Dr Harry Bailey was responsible for introducing deep sleep therapy to Chelmsford Private Hospital. The psychiatrist had initially worked in the public health system. In 1959, at the age of 37, he had been appointed to the position of Superintendent of Callan Park Mental Hospital by the NSW Labor government. In 1961, he blew the whistle on mismanagement and mistreatment at the hospital, triggering a Royal Commission. But he had bitten the hand that fed him, and the government retaliated by forcing him to resign. He had no option but to go into private practice, opening an office in Macquarie Street.
Bailey had long been interested in the potential of psychosurgery, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and deep sedation to treat psychiatric ills. He had learned more about these techniques while travelling on a 15-month World Health Organization fellowship in the mid-1950s.5 Upon his return he had convinced the NSW government to set up the Cerebral Surgery and Research Unit at Broughton Hall in the grounds of Callan Park. When he moved into private practice, Bailey was able to try out these techniques away from the scrutiny of the public hospital system.
Bailey’s experiments with deep sleep therapy at Chelmsford Hospital began in 1963. Working in a ten-bed sedation ward, he put his patients into a coma with barbiturates, often keeping them in a state of narcosis for weeks at a time. Bailey believed the procedure helped shut down a patient’s brain, allowing them to be reprogrammed and cleared of mental disorders. While sedated, many patients were subjected to ECT, commonly known as shock treatment.
Bailey used deep sleep therapy to treat a range of disorders, including anxiety, depression, anorexia, post-natal depression, alcoholism and drug addiction. He claimed an 85 per cent success rate for his treatment without ever producing a single piece of credible evidence to back up his claim.
Other psychiatrists had rejected Bailey’s theories. A trial of deep sleep therapy at Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital had been discontinued in 1957 after it was deemed too dangerous and unproductive.6 In 1959, the American Handbook of Psychiatry warned that the mortality rate for ‘continuous or prolonged sleep treatment’ was on average 1 to 3 per cent.7
The handbook listed a range of potential complications, including cardiovascular collapse, bronchopneumonia and respiratory depression. Even William Sargant, the British psychiatrist who inspired Bailey’s treatment, had warned that ‘continuous narcosis has remained the most problematic of all methods of physical treatment in psychiatry, as its results are the least predictable’.8 Sargant outlined a number of safeguards to minimise the risks of prolonged narcosis, but Bailey ignored them.
These advance warnings from significant figures in the medical profession did not deter Bailey and his fellow Chelmsford doctors, John Herron, John Gill and Ian Gardiner. Nor did the death toll mounting before their eyes. Twenty-six year old Miriam Podio was admitted for depression and died 16 days later after going into cardiac arrest.9 Antonios Xigis, a 28-year-old Greek seaman, passed away three days after he was hospitalised with post-traumatic depression.10 Peter Clarke, a 31-year-old policeman and father of two, died less than half an hour after Herron gave him ECT.11 Eleven of the 21 people who died were under the age of 40.12 Young people were dying old people’s deaths, from pneumonia, coronary occlusions and cerebral vascular accidents.13
Chelmsford Hospital operated like secretive cult. The doctors and psychiatrists were operating in an era and environment where their authority was rarely questioned. Death certificates were falsified.14 Family members were regularly denied visitation rights and routinely lied to about how seriously ill their loved ones were. The nurses, many of whom were underqualified15 and desperate for work, didn’t dare speak out for fear of losing their jobs; others blindly trusted the doctors.
