OFFER OF A FORUM TO SORT CLAIMS A SICK JOKE

The Manawatu Standard
December 9 2004
by Lee Matthews

The Government is cynically banking on former pyschiatric patients giving up and going away by making justice too difficult to attain, say former Lake Alice Hospital residents in Palmerston North. 

Sharyn Collis and Stephen McMahon * were 1970s Lake Alice patients tortured with electroconvulsive treatment without anaesthetic. They were disgusted yesterday to hear that Attorney-General Margaret Wilson has refused to hold a public inquiry into hospital abuse before 1992. Instead, she has offered to set up a non-public forum to allow former patients, their families and hospital staff a chance to air their complaints and stories. 

Any compensation for abuse would have to be sought by suing the Government through the courts, Ms Wilson said. 

"The Government knows that we can't afford to go through the courts. Who could afford the legal fees?" Mr McMahon * said. 

"And some group encounter session to talk about it? She (Ms Wilson) knows bloody well nobody will turn up for that . . .who would bother? It's not going to help to sit and talk about it." 

Mrs Collis agreed. She has spent her life since Lake Alice trying to move on from being raped and given painful paraldehyde injections and unanaesthetised ECT as punishments, and said group discussions of old hurts would not help her. 

"It's a joke, surely," she said. "A sick joke. When are we going to get justice? This just smells like the whole thing is too hard for the Government, so they're walking away from what happened." 

Mr McMahon * said what had happened to him at Lake Alice had wrecked his ability to function as a wage-earning adult in society. He could not work, dealing as he did with a medically prescribed morphine addiction that had come as a result of the medication needed to combat headaches arising from ECT without anaesthetics. 

Money as compensation was only part of the solution. Mr McMahon * said his compensation, part of the first $6.5 million class-action suit against Lake Alice, didn't repair his life. 

"I'm tired of being labelled a compensation-seeking bludger," he said. "It's not fair to apologise to and compensate some of the Lake Alice victims, yet tell people who were at Porirua and other places in the South Island that they should go to group therapy and talk about it." 

Mrs Collis said her experiences at Lake Alice had left her isolated and profoundly distrustful of other people.