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

>> Welcome back to Behind the Busters, 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.

>> No, not being in New Orleans with me, but here to podcasts with me, the great Gabe Dunn. Welcome to the show Gabe. >> Thank you, as I said before, I'm so excited, probably too excited, I'm a big fan of you guys. I would listen to you overnight at my warehouse job for hours and then I would get home

and realize that I had only heard your voices for eight hours. >> Well, that actually happens to Sophie and I sometimes too. >> Yeah, I was like, sometimes when I, I made this, I said this is a joke to somebody the other day and 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.

>> Wow, you've melted. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And when I'm in a apartment, it's like, hey, Robert, do you want to shoot this mystery powder

“into your veins and I'll be like, I'll hear Sophie's voice saying, yes, Robert, I think”

you 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. >> That doesn't tell me well in New Orleans, that's going to be weird in New Orleans. >> It is, I mean, you know, Sophie's motto is, "live moss." Taco Bell actually stole it from her, the lawsuit is ongoing.

>> Wow. >> Yeah. >> I believe it. It looks, I was going to say, I was going to say, I would love to sue Taco Bell, if somebody can give me a reason to live moss from me.

But I think what Robert was saying is, Gabe, you have any plug holes, you want to plug up top here, you want to let audience know who you are, because this is your first time on bastards. >> It is, believe me, 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 L.A., 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 sub-stack called a thousand natural shocks and a related podcast called

a thousand natural shocks. That used to be called bad with money. But then the world, financial advice became even more irrelevant than it only was.

“>> Yeah, yeah, I think the best thing to do is, I don't know, try to have money.”

>> Yeah, I mean, truly, I like try to grow a boss, play 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. >> Yeah, you're talking about anti-ice activism in L.A., and it, I've been thinking about the surface level aspect of this for a while, which is in Seattle and then the bolster

extent in Oregon during the 2020 protests, a major symbol of like the protests in those cities where 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 P and W, people don't use umbrellas here. Like the fastest way to tell someone is not from here or end 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 protests 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 before, because it's a way, so now we have to figure out like, something, we also, well, they, they have those signs that are like California melts ice, you know, right, it does, that's actually a major problem that we have here, right, yeah, 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.”

Yeah, not a city that had a lot of utility for umbrella owners, previews. No, they go, where is the 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? I grew up in LA, I don't remember ever having umbrella, so, right, one umbrella, Michael, how much could it cost, $1,000?

That, that, that people in Beverly Hills, right, right, right, this isn't, I heart podcast, guaranteed human. I'm Clayton Nackard, in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

But here's the thing, bachelor fans hated him.

That's when his life took a disturbing turn, a one-night stand would end in a courtroom.

“The media is here, this case has gone viral.”

The dating contract. Agreed, a date mean, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young, listen to Love Trap on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist, and one of the most authentic voices in music today.

The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there

is the only guy that's not there. No matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children. I dread the conversation with my son. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023, but what if we didn't get the whole story? I've just been face-to-face. The moment you look at the whole picture of the case, Colach.

“What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?”

Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Riley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security,

one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 the research on this. Love it. The episode title that I've got working is called The Real Doctor Sleep, which is the

title entirely because I'm pretty sure Steven 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 Steven King novel, but I did it, and I can't take it back. I think his son wrote maybe, maybe, but you know that.

“When you're in a memo, maybe you have to do exactly what your parents did.”

That said, I can also imagine a Steven King Nepo, maybe just being Steven King writing books for his kid and pretending there is kids book. He has time. He could put out five or six extra books a year. That's like three hours of work for Steven King.

You're imagining a kid, like you're imagining a 10-year-old and Steven King's writing for him. I'm like, okay, so he's a 45-year-old man and Steven King is still writing his books for him? Yeah, of course, as long as he's alive, you know?

Obviously, behind the bastards is a podcast. I'm not complaining, but it takes a lot of work. These are generally 8-10,000-word scripts every week. I average reading probably 1-1-1/2 books a week, sometimes 2 books a week, 4 doing research for these episodes.

That's all year round, you know, 50-some weeks out of the year. The Epstein-4 partners 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 16,000 words on the motherfuckers.