Barry Hart, however, was determined to get out of Chelmsford and let the world know what was going on. After he had emerged from an enforced 10-day coma, a nurse told him, ‘If I were you, I would get out of here – you’re sick, you won’t get treated for what’s wrong with you in here. Get your parents to have you transferred to a public hospital.’16 But Hart’s parents had difficulties visiting him, let alone getting him out. After Barry called them, they arranged for Dr Francis, from nearby Hornsby Hospital, to visit Chelmsford and assess their son. After he examined Barry, Dr Francis called an ambulance, turned to him and said, ‘Don’t worry. You will live.’17
When Hart got out of hospital he realised his life had changed forever. His brain was damaged, his anxiety was far worse, and he was suffering from post-traumatic stress. An overachiever who was used to running his own business and remembering all his lines for theatre productions, he now struggled to recognise friends or remember where he left his house keys. He could no longer sleep in the dark. The bedside light was permanently switched on at night.18
Hart was determined to seek justice, but found it difficult to find a competent lawyer willing to take on his case. Finally, two years after he had nearly died at Chelmsford, a solicitor got access to his medical records. When they arrived, what was missing was just as critical as what was there: there was no signed consent form for shock treatment, and the bottom part of the admission slip had been cut off.19
The files reinforced what Barry knew was the truth; he had not consented to being sedated and given shock treatment. He showed the documents to Frank Taylor from the Sydney Morning Herald, who led with the front-page scoop on 11 November 1975. The headline said it all. ‘Shock treatment protest, given against my will, says actor’.20
The Herald had been planning to run a series on the abuse of mental health patients, but the sacking of the Whitlam government that afternoon buried Hart’s story and the series.21 Herron and his colleagues at Chelmsford had dodged another bullet. A Herald series would surely have brought out more victims of Chelmsford and put pressure on the government to act. It may have even prevented more deaths.
Around the same time of the Herald revelations, Rosa Nicholson was planning her own exposé.22 Dark-haired, chubby and in her mid-30s, Nicholson worked shifts at various hospitals and nursing homes around Sydney. Caring and bright, Rosa was popular with colleagues and the people she nursed. ‘She was very sweet,’ says former Chelmsford matron Marcia Fawdry. ‘She was lovely with the patients.’23
Rosa Nicholson became the central figure in exposing the truth about the dozens of deaths caused by medical malpractice inside Chelmsford Hospital, but she did not do it alone. The Church of Scientology was deeply involved, but the truth about its role has remained a deep secret for over 35 years. Although it was to be Scientology’s finest hour in Australia, the organisation has never come clean about its true role in the covert operations that led to the exposé.
Rosa Nicholson had an affinity for the vulnerable and mistreated. The eldest of four children, she was raised by a mother who rejected her from birth. ‘Her mother was a harridan,’ a relative told me. ‘The way she treated Rosa made a mess of her life.’24 Determined to treat others with the love and care she had missed out on, Rosa became a de facto mother for her three younger siblings and cared deeply for her patients. But her upbringing also made her emotionally fragile and vulnerable to the flattery and false promises of the Church of Scientology.
The way Rosa told her story, she first came across the horrors of Chelmsford Hospital on 8 November 1972 as a trainee psychiatric nurse sent by her agency to fill a shift at the hospital.25 She said she was horrified by the high doses of drugs being administered by nurses and the lack of supervision by doctors.26 The experience made a lasting impression on her:27
When I lifted the sheets off each patient, they were a mix of men and women in the same room. There was no partitioning. I noticed some were bleeding – at least two were bleeding from the mouth. They were all wet, and a couple had had faeces – they had emptied their bowels – and one had vomited.28
Rosa Nicholson didn’t do another shift at Chelmsford for over four years. When she returned as an undercover agent, she copied and removed medical records that became key pieces of evidence exposi
ng a horror show of sustained medical malpractice and abuse.
Rosa claimed she tried to blow the whistle on Chelmsford from the earliest moment possible by writing to the Nurses Association and the Health Department to tell them what was going on at the private hospital. She said the complaint went nowhere and that she was consumed by guilt for not taking it further when a friend, the artist Arnold St Clair, died at Chelmsford in 1974. She spoke to her brother-in-law, who was a journalist, but he told her eyewitness reports were not enough, she needed documentary evidence to blow the whole thing open.29
The turning point came when she met a nurse called Brieda while working in an emergency ward in 1974. The two had an instant connection.30 ‘She said as a matter of fact, I’m doing Scientology,’ Rosa recalled, ‘and I turned around and said, “you’re joking?” And she kind of looked at me for a moment, and I said, “My aunt’s clear.”’31
The conversation turned to shock treatment. Brieda told Rosa how Scientology campaigned against psychiatric abuses: ‘She said, “We have got a guy in there you know who fights ECT,” and I said, “You’re joking. In the church?” And she said, “In the Guardian’s Office. So all he does is fight and expose ECT and other abuses,” and I said, “I want to meet him.”’32 The man Rosa Nicholson wanted to meet was Ron Segal, a Scientologist and the President of the Citizen’s Commission for Human Rights (CCHR).
