Deep sleep therapy scandal reawakens as Chelmsford doctors begin legal fight
Now in their seventies and eighties, both men say that claims patients died as a result of gross negligent are defamatory
They called it the ‘zombie room’, the ward at Sydney’s notorious Chelmsford Private Hospital where psychiatric patients lay side-by-side in a drug-induced ‘deep sleep’.
The treatment, which also involved electro-convulsive therapy, was subsequently linked to 24 deaths and condemned by a royal commission 30 years ago.
Now, two surviving Chelmsford doctors, Dr John Gill and a former psychiatrist Mr John Herron, are seeking to convince the Federal Court of Australia that the two-year royal commission was led astray by Scientologists.
The doctors, elderly and with little to lose, want to up-end the long-accepted view that what occurred at Chelmsford was a medical scandal.