So there's a lot to do, which is why I am appreciated whenever fans of the show are so good to suggest episode topics on the mega thread in the behind-the-bastard subreddit, because

a lot of people will be like, you know, oh, I want to, when are we finally going to get

them out episodes? Are you used to Steven Miller? And yeah, we'll get to the big guys. Those guys do require a lot of work. What I really like from the episode's 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 I first off, I want to thank the admins of the subreddit for making the episodes of gestion mega thread that I asked about during the Q&A episodes, because that came in handy this week. Posted an unusually detailed thread, uh, 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 the story at all? I have not, but so darkly, my first thought was like, how's that bad?

It is.

“This is an interesting question, 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 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 when I explain how this is supposed to work, you're going to be like, well, shit, I want to try that. That's the problem.

And that's ultimately the dark humor of my whole thing is I'm like, oh, tell me more.

What did he use? Yes. That's so bad. That's so bad. I have to be online.

A week. Shit. Exactly. And how gentle is the sleep? Okay.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 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 29, 1922 in Pickedon, New South Wales, Australia. His hometown was a tiny place.

And it's still listed today.

There's only about 5,000 people who live in Pickedon now. So it was even smaller when Presum's back then. And it had been like a town about 100 years when he was born, just a little over. Pickedon 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

quote feared for his arassable temperament, which I just find funny that like there's this debt guy who's claimed to fame was he was a real asshole, but it's named a town on Australia after him. Is that angry? Like he's angry?

Yeah. He's a day. He's mean. Yeah. He's Henri.

Well, that might be a good quality to have for that kind of person, I know. I can see being Henri being a benefit as an Napoleonic era military officer, although again, he dies at Waterloo so we can't even that good, right? Yeah. I like soldiers who don't die at Waterloo.

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 out of Waterloo. I don't know. Don't tell yourself short, Gabe.

Thank you. 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. Hi.

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

I think I'm just right to stay away from the candidates. But you guys are just like walking at guns? No, I don't want to walk towards a gun. That's a horrible idea. I'll be here with you when you come back.

Yeah. I'm going to introduce the concept of ducking behind cover to the Napoleonic era military. And then get actually. Well, this is my problem, like with, like, unconfronting ICE and DHS, where I am in LA because my whole thing is, like, they'll just come

and 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 just go home.

I feel like I just go home. I don't feel being like, guys, I think we should just go home. Oh, like the general from the dispatch, huh? Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly like that. Yeah. 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 sent 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

child in early life, like, basically nothing.

We don't have any quotes that he was an ambitious boy. We don't even have anyone talking about the fact that he was like a good student, which I presume he was given what he does with the rest of his life. So, we're just going to 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 to tale about his day-to-day life as a child came from this entry, came from his entry in the Australian encyclopedia of biography. So, 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 assistant.

“And in fact, there seem to be, and 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 comes from a kind of poor family. You know, maybe to probably not an usually poor for picked in probably as poor is basically everybody else in picked in, 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. Yeah. That'll be the tip on your shoulder in medical school. For sure. And I think he is going to really follow the money his entire career in some very evil ways.

Like he grows up really poor and that seems to be his primary motivation in life as

I want to make money even more than the medical stuff he's talking about doing. And he wants to get paid, right? I feel like that happens to men, like men are poor and then they grow up and they're like, I got to be evil about it. Yeah.

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 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 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 child. 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 to maybe I won't work full time for a newspaper because that doesn't seem like a future forward position. Right. Yes. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yep. So, and this is reading between the lines a bit by me here, so he was a grain of salt. But I, he, 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 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?

“Yeah, I don't want to, yeah, I don't, I don't want to say that that's, I think that”

that's a really admirable thing and I don't go well or badly. I will mean my admiration toward him until inevitably something 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 Australian Encyclopedia biography. On January 19th, 1945, at the Registrar General's Office, Sydney, he married Marjorie

Jocelyn Nunan, a cashier. He studied medicine at the University of Sydney and got his MB and MS, 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. He is a psychiatrist for a children, do we know?