The CCHR was formed in 1969 by the Guardian’s Office33 and is, in its own words, ‘dedicated to investigating and exposing psychiatric violations of human rights’.34 In the years leading up to the CCHR’s formation, Hubbard launched an attack on psychiatry. In a confidential directive labelled Project Psychiatry he ordered that private investigators be hired to dig up dirt on psychiatrists in the UK. ‘We want at least one bad mark on every psychiatrist in England, a murder, an assault, or a rape or more than one,’ it read. ‘This is Project Psychiatry. We will remove them.’35
Hubbard blamed psychiatrists for the attacks on Scientology in the US, UK and Australia.36 In a confidential memo written for Mary Sue in the year the CCHR was set up, Hubbard announced that Scientology’s ultimate goal of ‘clearing the planet’ had been replaced by something far more sinister – destroying psychiatry and other mental health practices. Under the heading ‘The War’, the secret memo lists the new priority as: ‘To take over absolutely the field of mental healing on this planet in all forms … Our total victory will come when we run his organisations, perform his functions and obtain his financing and appropriations.37
Hubbard was not just gunning for contemporary mental health practitioners; he claimed that 75 million years ago, psychiatrists helped carry out genocide in the Galactic Confederacy.38 In a 1970 memo, he claimed psychiatrists and psychologists ‘opened the door to death camps in Hitler’s Germany’ and ‘gave Hitler to the world as their puppet’.39 To this day, the CCHR argues psychiatrists were responsible for the Holocaust.40
In the mid-1970s, the Australian chapter of the CCHR set its sights on shutting down psychosurgery and ECT. But its President, Ron Segal, a pharmacist from Sydney’s southern suburbs, did not share Hubbard’s rabid hatred of psychiatry as a whole. As a pharmacist he understood the benefits of pharmaceutical drugs and did not believe that all psychiatrists were dangerous. Although a dedicated Scientologist, he was happy to work with non-believers to expose abuses within the mental health sector. Many of his campaigns relied on information leaked from doctors, nurses and even psychiatrists.
As a pharmacist, Segal was used to dealing with people from all walks of life. Peter Marsh (a pseudonym), an undercover agent with the Guardian’s Office, remembers that he was well connected with community groups and that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Scientology’s founder. ‘He looked like Hubbard, and people in the Sydney Org would say, “Hi, Ron!” and it would freak the newbies out.’41 Segal’s grandparents emigrated from Lithuania to escape the pogroms, but many of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. His family history instilled in him a lifelong commitment to standing up for the persecuted, the voiceless and exposing human rights abuses.
