More patients say they were abused in asylums

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

More former patients have come forward alleging that they were abused in mental asylums during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Weekend Herald revealed that the claims of widespread mistreatment that were previously confined to the former Porirua and Lake Alice asylums encompass most of the closed mental hospitals from Auckland to Otago.

They include the alleged beating of 11-year-old Clement Matthews in Kingseat Hospital, south of Auckland, in 1968. A pathologist found no marks of external violence at the time and a coroner concluded that Clement died of pneumonia.

But the police have re-opened their investigation of the death, after another former child patient told of seeing a male nurse pull Clement violently to the floor and kick him hard on his back.

Several other ex-patients contacted the Herald over the weekend to recount their own experiences of abuse. Some former mental hospital staff also told of witnessing colleagues mistreat patients.

Wellington lawyers Sonja Cooper and Roger Chapman have received nearly 200 complaints from former patients, most of whom were aged 8 to 16 at the time.

More than half were at Porirua - in the days before it became a modern mental health unit. About 15 complaints relate to Oakley, Kingseat and Tokanui Hospitals and some also to Lake Alice.

The allegations include sexual assaults and beatings by staff and patients, use of electric-shock therapy and drug injections as punishment, being over-sedated and being locked in solitary confinement for long periods.

Nearly 70 of the claims have been filed in the High Court, each seeking compensation of up to $500,000 and exemplary damages approaching $50,000. Another 40 are close to being filed.

Attorney-General Margaret Wilson said the Government was treating the claims seriously. After investigating the court claims it would decide whether to hold an inquiry.

One man put in Oakley Hospital in Auckland in 1971 when aged 17 for withdrawal from heroin addiction said he was beaten up by four nurses and given a painful injection that knocked him out for three days.

His parents, who were at first denied access to him, agreed not to lay an official complaint, in return for his transfer from the high-security forensic ward into an open ward.

Another former patient, Johannus Roes, now 45, spent about 11 years in four hospitals.

He was first admitted aged 11 after he broke out of solitary confinement at a boys' home, where he had been sent for burglaries.

His complaints are of excessive solitary confinement - six months on one occasion with the only break being daily walks in the yard - and needlessly being given large doses of many medications.

"I was like a zombie for a day or so and then it was back into disrupting them," he said of his time at Oakley.

Mr Chapman said yesterday that he was not aware of these cases but the allegations were broadly similar to others.

Leading psychiatrists interviewed by the Herald said their profession had leaped ahead since the 1960s, with better treatments and improved access to training.

They did not witness any of the alleged abuses and would not have tolerated them if they had.

Dr Allen Fraser, chairman of the New Zealand national committee of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, said he was uneasy about the "trial by media" surrounding the claims.

He acknowledged that a number of mental health inquiries had been held, especially regarding Oakley-Carrington Hospital, and that they had found mistakes and non-standard psychiatric care. But the latest claims were "more like systematic abuse. Most of us would say we weren't aware of anything like that".

He said a difficulty for any inquiry would be that many of the psychiatrists practising in New Zealand in the 1960s and 70s had died or gone overseas.