He's, the child's psychiatry is a major area of his interest, yes, like he is like specialized in pediatrics for a period of time. Yeah. Wow. So, yeah, he's, at this point, by the time he's, you know, in his early 20s, he's got his

medical degree, he's won some awards, he's married a working class girl, you know, who we presume kind of busted her ass the whole time he was in school to help 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 he makes kind of late in his 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 and many parts of the West is including Australia,

they're 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 you're a, if you're a nursing 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. Sure, and that's not a super important part of the surgery or anything. No, not enough, of course not.

It's one of the most important parts.

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 being kind of poor kid looking for a place to make

as 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 shipping 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 would have

to come you know, a hard surgeon or whatever. And the state of mental health is not what we want it to be. Yeah, we'll talk about that too, but you know, a big part of why it becomes a psychiatrist

medical field and you want the easiest time of the possible.

“So after graduate getting out and getting his degree, our boy spends a year in turning”

at the Prince Alfred Hospital and then gets a full-time regular gig at the Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic in Leicard, which is a suburb of Sydney that I'm sure I have mispronounced. And we have a giant Australian audience, so they will let you know. Croaky, they go in room. That's my Australian. That's going to piss them off more.

Oh, no. Sorry, guys. That was that was that was uncalled for. That was uncalled for. This is like when you spell something wrong on purpose in, you know, 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. 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.

Well, I just want to give a spoiler that Roberts actually never intentionally mispronounced

a single word a day in his life. And never, I've never, I've never pronounced it. Yeah, he's never mispronounced a word. And if it happened, it wasn't, it was, the drops done. What do you want for him? Yeah, flood the emails. Let us know. Yeah, please still. Let them know. I won't read the emails. I don't care. So he starts working at this, this clinic in a suburb of Sydney, and he seems to be really

good at it. Opportunity 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.

“Remember the world, the health organization, everyone? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”

This is, I mean, he's, he doesn't do anything bad. Well, he's with the WHO, but his time with the WHO does kind of lead to something bad. It's not really the WHO. 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 professional development thing. Right. 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 electro-convulsive therapy if he's really drawn to. Right. And that is, that's a real therapy. People use it. It's used to day on, for example, people 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. I'm, I'm, I'm right. It does, it's not great. It's wildly over prescribed at this period of time. And a way that is like off and just torture. Yeah. 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 bin, bin zo's. Like bin zo's have hit the, 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. And he loves sedatives. He finds himself

like fascinated by benzos in particular. Honey, me too. Like what? Yeah. Who doesn't love a good bin zo, am I right? Yes, they're good. But he's not taking them himself, right? He's just over prescribing them or loves to prescribe them. At this point, yeah. He, he, he's just loves to prescribe them. And it's important. We would say over, but at the time, nobody's calling us 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 bin zo's in the 50s. Sure do. Sure. Yeah. That's why boomers off the way they are, maybe. Yeah. Like 80% of medicine is bin zo'd, I asked if he and fucking cigarettes. Like that's most of my medicine. I miss it. Bring it back. We should return. We should return. That was the golden era. Yeah. God almighty. Speaking of gold, you know, who might sell you bin zo's? You know, under the table,

if you're nice to him? Is it the products and services? That's right. That's right. We might be sponsored by a guy down the street who will sell you bin zo's or there might just be a guy down the street who will sell you bin zo's. And if so, I got to tell you, that's just going to be straight fentanyl folks. Test to shed, you know. Test to shed. And less it's from our sponsor. Test to your shed. Do whatever our sponsors give you. Or anyone who says they're one of our sponsors. Anyway,

here's that. In 2023, a story gripped the UK of looking horror and disbelief. A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain,

The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it. To ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppi was? No voicing of any skepticism are doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The

Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first bachelor to ever

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“all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines?”

It began as a one-night stand, and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. A great adatement, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He said She said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeart Radio

app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guilt season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night Bobby Gumpride became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. Tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Termine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, "Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a

mistaken identity." The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years only two people knew the truth, until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to burden of guilt season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award winning country music artist, and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really

takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the words

“celebrity hate those words that you make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain”

point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent

person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything

to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo is born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my life and my children over my job, I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you do? Listen to on purpose with your Jay-Shatty on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the part of Coost. So, I don't why I said it that way.

What's happening here? New Orleans is getting to you. Yeah, that's gotta be the knowledge. 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, meet and fund 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 and general and in Australia and in specific. Primarily in Australia, specifically.

