In 1933, Robin Hyde (born Iris Wilkinson) was a young journalist working for the New Zealand Observer. On June 2, Hyde walked down Queen St and jumped into Waitemata Harbour, attempting to take her own life.
Instead, she was rescued, arrested and placed in the delirium tremens cells at Auckland
Positivity from a dark history
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Dr Paul first began looking into Hyde's work in the 1980s when she started on her doctorate in New Zealand literature and history.
"I was sharing a room with [poet] Michele Leggott and we both later discovered these poems in the Auckland Uni library. We applied in the late 90s for a Marsden Fund grant."
Part of the grant went to Hyde's son, Derek Challis, to assist in completing Hyde's biography, while Leggott compiled a collection of poems and Dr Paul a book of essays on Hyde.
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"We knew about these [autobiographical writings] and a 1935 manuscript about being in the Lodge. There'd always been this idea to put together this collection."
The Hyde described by Dr Paul is "an unusual woman who lived in a man's world. I think people will find it interesting as a social history of when it wasn't acceptable to be an independent young woman and all the pressures on her because of that."
Hyde had two children out of wedlock, the first when she was 20, but who died at birth.
"That was when she took her writing name. She'd called him (Christopher) Robin Hyde. She began dabbling in seances trying to access her lost child. They were very fashionable. I think she really felt compelled to have another child."
While working as a journalist in Wanganui, Hyde fell pregnant to a married journalist. The baby was adopted out and Hyde moved to Auckland where she suffered a breakdown and attempted suicide. It was then she admitted herself to the Lodge, petrified of being sent to an asylum, says Dr Paul.
"She avoided being in those main wards, which were fairly barbaric. They didn't have any drugs to calm people down, they straitjacketed people and people were in pretty disturbed conditions and became more disturbed."
However, an attempt to smuggle in drugs led to a stint in the place she feared so much.
"We found in the files she had a friend who was a downtown Auckland chemist who got some chocolate with morphine in it and smuggled it in, but it was intercepted. They sent her off for punishment to the main wards. Then she discharged herself and had another crisis and asked to be taken back to Dr Tothill because he was the one who'd been kind and accepting of her."
Dr Paul says the nature of Hyde's affections for her psychiatrist has been interesting to consider.
"In some ways we'd thought through the autobiography she was maybe in love with her doctor. Your unselfish kindness comes from that phrase," she says of the book's title, taken from Hyde's writing to her doctor.
"I think that there is that necessary transference, that you have to be partly in love with your doctor, to love them enough to recover... He was just an incredibly trustworthy professional who believed in talking to the patients and taking them seriously."
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Dr Tothill had suggested his patient write her life story as a way of helping her understand events that precipitated her breakdown.
"It was part of a new fashion partly coming out of talking therapies and psychoanalysis happening in Europe. I think she had the good luck to come into this place where they recognised that she was this fantastic young woman with a fantastic career and they thought, 'Let's help her'. That's what it's about, being accepted and seen as another member of the human race who's having a bit of trouble."
Dr Paul notes the positive experience in the mental health system is in contrast to that of another of New Zealand's great writers.
"We tend to think 'progress', that over time we get better. But that was heaps better than Janet Frame who was [institutionalised] 10 years later. She complied with the idea that she would be looked after and she trusted a doctor who had a different perspective, which was unfortunate." (Electro-convulsive therapy - shock treatment - was administered to Frame.)
Dr Jackie Liggins is a psychiatrist researching the environments in which mental health care is provided.
She attended a lecture by Dr Paul and was surprised to learn of Hyde's treatment.
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"So much of what we hear in the media is about the terrible history in asylums and the way people were treated. It would be wrong to deny the experiences of so many people who were traumatised in these places but I was a little surprised to hear what the Lodge was doing. The asylum history is fascinating. It says a lot about society and society's view of mental illness."
Dr Paul, whose pen name is Mary Edmond Paul, hopes the book will be useful to mental health professionals as well as a new generation of young New Zealand women and "anyone who's had hard experiences like losing a child or feeling they're looked on as not respectable".
"You can be quite bohemian and out there like Hyde was but it doesn't mean you don't feel all the consequences of that."
ROBIN HYDE
Robin Hyde (1906-1939), was a journalist and parliamentary reporter, poet, novelist and war correspondent reporting from the China-Japan warfront.
The author of famed autobiographical novel, The Godwits Fly, as well as other books of fiction, poetry and reportage, she struggled with depression throughout her adult life.
Despite the help she'd received in New Zealand, she committed suicide by a drug overdose while living in London.
Your Unselfish Kindness (Otago University Press), $40
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