's times and I was like, ooh, I
don't know about that guy.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
What I would like to find is a guy with
the last named sergeant to make him to a doctor,
and then a guy with the last named doctor, and
you have him join the military and becomes a sergeant.
And then you've got doctor sergeant and sergeant doctor and
they get married. Yeah I don't yeah, I don't know
what to do after that point, but yeah, there you go,
and they get married and hyphenate their names. So it's
now doctor sergeant doctor and sergeant doctor sergeant. The dream,

(59:40):
The dream, The Dream. Bailey begins experimenting with new ect methods,
often using various barbituates en downers to knock patients unconscious.
First for doctor Philipicky Sergeant and Bailey would mail each
other bragging about how many patients they'd knocked out each week,
keeping score like Gimli and Legolis during the Battle of Health.
It's deep like they're literally being like, ahh, here's so

(01:00:03):
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, but I gotta

(01:00:23):
say what Sergeant 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 the general criticism of deep sleep therapy.
But doctor Sergeant and doctor Bailey are both award winning,

(01:00:45):
prominent and respected members of the of the profession within
their field within their countries.

Speaker 4 (01:00:50):
Now do you know what if those same medications were
being used for other stuff?

Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
Like were they giving two tons yes, like.

Speaker 4 (01:00:57):
Were they they were giving you benzos for like physical
ailments and other things like Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
One of the reasons why it's so hard to get
benzos now is that from the fifties through the seventies,
they were handing them out like fucking candy, especially to
like depressed housewives who also drank, because it was the
fifties and sixties, and so a shitload of people lost
their moms because they would overdose on benzos and alcohol.
It happened to fuck load.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
And you're not talking about depression.

Speaker 4 (01:01:22):
I'm talking about like, do they give ammal barbital to
someone who's like, my kidney's hurt.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
No, no, no, no, no, no, you wouldn't.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
I mean all psychiatric.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
It's I think you 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 ammal barbitaal, but some of the stuff
the use in this cocktail are used to help knock
people out for other procedures, right, because they're they're good
for that, yes, okay, but no, someone's probably not getting
prescribed ammo barbitol because like they've got a fucking stomach

(01:01:51):
ache or whatever. That would be kind of weird. 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 get

(01:02:12):
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, So doctor 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, as I said, and then yeah, a
prize for pediatrics. Per the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography, his

(01:02:35):
reputation high. In nineteen fifty nine, Bailey was appointed medical
superintendent of Callan 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

(01:02:57):
to substantiate the charges. Undeterred, Bailey, blue the whistle and
dramatic newspaper headlines embarrassed the heffern government, particularly the responsible
Minister William Shan. Despite the resulting Royal Commission reporting to
Callan Park by John McClements confirmed many of Bailey's allegations,
while concluding that some are exaggerated. So he's looking pretty
good at this point. Right, he's a whistle blower. There's

(01:03:19):
real problems of this facility, but you're also seeing some
of the signs of the later problem. This guy's going
to 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

(01:03:40):
he knowingly judges up or just the truth or just lies,
but he also gets very convinced of his own rightness
and righteousness, 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 going
to be the case much lofe longer. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:01):
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 will
be undeniable.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
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 the shit get covered up. So you've got at
this point, doctor Bailey is not just an award winning
psychiatrist with widespread professional acclaim in several continents, but a

(01:04:33):
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. Doctor Bailey. After
this point, Yeah, not gonna be good.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
Yeah, too much power, Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
The lesson here, folks is, if anyone ever does anything good.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
You need to look into it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Yeah, look into it. Throw himTo the ocean. It's the
instant someone does anything good, Toss him into the sea.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
You know, I just think, I just think it when
you do that, like I see the merit of it,
like he's trying. But when you do that, you don't.

Speaker 4 (01:05:08):
Get to the actual heart of the issues because you're
just compounding stuff. So like your actual thing that you're
worried about doesn't it's not in the conversation because you're
just making stuff up to have some serve sweeping you know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Yeah, part of the issue is that, like doctor Bailey
probably even did hamper the reform efforts by lying about shit.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
Yes, that's what I was trying to say.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Yeah, but regular people don't know shit about that.

Speaker 5 (01:05:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
He's the hero doctor. So he starts a private practice
and it's immediately a success. He's making a fuck load
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, right, you might attract a really loyal

(01:05:56):
following with people who don't trust doctors. This is kind
of what happen, 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 problem. He doesn't
ever bring up any 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, Yeah, yep.

(01:06:21):
Bailey is very appealing when he starts in private practice.
This is nineteen sixty two when he begins his private practice,
and in nineteen sixty three 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 doctor Bailey. Chelmsford

(01:06:44):
was a small for profit hospital and Bailey had helped
to fund it. He's a part owner in the hospital.
The n essay on the website Waking dot 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 this created a perverse incentive to extend treatment

(01:07:07):
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
doctor Bailey he's like, Oh, he knows this person doesn't
need to be hospitalized, but he tells him he need
to be hospitalized for three days. He knows exactly how

(01:07:29):
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. Yeah,
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

(01:07:51):
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. He doesn't even have to do it. Yeah,
he can and he doesn't even have to do it
right right or have one of his other because he's
got other doctors here. He often has them do it right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
I'm just gonna say it this doctor Bailey guy not
great guy.

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Uh So by the time he starts at Chelms for
doctor 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 DST. He can keep patients down four 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. Doctor Bailey used his prestige in the fact

(01:08:40):
that his hospital was the only one offering this treatment
in the area to charge patients between four hundred and
six hundred percent more than comparable treatments costs from other practitioners.
He regularly kept people unconscious and sedated for days beyond
what his treatment plans suggested to maximize the amount of
time he could build. Via that same essay quote, some
families reported bills exceeding their annual income.

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):
Did the other doctors, the two other doctors that were
working with him, did they know that he was scamming.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
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 other doctors are very implicated in this. Now, I
don't know if they're fully aware, especially at the start
of how bad this is. There's some especially the doctors

(01:09:31):
and nurses working early on, might think they're really doing
the best, because again we don't less is known, right,
but he's doing this for almost twenty years. It becomes
clear at a certain point this is just a grift
that's hurting people. Yeah, speaking of grifts that hurt people,
you know what my.

Speaker 3 (01:09:48):
Favorite grift is products and services.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
No ending this podcast for the day because I'm tired.
We'll be back there, say with more to plug your
bluggables at the end, Hea though.

Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
Sure, Uh, these are what one would call my products
and services.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
Uh, that's right.

Speaker 5 (01:10:06):
You can.

Speaker 4 (01:10:08):
You can go to my substack one thousand natural shocks
dot substack dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:10:12):
There's also a just.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
Like E C T. By the way.

Speaker 3 (01:10:15):
Oh yeah, didn't even think that mine's a Hamlet reference.

Speaker 4 (01:10:18):
Because I'm unbearable and then there's the a thousand Natural
Shocks podcast. I also do a podcast called Best Gabe
Ever that's more lighthearted.

Speaker 3 (01:10:28):
Uh, and that's and that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
Yes, Gabe, I think I know how you and I
can make a shitload of money.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
Is it shocking people?

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
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 get people huge
doses of benzos to knock them out, and then instead
of giving them electroshock therapy, we play your podcast of shocks.

Speaker 4 (01:10:54):
Oh, I really say you're going to say we play
r e m I really thought you were going to
say we play No.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
No, incredible Michael Stide gets enough fucking money. All right, Gabe,
thank you very much. We'll be back with part two
on Thursday's. Folks. Until then, go to Hell. I Love you.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:11:37):
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