So, the first mental health institution in Australia was the Australian lunatic asylum in Castle

Bill and New South Wales, which they used to call him that. He's just got lunatic asylum.

“Crazy, that's what I call my apartment. Yeah.”

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 kind of like, people, there's no thought that you treat people. This is just a warehouse to stick crazy people

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. I don't get a friend who was six foot seven and he would sometimes be like, "Oh, what if past lives for us?" And I was like, "Uh, I would be in an asylum for being like having depression and being gay and your six foot seven, you would be in a freak show."

Yeah, there's no romanticizing this. Yeah, you would be in a freak show or you would be in like, one of those Austrian military units where they only hired tall guys. It could make the king look cooler. We're not having the pleasant village experience.

Yeah, I would have been burned at the stake. Like 100%. So 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 Chumsford scandal blog, quote, "Mentalial patients were commonly transferred from jails to these asylum's 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 a mandatory for mentally impaired persons to be housed in a silence rather than

prisons. This group together, the mentally retarded or disabled and the mentally ill. In 1900, these categories were made distinct and the patient separated. It's not all terms we use now, but this is what they're calling them at the time. They're bringing back. Yeah, they're bringing it back. Yeah, fucking streamers are. So things do start to get better, but even in a silence 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 a silence are regulating and housing people and they're acknowledge that they need treatment, but they're not providing

“treatment. The only thing that they used to control patients that'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. 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 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 your pounding people's brain 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 a place to straight jacket. So 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 time. Would the idea be to reintegrate them into society?

Yes, that has finally broken through and by the fifties and sixties, nurses and attendance 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, you said your wife because she's depressed, they put her on so send her back home. Now she just

“washes the dishes like a zombie. We did exactly exactly and honestly, theoretical 50s housewife”

send me your benzos, please. I will put them to good use. So not as a joke. I would 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 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 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 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 it in that negative because they're how much they're pumping, but like people who aren't zombie acts. They'll be like, okay, well, I can knock you out for

12 hours. Then you can't shut up on your sleep, right? And that's initially a lot of the first trays they are just trying for like a day, but they start trying for like a couple of days at a time, we could 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 Scottsman named Neal McCloud, and he experimented with knocking people out for long periods of time as a treatment for schizophrenia,

Mania could be good, it could be good for that. Yeah, sleep it, sleep it off, right? You can see why people would think this. He's not McCloud is not a bad guy for wondering, fuck, this maybe if I just help 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, and you've got rapid eye movements 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 Stepp. We all experience this, right? That's why they call it rim sleep. You got me.”

I was not expecting it. I always make an RAM joke. 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 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 of it's 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 hypothesize that by

artificially extending the deep sleep phase, they could enhance its restorative properties and provide therapeutic benefits for individual 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 it for extended periods of time. Periods significant risks and potential consequences. Yes, I would say the opposite, the opposite of that is you're sleeping so much that you have a

fog and your brain is actually working worse. 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. 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 in order to capital and inception. 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 whether I help. Yeah, like sure. Yeah. Let's give it a try. Look, you're depressed or you're stressed out, right? They do give you still a 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 in

Neurolaunch as a cocktail of barbituits and other sedatives drugs. Oh, lucky. I know. It's really great, right? This is the worst few people to do this episode. I know. I know. I know. As I was reading, as I was like doing my research, I kept you like, fuck, I do want to try this. This sounds rad. So yeah, the cocktail is three major ingredients. Chlorol 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 vapours of chlorol 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 chlorol hydrate, right? It's just not ideal. Yeah. It's also, and it also causes lots of physical problems for patients, including because it's a central nurses in

depressive, heart and lung failure. So people who die pretty easily overdosing on this stuff. Again, my God, that's so much more dangerous than I thought. It's a, it's a serious drug. Chlorol hydrate is a real-ass drug. And it's not the only one in this cocktail.

“No, I'm not sure you're taking. Is it like a tincture or you're taking a lot?”

Great question. Great question. It varies on the doctor. It varies on the doctor. 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 some top-up during the period of time while they're unconscious, right? Another major ingredient of

under the name blue heavens and sounds awesome. It is also super addictive and causes horrific

withdrawals that can straight up kill you. Bensos are one of those things if you are addicted

“to bensos, 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. Blue heaven. Blue heavens is the street man for ammo barbatol. 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. Truth serums? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I knew that. I knew truth serums.

