Napier polytech counsellor had relationships with former clients
A polytechnic counsellor who had relationships with two former patients behaved "unprofessionally and unethically", the deputy Health and Disability Commissioner says.
Stefan Thevessen was employed by a medical centre with the contract to provide counselling at Napier's Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT). He began a relationship with one woman two weeks after their counselling relationship ended in 2005, after he had counselled her eight times.
Their personal relationship ended in around June 2006, at which time Thevessen began a personal relationship with another women, whom he had been counselling for three years. Their personal relationship began within a month of their last counselling session.
His relationship with the second woman ended in 2012. In late 2013 the women complained to the NZ Association of Counsellors. The association chose not to pursue a formal complaint against Thevessen after he resigned his membership of the association. Instead, the association referred the complaints to the Health and Disability Commission.
The women also complained to the medical centre that employed Thevessen and following an internal investigation he resigned in March last year.
The commission released a report on each patient's complaint this week, but did not identify Thevessen.
Deputy commissioner Theo Baker found that Thevessen had acted "unprofessionally and unethically by failing to maintain appropriate boundaries and engaging in a personal relationship" with the women.
Baker said the medical centre had been unaware of the relationships and was not liable for Thevessen's breach of the Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers' Rights.
Baker noted that Thevessen had retired from practising and did not intend to return. She recommended he provide an undertaking to register immediately with the association if he recommence practising.
She had not recommended that he apologise to the women as both had advised the commission they did not want an apology.
One of the women, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said she did not believe Thevessen should practice again.
"The other woman and I have become good friends since all of this started. We both say we'd never have had a relationship with him if we hadn't been so vulnerable when we saw him. It should never have happened. He's harmed enough people and we want to make sure it doesn't happen again," she said.
Thevessen said he knew he had erred and he was sorry.
"I have quit my job and quit my profession as a consequence [of my actions]. I have offered my apologies. I am still unemployed. I have accepted the verdict of HDC," he said.
"I accept responsibility. I have accepted the consequences and I have paid for it. I will never, ever work in any related profession again. I don't know what else I can do".
EIT said it had not employed Thevessen. He had worked for a medical centre that was contracted to provide student health services that include counselling and nursing health professional services for 40 weeks a year.
Margaret Parry cannot remember anything about her childhood. "I used to try desperately to remember, because I didn't want to lose my memory, but you couldn't stop it," she says.
Parry, 74, was 18 when her mother first took her to Porirua Hospital to try to straighten her out.
"I was a troubled teenager and I had a bad home life and I didn't have the love I needed as a child. My mother didn't know what they were going to do with me.
"I did need help, but not that kind of help."
She needed to talk to a therapist, but they weren't really around in the 1950s, so 45 courses of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT – by which an electric shock, or a stream of electrons, is sent through the brain to evoke a seizure – were forced on her.
She is one of several people to have filed claims against Porirua Hospital for abuse, but says the courts would not look at the use of ECT on her "because it's allowed".
"It handicapped me. Before I had it, I felt normal, like everyone else, and afterwards I didn't feel whole, completely washed out. I was incapable of doing anything and couldn't talk to anybody any more."
Parry, who now lives in Waikato, has recovered enough to marry and have three children, but, since having ECT, she has always struggled with memory and concentration.
"I've never met anybody who said it helped them, and I've met dozens of people who have had it. They all said how terrible it is.
"I can't believe it's still happening today. I'll never be happy until it's banned."
Rae Chalmers, of Wellington, says the treatment she received 20 years ago helped her get over her depression when she was at a critical stage, "but it would only last a day, and then I'd have to have it again".
Chalmers, 75, says it helped her on the road to recovery, but medication had kept her on the steady path.
The women's experiences are reflective of a continuing debate about the need for the treatment, with clinicians and experts also divided over the merits of ECT.
Psychiatrist Pamela Melding and psychologist John Read are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the therapy.
They do agree on one thing: that clinician inclination (whether your psychiatrist is a fan) plays a big part in who gets the treatment.
Of the 200 people who have an average of between four and 12 courses of ECT each year, between 40 and 60 are in the Canterbury region, with only five from Auckland. Canterbury is followed by Otago, Waikato and Waitemata.
The number of patients has fallen by about a third since consent became compulsory in 2006, but 15 to 20 per cent of those who have ECT are deemed too unwell to consent, so the decision is made on their behalf, with input from psychiatrists, family and the Ethics Committee.
Women receive ECT nearly twice as much as men do, and elderly women receive the most. Reasons for this could include loneliness and isolation, specialists say.
It is given to patients who are suicidal, not eating or drinking, chronically depressed and who have sometimes tried several courses of antidepressants and therapy.
Dr Melding believes the results far outweigh the adverse effects.
ECT is used more often in the South Island because there are more beds and "there's a lot of clinician interest", she said.
Smaller district health boards (DHBs), such as South Canterbury and West Coast, which do not perform ECT, refer patients to the Canterbury DHB.
Melding administers ECT through the Waitemata District Health Board, where she works.
Auckland does less ECT because of a "clinician factor", she says.
