Xavier Nesbit
Tasmania, Australia

In 1963 in Sydney, Australia, psychiatrist Harry Bailey admitted his first patient for deep sleep therapy at Chelmsford Private Hospital, a small establishment in the northern suburb of Pennant Hills.¹ Over the next sixteen years, roughly 1,100 people passed through its sleep room. Many did not fully understand what had been done to them until long afterwards.^1,2

The idea was not entirely new; psychiatrists had experimented with prolonged narcosis since bromide-induced sleep at the turn of the twentieth century, and later with barbiturates and chlorpromazine.³ Bailey’s version used a cocktail of barbiturates and sedatives to hold patients in a coma-like state for two to three weeks, frequently combined with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).^1,2 The premise was that a brain held in suspension could be relieved of depression, anxiety, or addiction.

The treatments stopped in April 1979, after another psychiatrist at the hospital had demanded Bailey’s departure the previous November.¹ By then, one former patient had already begun to push back. Barry Hart attended Chelmsford in 1973 for treatment by Dr. John Herron, Bailey’s colleague. He later alleged that he had been rendered unconscious without his consent and, over a ten-day period, was given potentially toxic doses of drugs and ECT without muscle relaxants. He developed pneumonia, a pulmonary embolism, and anoxic brain damage.⁴ In 1980, a civil trial awarded him $60,000 in damages for assault and false imprisonment.^4,5

Other evidence emerged from inside the hospital. The Sydney Morning Herald published sixty-six articles drawing on leaked hospital documents, and a 60 Minutes investigation into the death of patient Miriam Podio prompted a fresh inquest in 1982.² Eleven coronial inquests into Chelmsford deaths were held between 1967 and 1988; the early inquests did not find Bailey responsible.² In 1983, Bailey was charged with manslaughter. He died by suicide in September 1985, before the matter was resolved.² Meanwhile, disciplinary complaints brought by Hart and the campaigner Jan Eastgate moved through the system from 1983 to 1986, until the Court of Appeal dismissed them as an abuse of process.⁵

Continued pressure produced a Royal Commission, announced on 16 August 1988 and chaired by Justice John Slattery.¹ Over 288 sitting days, it heard 297 witnesses and generated 18,821 pages of transcript.¹ Its report, delivered in December 1990, found that twenty-four patients had died as a consequence of the treatment, sixteen of them under the age of fifty. Survivors had suffered brain damage, convulsions, pneumonia, cardiac irregularities, and fractures.¹ Bailey had signed seventeen death certificates that were “probably false.”¹ The Commission’s reviewers concluded that “almost all patients reviewed were in some threat to life during their treatment because of the inadequacy of medical examination, poor nursing care and documentation.”¹ The Commission also found evidence of criminal conduct and forged consent documents.⁴

For Hart, the legal aftermath lasted another decade. His subsequent appeals were dismissed, and in 2000, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found his complaint inadmissible, as most of the events predated Australia’s acceptance of the Optional Protocol in December 1991.⁴

References

1. Ellard J. Chelmsford and its aftermath. Psychiatr Bull. 1991;15(11):687-688. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin/article/chelmsford-and-its-aftermath/FDAE70489A18E4554DDF27F2EC6CE567
2. Wyndham D. Chelmsford Private Hospital Royal Commission 1988–90. Dictionary of Sydney. Published 2021. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://dictionaryofsydney.org/node/67288
3. Walton M. Deep sleep therapy and Chelmsford Private Hospital: have we learnt anything? Australas Psychiatry. 2013;21(3):206-212. doi:10.1177/1039856213486703
4. United Nations Human Rights Committee. Barry Hart v Australia. Communication No. 947/2000. UN Doc CCPR/C/70/D/947/2000. October 25, 2000. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://hrlibrary.umn.edu/undocs/947-2000.html
5. Justice and Equity Centre. Chelmsford deep sleep therapy: exposing systemic failings that denied justice. Published June 26, 2024. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://jec.org.au/impact/our-record/chelmsford-deep-sleep-therapy-exposing-systemic-failings-that-denied-justice/