Now, it's also a rapid onset barbituate, like ammo barbatol. So in addition to, this is like coral hydrate and two rapid onset barbituates, is what you're taking together in this cocktail. Your heart and life are failing. Yeah, absolutely. You ain't breathing shit. I don't get your mind on something called blue heaven, and you don't stop telling your secrets. Exactly. Perfect. Wow. That's Friday night, baby.

Yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice Friday night. If you've never been on like a, if you've never

taken a like a heavy dose of Xanax or something, when I was a kid and I'm the white kid, I mean, like 20 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. Sure. She'd been taking it for a while, but it was street sands, and what we got was thankfully, this was not the era of fentanyl yet. It was definitely our prazolem 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 hours later without any memories of the intervening period whatsoever. Yeah, I would do that. It would totally whack. Yeah, it totally won't even know how I got. Yeah. Were you living in New York? Where were you? No, I was in Texas at this point in time. Okay. But you've had some hot, hot vans too, I'm guessing. And that's part of why, especially in the mid-autts, there were a lot of deaths due to zans that

had fint in them, or that were just way too hot, because if you're, I mean, zanx is not a great drought. You don't want it. You can kill yourself mixing it with alcohol, really 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 24 hours or more, right? And these people are taking way more, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is why they're throwing in the coral hydrant. They don't want you functioning for shit during this. I took, I was taking ambient for a while, and I stopped because I would, I would go to bed wearing one thing, take the ambient, and then wake up in different clothes in a different part of my house. Yeah, it's fucking wild stuff. I was like, what is a food

would be missing? I'd be like, I guess I ate something. I must have done something. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? One time I looked in my Google searches, and I had Google scary horses. 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. 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. Brilliant. That's like that thing where they're like artists have to be like, fucked up to be, I'm like, I don't know about that. No, no, no, 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 these

of Deep Sleep Therapy or DST was Jacob Clicy. He was a Swiss psychiatrist who seems to have had a deal with the Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Rush because he only used their barbechewits in his cocktail, perinarticle on the website Mad in America by Dr. Philip Hickey, quote, "In places first publication on this matter, he acknowledged that three of the 26 patients had died during the study due to Bronco pneumonia 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 imminent psychiatrists. So, the first guy to try Deep Sleep Therapy kills 12% of the 26 patients that he-- This is because people didn't talk to each other.

they read this study where he kills 12% of his patients and they're like, "I got to do it. I got to get on that." But the people, the people don't know. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the people taking a green to the treatment are not being told. So, yeah, and the first study we did on this, it killed three of the 26 people in it. You want to roll those dice? Exactly. 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 because a big doctors, there's a bit-- Doctors don't like explaining stuff to patients in this period of time. I'm not-- I don't always do it now. I don't always do it now. I don't like explaining stuff to patients now at all. Yeah, but it's considered-- it's like offensive to a lot of doctors that a patient would have any input at all. Oh, it's like, how dare you question my expertise? I'm a doctor. Yeah, not to victim

“blame, but I think you should ask every time you're prescribed something, has this killed 12% of”

the people in this case? Has this killed 12% of the people who did it? And if they say no, and it a really killed 13%, that's on you. That's on you. Solid question task.

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 complimented anyway, so they're not able and often not asked to consent to anything, but they're certainly-- these guys' attitude, no one outside is going to 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 a local who should be a watchdog for this is just like we want these people

off the streets, give them away from where anyone will watch them. I don't care. You're a doctor, do whatever you don't fucking, right? That's not all that, because obviously regular people who are out in society and stuff and not 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 something 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 doing this at the time to keep people under for more than a day at a time, but some researchers experiment with extended period of time, up to like two weeks long, per neuroline code. Yeah, oh, and it gets just

you. Oh my god. Yeah, two weeks. That's a coma legally. That's a coma. That's a fucking coma. Per neurolunch.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. So if he's going to put a picture up, you can see on the video version. If not, I will describe it. Oh, god. Yeah, you're seeing a feeding of a patient here. So you've got a man in a hospital bed of 60's look and one unconscious. There's a doctor or an

