High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Deep Sleep Therapy (or Deep Sedation Therapy, DST) was a psychiatric treatment based on the use of psychiatric drugs to induce a coma in patients diagnosed with mental disorder. Induction of deep sleep for psychiatric purposes was first tried by Scottish psychiatrist Neil Macleod at the turn of the 20th century. He used bromide sleep in a few psychiatric patients, one of whom died. His method was adopted by some other physicians but soon abandoned, perhaps because it was considered too toxic or reckless. In 1915, Giuseppe Epifanio tried barbiturate-induced coma therapy in a psychiatric clinic in Italy, but his reports made little impact. Deep Sleep Therapy was popularized in the 1920s by Swiss psychiatrist Jakob Klaesi, using a combination of two new barbiturates from pharmaceutical company Roche. Klaesi's method became widely known and occasionally used as a procedure for psychotic illness inthe 1930s and 1940s.