Read, an Auckland psychologist and researcher at Auckland University, says the geographic differentiations are important.
"They've been there for a long time and they're huge. So that tells you that in any district health board it only takes one or two psychiatrists who are very keen on ECT.
"Your chances of getting this quite dangerous and ineffective procedure are quite arbitrary."
Auckland DHB confirmed the difference was because of "the prescribing practices of individual clinicians who refer patients to us, rather than any capacity issues".
Dr Richard Potter, of the Canterbury DHB, says it is unfair to compare the rates of ECT use throughout the country.
"Administering ECT is based on clinical needs and patients choosing to have it. It also depends on how often it is offered, which depends on a patient's clinical history."
ECT has survived attempts to have it halted altogether. A petition calling for it to be banned in the late 1990s sparked an independent review which led to the government adopting several recommendations.
THE Health Ministry began to issue annual reports on ECT and decided the treatment would no longer be given to people who did not consent, apart from those deemed too unwell to do so.
"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Melding says. "Why are you going to treat people with ECT when a pill is going to fix it?
"But there are some patients where you're not going to wait, because it's too dangerous to wait. These are patients whose depression is so severe they're catatonic, melancholic – they can't eat or drink or do anything."
It is a short-term solution and is often followed by a course of antidepressants, which can take weeks to work.
A stream of electrons is sent through the brain to evoke a small seizure to shock the patient, a practice that Dr Read says "burns out the brain cells".
Cognitive therapy is the best therapy for depression and it is much safer than ECT, he says.
"None of the follow-up studies [on ECT] that follow people for a week, month or a year show there is any benefit, and that wouldn't matter if there wasn't a horrendous set of adverse effects."
Psychiatrists who administer it acknowledge memory loss is possible, but say it usually comes back.
But others claim they were not advised of the way ECT could affect their memory before they were given it and say whole chunks of their childhood were missing after treatment.
Read says he knows many people, like Parry, who have had ECT, found no benefit from it and then "discovered there are chunks of their lives missing".
"If you tell people there is a pretty good chance you're going to have parts of your life missing, then who is going to sign up for it?"
But Melding says many patients consider it the lesser of two evils. "We have patients who say it's choice really: `If I've got a little bit of a memory problem as opposed to depression, then I'll take the memory problem'.
"It does shake your memory around and it's logical that it does, as ECT releases neuro-transmitters and those neuro-transmitters are not only important in mood, eating and drinking, but they're also important for your concentration and memory. But depression itself knocks those things around."
Memory returns within six weeks after treatment for 95 per cent of patients, but "it might take a bit longer" for the other 5 per cent, she says. The greatest risk was to people with cardiovascular problems, but this was monitored and considered before treatment. Muscle pains, ringing in the ears, headaches and nausea are other adverse effects.
Melding says ECT has changed dramatically since the late 1930s, when it was invented. It was widely used throughout the 1940s and 1950s, when there were few alternatives. Patients weren't given anaesthetic or muscle relaxants and the dose of electricity they were receiving could not be measured.
Patients now sleep during the procedure, which involves sending up to 540 millicoulombs of energy through the brain, and the process is over within minutes.
"In the old days, before we used muscle relaxants, people used to break bones and teeth," she says, "but now they're relaxed."
The treatment is controlled by a computer, as opposed to a machine with dials and wires.
The ministry's acting director of mental health, Susanna Every-Palmer, says there are historical cases of ECT abuse, including it being used as a punishment.
The number of people receiving ECT has declined and it is typically given only to those who consent.
"Someone who wouldn't be able to consent is the type of patient who is mute, unable to communicate and unable to engage. Anybody who can say `Yes, I hear and understand what you're saying' – that person basically has capacity."
Every-Palmer says New Zealand's rate of ECT is relatively low compared with other countries, such as Australia and Britain, which have about five times the amount of use per person.
Melding says the treatment works for 70 per cent of patients, which is "as good as the best treatments in medicine".
The only reason it is still being used is "because it works", she says.
Read disagrees and believes its decline is a signal that it will be gone in 10 to 15 years.
"We will look back on ECT as we now look back on lobotomies."
* Clarification: Due to an editing error, Margaret Parry was referred to as Margaret Perry in an earlier version of this story.
Emma lives with her dad, is interested in politics and plays piano. Her favourite composer is Chopin. She studies maths and psychology at Wellington's Victoria University.
Two years ago, aged 18, she tried to kill herself and was placed under the Mental Health Act in Wakari psychiatric ward near Dunedin. During her stay she says she was diagnosed with depression, forced to have seven rounds of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and injected with sedatives.
Nothing was working; she was tired of being away from home and tried to kill herself again.
Emma (not her real name) says she was then pinned down by nurses, stripped naked and locked in a small room - part of a practice called seclusion - inside the forensic ward; the general psychiatric seclusion rooms were full. They had also run out of gowns.
On the hard floor there was no mattress or pillow, she says, despite these being mandatory items for patients in seclusion. Emma used a blanket to cover her body from nurses routinely peeping through the observation window.