orderly, I can't really tell, standing behind him, who's got his 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 bonk? Yeah, it's a funnel. 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 with like a giraffe of coffee. I'm sure it's a more nutritional supplement or just hydration or whatever. But it looks like he's

just pouring coffee into this guy's nose. Me, you're morning trying to get up. Do you know, yeah, yeah, 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 as soon as they're done, my eyes pop open and I pop out of bed like ready to go. Yeah, thank you for the don't wake daddy reference. That's really going, that's going, that's going to be really popular with the chunk of our audience whose knees are starting to fail. Oh, and REM is it? Oh, and Michael's type is it? Yeah, it's okay. The people who would most get the Michael's type joke can't hear anymore. They're Gen X. They're like, they're, they're, they're bodies failed long

stop and so kind of people that support us. I know. I love you guys. Gen X listeners know. I love you, Gen X listeners. 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

to help prevent bed source, 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

“around and cleaning them and if you really want to cut costs, why not just keep them knocked out?”

Instead, and just have me unconscious the whole time. Like, I need to, they've made money. And you up and like, we get that Bernice, you around cheaper, cheaper is better, cheaper is better. They just have one guy that's kind of making you walk. Yeah. I mean, usually they just don't do that. You usually just leave you unconscious that that it comes increasingly in big facilities, right? In large and like, 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 bins out out those times. 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, in Psalm the 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. 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 drugstore 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 and with huge doses of benzos. So people die sometimes. Why? Why do you mean how? Like they they they stop breathing. It's it's it's it's it's it's it's a CNS depression. Yeah, so they just start they say, right? I mean, there's other ways this kills them, too. But a lot of times they just stop fucking breathing or

there are just stops, right? How? 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 it does. 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? And allergies. And again,

often times 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, right? That said, physicians love this because psychiatrists love this because it it gives what certain kinds of psychiatrists because obviously you get your Freudian types, who it's all about talk therapy, but their psychiatrist who's whole thing is drugs, drugs,

give them something to, you know, that's all that matters is do some, right? There's a place for aspects of that, obviously. Sure. 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 where these people brought in by their families or like, so if they died,

would somebody care? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Okay. Some of these people are basically

wars 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-confist mentors, 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, 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 you'll help you, but it'll take years of therapy

“or not to problem out in two weeks, you're not even awake." Wow, good. That's what those”

they haven't had on son, Santa Monica and Coenga for whatever that thing is. That's like the Narrow link or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It literally says, "Don't be depression, gone."

I'm like, "That can't be right." And I'm always, you should, and you should always be

super on guard whenever anyone's talking about like a serious mental health problem like, and this just knocks it out. That never happened until health. There's some stuff like, I can't, the thing that changed my, when I was a kid in very anti drug, the thing that changed my mind about potlegalities. I had a friend with multiple sclerosis who's like, "This is my wow-gild." And she got, 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, and like, "Oh, of course."

that miraculous for certain things, but not for something that's as complex and as wide-ranging

“as just depression, right? Right. That's just, I don't trust anybody making claims like that.”

So as time goes on, it becomes clear that deep sleep therapy has a lot of deadly issues with it. Patients under going at heavy high tendency to contract pneumonia, they get bedsores that often get hideously infected in part because since these people aren't conscious for days on end, the order of these are supposed to be taken into 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 off and enough. And so you have bedsores that then people get shit wedged into, not good for your health. For the, for the video people that can see my face, you get it, but for the author listeners, I would say through like 75% of what Robert's been saying, my mouth is just wide open. It's not plastic. I am so shocked. And this is not everywhere that does this. There are good facilities where, and in the facilities, people still die because the treatment

is inherently dangerous in a bad idea, but they're not dying of bedsores, 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, you do that, you can sometimes pop, pop a fucking cloth, right?”

