Return to horror hospital

By MARTIN JOHNSTON

For Hake Halo, Lake Alice Hospital was a place of terror which overshadowed the rest of his life.

Now just a collection of run-down rural buildings with cows munching grass outside, in the 1970s it was the place where the then teenaged Hake says he was punished with electric shocks and painful injections by nurses and doctors trying to alter youngsters' behaviour.

He blames the electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) for the return of his epilepsy and damaging his short-term memory.

His long-term memories of the hospital remain sharp and painful. He vividly describes his body straining under ECT without anaesthetic or muscle relaxant. The pain after he fell back on the bed was "like a sledge-hammer banging against your head".

But he and two other former patients have weakened the power the old hospital has held over them simply by visiting it.

They obtained permission from the owner, the Government's Residual Health Management Unit, and went to the site, near Wanganui, in September with patient advocate Steve Green, of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

"It has helped for the old memories and pains I have been carrying," said Mr Halo, now 42.

In 1975 he complained to his grandmother, cleverly deceiving hospital censors with a Niuean speech bubble beside a smiley face in an otherwise non-contentious English-language letter. The message said: "I have been given electric shock by the people, mum. The pain is very bad."

This letter was the first link in a chain that led to the closure of the hospital's child and adolescent unit and the Government much later apologising and paying $10.7 million compensation to 183 former patients who were mistreated.

Mr Green urged more former patients to consider visiting the site before it is sold, because of the sense of closure they could experience. He offered to accompany them.

But he said closure would be incomplete until psychiatrist Dr Selwyn Leeks, who until 1977 ran the unit, which operated from 1972 to 1978, was held to account.

The police are investigating criminal complaints against Dr Leeks, who lives in Melbourne, but have yet to decide whether to lay charges and seek his extradition to New Zealand.

An Auckland University psychologist, Associate Professor Fred Seymour, said revisiting the site would help some former patients, but could retraumatise others.

Former patients thinking about re-visiting Lake Alice should first consider discussing the idea with a counsellor or therapist, he said.

The Residual Health Management Unit's chief executive, Graeme Bell, said requests to visit would be considered case by case.

The unit expects to sell the property next year.

Ill-treatment

* Former Lake Alice Hospital patients were given electric-shock therapy without anaesthetic as a punishment, youngsters were locked away with insane adults and the drug paraldehyde was injected as a punishment.

* The Government has paid $10.7 million to 183 former patients abused between 1972 and 1977.

* Patients are still waiting for police to decide whether to prosecute former staff.