The Psychopath Test

by Jon Ronson

they have won some epic victories. There was, for example, their campaign back in the 1970s and 1980s against the Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey. He ran a small private suburban psychiatric hospital in Sydney. Patients would turn up suffering from anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obesity, premenstrual syndrome, and so on. Harry Bailey would greet them and ask them to swallow some tablets. Sometimes the patients knew what was coming, but sometimes they didn’t. To those who asked what the pills were for he’d say, ‘Oh, it is normal practice.’ So they’d take them, and fall into a deep coma. Harry Bailey believed that whilst in their comas their minds would cure themselves of whichever mental disorders afflicted them. But somewhere between twenty-six and eighty-five of his patients sank too deep, and died. Some choked on their own vomit, others suffered heart attacks and brain damage and pneumonia and deep-vein thrombosis. The Scientologists eventually got wind of the scandal and set a team onto investigating Bailey, encouraging survivors to sue and the courts to prosecute, which they did, much to Harry Bailey’s indignation, who believed his work to be pioneering. In September 1985, when it became clear he was destined for jail, he wrote a note: ‘Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won.’ Then he went out to his car and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, washed down with beer.