The controversial practice led to the death of 25 patients in Chelmsford Private Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, from the early 1960s to late 1970s.
Deep sleep therapy was popularised in the early 1920s by Swiss psychiatrist Jakob Klaesi, using a combination of two barbiturates marketed as Somnifen by the pharmaceutical company Roche.
After the failure of the agencies of medical and criminal investigation to tackle complaints about Chelmsford, a series of articles in the early 1980s in the Sydney Morning Herald and television coverage on 60 Minutes exposed the abuses at the hospital, including 24 deaths from the treatment.
[8] The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, co-founded by the Church of Scientology and Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus Dr. Thomas Szasz in 1969, was an advocate for victims; it received documents from the hospital, copied by a nurse, "Rosa".
[9] In 1978, Sydney psychiatrist Brian Boettcher had convened a meeting of doctors working at Chelmsford and found there was little support for deep sleep therapy (Bailey did not attend).
[14]A 1992 British television documentary[15] included the testimony of several former patients and relatives of those who died from treatment at Chelmsford Hospital.
In New South Wales in 2011, following the publication of a story in the Sydney Morning Herald,[16] the Minister for Police and Emergency Services, representing the Minister for Health, in answer to a parliamentary question on notice, made a statement on the use of court-ordered prolonged sedation with ECT: Prolonged sedation is used on rare occasions with the administration of ECT where there has been a clinical indication to combine the two procedures, such as in complex cases when the risk to the patient and others from severe mental illness is extreme and other treatments have been unable to safely contain this risk.
The primary purpose of the ECT is to treat the underlying mental illness.The minister said that all three cases had positive outcomes and "accepted procedures and clinical governance processes available at the time were followed".
[17] The New South Wales Mental Health Review Tribunal has power to approve or prohibit administration of ECT treatment in respect to both voluntary and involuntary patients.