Chelmsford Royal Commission

The Chelmsford Royal Commission (1988–1990), chaired by Justice John Patrick Slattery, was established by the New South Wales state government to investigate "Mental Health Services" in NSW. It came about only after prominent Sydney radio and TV shows pressured the newly elected Health Minister, Peter Collins, to make good his promises for a Royal Commission. Originally its prime focus was to have been psychosurgery at the NSW Neuropsychiatric Institute. Following media pressure it focused more on the "Deep sleep therapy" of Dr Harry Bailey, who was director from 1963 to 1979 of the Neuropsychiatric Institute and later the Chelmsford Private Hospital, a private psychiatric institution in Sydney.

Such was the shift of public attention that the Royal Commission changed its title from "Royal Commission into Mental Health Services" to "Royal Commission into Deep Sleep Therapy" (DST). The Royal Commission found that 24 patients died as a result of "deep sleep therapy".^[1]

DST was Bailey's invention, a cocktail of barbiturates to put patients into a coma lasting up to 39 days, while also administering electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). Bailey likened the treatment to switching off a television; his self-developed theory was that the brain, by shutting down for an extended period, would "unlearn" habits that led to depression, addiction and other psychiatric conditions. Bailey claimed to have learnt DST from psychiatrists in Britain and Europe, though it was later found that only a mild variant was used there, sedating traumatised ex-soldiers for a few hours at a time, not the median 14 days under which Bailey and his colleague Dr John Herron subjected their 1127 DST patients at Chelmsford between 1963 and 1979.^[2]

Bailey sought to get evidence in his defence from prominent Melbourne psychiatrist Alex Sinclair, which revealed that Sinclair had used deep sedation therapy (apparently without the ECT). Dr. Sinclair said in a subsequent newspaper interview that he had given the treatment to prominent people including judges and politicians. The Victorian Coroner found that Sinclair had contributed to the death of a patient given deep sedation therapy in 1987.

A Victorian private psychiatric hospital which was associated with a quasi religious sect, Newhaven, "specialised in the use of LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms), Deep Sleep Therapy and ECT."^[3]

Bailey committed suicide in September 1985, in response to the ongoing investigations into his practices. In his suicide note, he said: "Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won".^[4]

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