Like it's, it's, you know, not, not, there's a medical term, it's pop a cloth. Pop a fucking cloth. 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. But 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 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. Yeah, but do you think that would have helped you? 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, yeah, 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. Yeah, and I am, I have bipolar disorder and during Mania, I, I, I wouldn't, I could see like people well-meaning family members or something being like knock him out. Knock him out. So that he can't do, I'm going to do himself. 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 forward, 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 days at a time. So what did help you? Oh, me? Yeah. Time. Some, some of it was 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 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. Yeah. Time is the thing that's had the biggest impact on me. And people don't want time. Well, they, they, 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 conchures 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 great. 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, not me the fuck out, right? So among most psychiatrists than 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

is that when someone is unconscious, they can't stop you from doing stuff to them, right? And I don't

“mean, I don't mean if, in the, like, the gross cell that that probably does happen, I mean electric”

and volts of therapy, which is at this point. As I said, a common treatment for all-manual or moved disorders and impulse 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 electric shock 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,

sometimes proved it's not a good idea, but that's consent. If a doctor 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 ready and conscious, why don't I need to get consent? I need to shock them.

Like, fuck, ask them. I'll just do it, you know, what are they going to 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. That's what I was going to say. Are they,”

are they, are the haters saying that they didn't or is the person like not aware that that's what happened? 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 same thing. Under statement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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 tour how theoretically torture should work, right? Oh, theoretically. Yeah. Dr. William Sargent,

“the prominent UK physician that I mentioned earlier, wrote it with this about electrocuting”

patients without their consent in a medical textbook that was published in 1972. That many patients. 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 if while the patient has 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 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 is invaluable because sleep therapy 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.

Well, one, how do you even define fixed at that point? You're just like a blank and there's a lot of questions. Well, sure. I'm asking, yes, right. And to your body still remembers, like 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. Right. Right. Yes. Yes, the body keeps the score, which is certainly true in the case of a broken leg. Speaking of bodies, you know,

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I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.

He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him.

“If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show?”

Made even bigger headlines. It began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract agreed to date me, but I'm also sewing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He said and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity hate those words that you make me uncomfortable. But if when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and

exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that

will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo is born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my

“job, I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say?”

Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 burst in with exciting new

“ideas. He quickly convened Calen Park, mental hospital to establish a cerebral surgery and research”

unit, which opened in 1957 with him as the director. Can we talk about how menacing Dr. Sargent sounds? It's a cool name. It's a cool name. It's a cool name. Right? Oh, I don't know about my guy. What I would like to find is a guy with a last name sergeant to make him do a doctor. And then a guy with a last name doctor. And you have him join the military and becomes a sergeant. And then you've got Dr. Sargent and Sergeant Doctor. And they get married. Yeah, I don't know what to do after that point,

but yes, there you go. And they get married in a hyphenate their name. So it's now Dr. Sergeant Doctor and Sergeant Dr. Sargent. The dream. The dream. The dream. The dream. Bailey begins experimenting with new ECT methods often using various barbituants and downers to knock patients unconscious.

First, for Dr. Philip Hickie, Sergeant and Bailey wouldn't mainly each other,

bragging about how many patients they'd knocked out each week, keeping score like Gimley and Legolas during the battle of Helm's deep. Like they're literally being like, ah, here's how many people I put into a coma this week. Oh, man, you're falling behind, better knocks them more people out, which you might think maybe leads to them knocking people

they want to win a contest. Maybe. So this all seems pretty fucked up. A lot of what we've talked

“about, but I got to say what Sergeant 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's general criticism of deep sleep therapy, but Dr. Sargent Dr. Bailey are both award-winning prominent and respected members of the of the profession within their field within their countries. Now, do you know what those same medications were being used for other

stuff like where they gave you tons? Yes. Like where they were giving you benzos for like physical ailments and other things like okay. 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 who also drank because it was the 50s and 60s and so it should load to people lost their moms because they would overdose on benzos and alcohol. It happened to buckload. But I'm talking about depression. I'm talking about like, do they give Amel Barbetale to someone who's like, "My kidneys hurt." No, no, no, no, no. I mean, all psychiatric.