Rosa Nicholson insisted she first met Ron Segal in 1975 at the office the CCHR shared with the Church of Scientology, near Sydney’s Central Railway Station, and it was then that she put forward a plan to go undercover at Chelmsford.42 She later testified that she had told Ron Segal, ‘I’ve got a brilliant idea. I’m going to go back there and get evidence and I’ll give it to you because it looks like you can do something about it.’43 Rosa boasted that she could get a camera into Chelmsford to take photographs of Harry Bailey, and sneak files out of the hospital to have them photocopied.44
Rosa Nicholson eventually returned to work at Chelmsford Hospital on 28 February 1977, carrying a list of files she and Ron Segal had decided they needed copies of.45 ‘He (Segal) would have complaints from patients or relatives,’ Rosa recalled, ‘and I would supply whatever he needed as well.’46
In what must have been a nerve-racking operation, Rosa would sneak into the matron’s office and look through the filing cabinets. After consulting her ‘homework list’ she would remove the relevant files and place them under a cushion on a chair near the door. Eventually she would take the files out to her car, which was parked near the front door of the hospital.47
Rosa hoovered up documents with all the courage and efficiency of Meisner and Woolfe in Operation Snow White. She photocopied the daily nursing notes and removed blank drug sheets that had been pre-signed by Bailey and Herron. After each shift she compiled her own notes, documenting who had been admitted and how they were treated. Rosa also took six of the ‘red books’, ledgers containing daily reports and information that proved critical for subsequent court cases and inquiries, and salvaged a number of ECT books from the rubbish bin, which showed doctors defrauding the patient’s health funds.48
Rosa Nicholson removed and copied critical files from Chelmsford Hospital for over a year. Marcia Fawdry, the Matron of Nursing whose office Rosa had ransacked, had no inkling of what was going on. ‘I was shocked when I found out,’ she says. ‘We had no idea what she had been up to.’49 Rosa was living a double life, acting as a confidante to Fawdry and helping to pick up her children after school, then raiding her office at night. Fawdry is still amazed that Nicholson was able to execute her undercover operation while continuing to be so diligent with her patients. ‘She was very warm and caring,’ she says. ‘The patients loved her.’50
Nicholson was appalled at what she witnessed inside Chelmsford. The patients who survived deep sleep therapy woke up heavily traumatised. ‘They would be hallucinating,’ she recalled. ‘They would be flailing – some would flail their arms around and they would be frightened, terribly frightened. They would be seeing things, hearing things.’51 Many were given deep sleep therapy without their consent, and, when they regained consciousness, were ‘delirious and frightened, unable to walk, unable to move their bowels because the bulk waste had settled in their bowels’.52
Rosa Nicholson was particularly damning about the cavalier attitude of the doctors. Although Bailey was making hundreds of thousands of dollars out of his patients, he was rarely there and Rosa had been back at Chelmsford for three weeks before she even saw him.53 When nurses contacted Bailey during emergencies, he was often dismissive or abusive. According to Rosa, the nurses who dared to ring Bailey ‘would come in feeling rattled and nervous because he’d just given them a barrage of abuse over the phone for being so ignorant and stupid as to ring him when they should be working it out themselves’.54
But Bailey was the one who was about to feel rattled. Rosa did her last shift at Chelmsford Hospital in April 1978.55 By then she had photocopied over 100 files comprising a catalogue of psychiatric abuse and malpractice.56 Now she was safely out, Ron Segal was able to go public with what they had found. He compiled a dossier of key documents and arranged a meeting with Frank Walker, the New South Wales Attorney-General. It helped that Segal operated outside of the Scientology bubble. Married wi
th two children, he was an active member of the Labor Party and he and Walker knew each other from local branch meetings. The Attorney was aware of Segal’s Scientology connections, but took the claims seriously, especially when confronted with the evidence. Walker was disturbed by what he was confronted with and handed over Ron Segal’s dossier to a policy analyst in his department for further investigation.57
The contrast between Operation Snow White and Segal’s operation could not have been starker. Whereas Scientologists in the US had burgled the Office of the Deputy Attorney-General, in Sydney a key Scientologist attended party meetings with the state Attorney-General and gave him a private briefing.
Meanwhile, Harry Bailey was beginning to feel the heat. The CCHR ramped up the pressure through letter-writing campaigns and public protests. They held a rally outside the Attorney-General’s office demanding that the inquest into the suicide death of Sharon Hamilton be reopened. In a letter to the Attorney-General, the CCHR had pointed out that Hamilton was not only Bailey’s patient, but also his lover, and that the psychiatrist had become the executor and sole beneficiary of her will.58 The media reported on the rally, and the publicity gave Chelmsford victims and staff the courage to contact the CCHR – although at least one withdrew her statement when she discovered the CCHR was a Scientology front.59
The Hamilton protest coincided with the increased involvement of Jan Eastgate, a dogged 24-year-old campaigner who would eventually become the International President of the CCHR. Segal had left his post at the CCHR to give more time to his family and his business. Within months, Jan Eastgate had taken over his role. While Segal was not anti-psychiatry, considering himself instead to be opposed to psychiatric abuses, she took a more hardline stance.
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