Refuges find abuse drives women crazy

Marlene Bolton, manager of Camellia House, says the beds are never empty. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Domestic violence is driving many women literally crazy - and a group of Auckland women want to do something about it.

The group found that 347 women who entered New Zealand's 39 nationally affiliated women's refuges in the past six months had mental health or drug and alcohol problems, mostly caused by years of violence.

But only one refuge was geared to their needs: Manurewa's Camellia House, which is believed to be the only refuge in the Southern Hemisphere for women and children with mental and physical disabilities.

Manager Marlene Bolton said that with just 10 beds, "I'm emptying one room and the room is full within the hour. It's a huge thing."

Many other refuges turn women away if they have mental health problems or addictions.

The group's survey found that in the past six months refuges barred at least 178 women, and asked 79 women and their 81 children to move on, because they were a threat to other residents or the refuges did not have the skills to help them.

"One was physically abusing other clients and dealing drugs from the front of the refuge," one refuge reported.

The Homeworks Trust, which organised the survey, wants to establish six specialist refuges - one each for mental health and addiction problems in each of the three main centres of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Each refuge would house eight to 10 women plus their children and would need around 10 fulltime staff.

The catch is that each house would cost around $830,000 a year.

The trust believes clients could pay about $50,000 a year, but it is seeking the rest of the money from the mental health budget and Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS).

The total net cost for six refuges would be around $4.7 million. The country's mental health budget is $900 million.

CYFS pays the existing 39 women's refuges $5.5 million. They have to cover the rest of their costs from trusts and other sources and rely on hundreds of volunteer workers.

Refuge national manager Heather Henare said the existing refuges needed $16 million a year to meet women's needs for court advocacy and support as well as provide beds.

A Massey University study in 2000 found that 17 per cent of New Zealand women had been "seriously beaten or attacked" by a family member during their lives.

Just over half of these were beaten by partners, and the rest by parents, siblings or other relatives.

It found that 12 per cent of all cases of psychological distress and 7 per cent of serious physical illness among women could be traced to family violence.

Health promotion lecturer Debbie Hager, who chairs the Homeworks Trust, said she was surprised at the extent of mental health problems revealed by the survey.

Several refuges said that all, or nearly all, of their clients had either mental health or drug and alcohol problems.

"Most clients do drugs and drink," one refuge said.

Ms Hager's 2002 masters thesis, He Drove Me Mad, found that some women were literally driven mad by their partners' efforts to control them and to make them feel worthless.

"Repeated messages to you that really are damaging can make anybody crazy," one woman said.

The women said mental health services labelled them and gave them drugs, but failed to ask about the abusive relationships that caused their problems.

Ms Henare said the health system should start tackling the root causes of mental illness and addictions.

"This is an area we haven't been able to deliver on for a number of years," she said.

"We have agreed to work with Debbie and are prepared to pilot it."

CYFS spokeswoman Lee Harris-Royal said the service gave Homeworks Trust $45,000 in 2004 to develop its plans, but did not provide ongoing funding.

* The Preventing Violence in the Home agency is collecting goods for a huge garage sale at the ASB Showgrounds in Auckland on November 17-19.

'I ended up thinking it was me who was the problem'

Whenever Marie admitted herself to the hospital's accident and emergency department, they would call in the psych team.

A young doctor and a couple of nurses would turn up.

Once again, she would tell them her "very unusual symptoms". Towards the end, these included physical signs such as a racing heart-rate.

"They would discuss what was the best medication to put me on to control the symptoms," she says.

Then she would be sent home - to a husband who terrorised her.

"I would actually disclose abuse during the interviews with the medical professionals. But they wouldn't do anything about it," she says.

Marie (not her real name) spent seven years with the man who fathered two of her three children.

He was a financial controller who had custody of his two children from a previous marriage because a judge was convinced that his first wife was dangerous.

Marie says there was a lot of psychological abuse from the beginning. Six months after they married, she obtained a protection order against him and left him for three months.

But she went back. "I ended up thinking it was me who was the problem and I was imagining things."

She had their first child. But then she got a sexually transmitted disease and her husband admitted he had been visiting prostitutes. He had also been gambling with company money and was under huge stress.

The psychological abuse turned into physical violence.

"I actually went into some sort of shock where I lost consciousness and ended up in hospital," Marie says.

"It got worse because he started to feel threatened. It was like suddenly we didn't feel safe in our home. It was like he was keeping tabs on what I was doing.

"He was not able to control his emotions and he'd just go nuts. He attacked my baby at the time on three occasions. He attacked the dog and broke the dog's leg. He was driving very erratically. He was saying very scary things."

He was referred to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed bipolar disorder. But medication only made him even more abusive.

The couple separated again, this time for six months. He sent people to threaten her. Again she went back to him.

"It was like a cycle. We'd get back together and I'd find more problems and he'd get violent and then we'd separate," Marie says.

"While we were living together the last time, he was on all this medication. He was actually off work. I felt like I couldn't go anywhere and he was with me all the time.

"I felt if I left him he would hurt me... I felt like I was going crazy," she says.

The doctors' response was to put her on tranquillizers to bring down her heart rate, and antidepressants.

"I was on a very small amount of antidepressant medicine, but it was not depression I was suffering from. It was anxiety," she says.

"I didn't require a lot of medicine. I have found that the best way to control these problems is to keep away from this person."