“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 Amel Barbetale, but some of the stuff these in this cocktail are used to help not people out for other procedures, right? Because they're good for that. Yes. Okay. But no, someone's probably not getting prescribed Amel Barbetale because like they've got a fucking stomach 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 two 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? So Dr. Bailey is primarily the only people who know what he's doing are his peers and they love him. He receives the Norman Manning Memorial Prize for Psychiatry, as I said, and then yeah, a prize for pediatrics, per the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography. His reputation high in 1959, Bailey was appointed medical superintendent

of Calen Park, a large institution, suffering from years of neglect and a culture of confinement. He proved to be an impatient performer within a few months he submitted a report to the public service board with detailed allegations of staff cruelty, patient neglect, and daily pulvering 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 heiferent government, particularly the responsible minister William Chan, despite the resulting royal commission reported in Calen Park by John McClimman's 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 whistleblower. There's real problems at 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 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 longer. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, he's like, it's not going to 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. 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 cut covered up. So you've got, at this point, Dr. Bailey is not just an award-winning psychiatrist with widespread professional acclaim and several continents, but a crusading activist for medical ethics. Obviously, this is the guy you trust if you're loved one needs mental health care. He's the best guy to go to. Dr. Bailey after this point. Yeah, not going to be good. Yeah. Do you like your power? Yeah. The lesson here folks is if anyone

“ever does anything good, you need to do it. Yeah, look into it. Throw them into the ocean.”

It's the instant someone does anything good. Pass them into the sea, 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 get to the actual heart of the issues because you're just compounding stuff. So like

just making stuff up to have some sort of sleeping, you know? Yeah, part of the issue is that like

Dr. Bailey probably even did hamper the reform efforts by lying about shit. Exactly. Yes,

“that's what I was trying to say, yeah. But regular people don't know shit about that, right? He's”

the hero doctors. 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 you 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 following the people who don't trust doctors. This is kind of what, I mean, in a different way,

this kind of what Andrew Wakefield does, right? I mean, Wakefield doesn't ever actually

bust any real plot. 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? I was thinking about him. Yeah. Bailey is very appealing when he starts in private practice. This is 1962 when he begins his private practice. And in 1963, he works at a deal with two other doctors in Gardiner and John Gill, the treat patients together at the Chumsford private hospital. This is not a normal medical

employment situation for Dr. Bailey. Chumsford was a small four-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. 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, "Well, he knows this person doesn't need to be hospitalized, but he tells him he needs 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. So every new thing you 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 and

even have to do it. Yeah, he can do it. 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?”

Just because I say it, the doctor, Bailey guy, not great guy. Yep. So by the time he starts a child's word, 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 DST. He 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. 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 percent more than comparable treatments caused from other practitioners. He regularly kept people unconscious and sedated for days beyond what his treatment was, just to maximize the amount of time he could build via that same essay, quote, "Some families reported bills exceeding their annual income." Did the other doctors, the two other doctors that were working with him, did they know that he was

skinned? Oh yeah, all several of the doctors at Chumsford are directly implicated. They are helping him, they are benefiting, so one way 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 if they start, of how bad this is, there's some, especially that doctors and nurses working early on,

“might think they're really doing the best because again, we don't less as known, right?”

Right. But he's doing this for almost 20 years. It becomes clear at a certain point. This is just a griff that's hurting people. Right. Yeah. Speaking of griff that hurt people, you know what my favorite griff is? Products and services? No, ending this podcast for the day, because I'm tired. We'll be back there today with more. You want to plug your plug-ables at the end here, though? Sure. These are what one would call my products and services. That's right. You can go to my

sub-stack, a thousand natural shocks.substack.com. There's also a just like ECT by the way.

And then there's the a thousand natural shocks podcast. I also do a podcast called Best Gave Ever

That's more light-hearted. And that's, and that's it. Yay.

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

Is it shocking people? Well, 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 Benzo's to knock them out. And then instead of giving them a electro shock therapy, we play your podcast. I'm shocked. Oh, I really think you're going to say we play R.M. I really thought you were going to say we play R.M. No, no.

Incredible. Michael Stein 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. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool zone media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Are check us out on the I heard radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me of Netflix. You don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/at behind the bastard. We love about 40% of you statistically speaking. I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

“But here's the thing. Bachelors fans hated him.”

If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would. That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. A great a date mean, but I'm also so suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to love trapped on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Letbe. We unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story?

It has been based at first. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed.

“What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?”

Oh my god, I think she might be innocent. Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Letbe, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Riley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world.

The sixth bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the sixth bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.