Monday 22 April 1991
The Age
Melbourne Australia
22 April 1991
By JO CHANDLER
and Jacqui Macdonald

WHEN a royal commission last year exposed atrocities at the Chelmsford Private Hospital In New South Wales, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights scored dual victories: one public, one private.

The first came with the release of Mr Justice Slattery's 12-volume report into the nightmarish "cuckoo's nest" at Chelmsford -- a private hospital where the commission found that at least 24 people died as a result of deep. sleep therapy. Another 24 patients survived the treatment but later took their own lives, 19 of them within a rear of leaving Chelmsford, it found.

CCHR had lobbied for an Inquiry into Chelmsford for more than a decade, and the royal commissioner and the media were critical of authorities for being so slow to take CCHR's claims seriously.

The second, private victory for CCHR and its parent organisation, the Church of Scientology, which established CCHR In Australia !n 1972, was heralded In the pages of the Scientology magazine 'Impact'.

On being recognised for her courageous work, the Australian president of CCHR, Ms Jan Eastgate, herself a scientologist, said: "It's a fantastic group to receive an award from and I now that ridding this planet of psychiatry helps Sclentology expand and therefore helps all of you.

"We have been fighting a war and we have won."

The battle analogy was an ironic echo of the words penned by the enigmatic "Jekyll and Hyde" psychiatrist at the centre of the Chelmsford tragedy, Dr Harry Bailey, before he swallowed a lethal combination of barbituates and alcohol on 8 September 1985.

"Let 1t be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won," he wrote in the suicide note given to the commission.

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