She rested her head on the cardboard bedpan she'd been given to use as a toilet and relieved herself on the floor, she says.
At its birth, 22 years ago, the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act of 1992 was radical. New Zealand had finally rid itself of the "loony bins" of Janet Frame's era following a de-institutionalisation movement in the 1970s. Lobotomies and screaming patients chained to chairs were yesteryear. Seclusion replaced padded rooms and straitjackets. The future of humane psychiatry was now.
We charged forward but somewhere along the way our commitment to adequate mental health care faltered, say experts, including the ombudsman and our disability commissioner. In fact, things are so bad they've gained international attention. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention visited last year, urging the Government to review the Mental Health Act and dubbing seclusion a form of torture that violates human rights law, particularly when mental illness or intellectual disability is concerned.
Advocacy groups have tried repeatedly over the past decade to ban electric shock therapy.
"We're witnessing knock-on effects from a government that's doing as little as possible to help mental health, including cutting back on funding and getting rid of the Mental Health Commission in 2012," says Sarah Gordon.
She wrote a paper calling for the Mental Health Act to be reformed to avoid discrimination and it was published in the New Zealand Medical Journal last year.
The number of people on the jobseeker's benefit due to psychological or psychiatric conditions has more than doubled since 2000 and there's been a significant rise in police calls about attempted or threatened suicides.
"These interactions are complex and time-consuming, taking on average two to three hours to resolve," says Assistant Police Commissioner Dave Cliff.
Police respond to almost 500 mental health jobs a week on average.
In a bid to help staff deal with this the Royal NZ Police College recently rolled out new mental health training for recruits.
"We're witnessing a worsening epidemic that's not only significantly affecting health services but a whole range of other agencies. Until we address it, the result - other than human misery and disability - is an overburdened health service and economic loss."
The Southern District Health Board says Emma should complain to the board, not the media, so it can investigate her claims.
Emma isn't comfortable with that: "There's always the worry that since you're the mentally unwell one, no-one will believe you."
Despite Emma waiving her right to privacy and her claims being relayed (as asked) to the DHB, it wouldn't confirm whether they were true or comment, saying: "For the integrity of any investigation process it is important that we avoid discussion on the matter."
The DHB did agree to answer general questions around seclusion in email format.
Dr Brad Strong, the clinical leader of the Southern DHB, says people being put into seclusion are provided with basic necessities, a bed with bedding and a pillow.
"They also have access to drinking water, toilet facilities and a hand basin. Reading material or music can be offered depending on the clinical needs of the person. Most people are able to remain in their own clothes or they can change into hospital-supplied pyjamas.
"It is considered a temporary and infrequently used approach that can allow clients to calm and recover their emotional balance in a low stimulus environment."
Research proves otherwise, says Disability Rights Commissioner Paul Gibson.
"For many people, seclusion has a detrimental effect and for those in permanent seclusion - there's five people in New Zealand who've been locked up for a year - that's even more detrimental."
A range of patients who had been locked up under seclusion were spoken to for this article. Many were fearful of speaking openly.
The overall feeling was one of helplessness - "You're virtually stymied in every way. It's what I assume it feels like to be in prison but the irony of it is it's not a crime to be mentally ill yet we end up getting treated like blimmin prisoners," says Suzy Stevens, who experienced seclusion last year.
Stevens, who suffers from bipolar affective disorder and bouts of psychosis, was admitted into a psychiatric ward after her partner raised concerns about her behaviour and policemen "frogmarched" her straight into a seclusion room.
After six hours, a friend who worked for the DHB was alerted to Stevens' seclusion and visited. At her behest, Stevens was given food and subsequently released.
In a former job, Stevens worked in the mental health sector and this made for an unsettling experience when she came under the act.
"People knew me, the manager of the unit knew me. It was like I'd stopped being who I was and was wearing the garb of a patient and therefore didn't exist."
Stevens left her mental health job - finding it too stressful - and now runs a cafe in the Bay of Plenty. What helps her come down from an intense high or balance out a depressing low is yoga, going for walks and aromatherapy. "I'm stuck in the world of psychiatric drugs but when I'm well I try and have that inner calm."
There are alternatives to seclusion but they involve more resources. New York State has outlawed seclusion - nurses sit with those in agitation and distress.
Other hospitals have invested in sensory modulation - using sight, sounds, smells (essential oils), movement and items like weighted blankets and rocking or massage chairs. These help people learn self-soothing techniques and how to change their emotional and behavioural responses to stressful situations in positive ways.
We have to be cautious about being too quick to eliminate seclusion, says John Dawson, an Otago University professor who specialises in mental health law.
"The concern is that other means such as the over-medication of people may be used in critical situations as the alternative. Other approaches more harmful than seclusion could take its place."
Director of Mental Health Dr John Crawshaw says he is aware of this in working towards ultimately eliminating the use of seclusion.
"Part of the challenge is you don't want any perverse outcomes," he explains. "We actually want to reduce the drivers that lead to seclusion and improve the outcomes for people who have significant challenges with mental health and addiction problems."
In Janet Frame's autobiography, An Angel at My Table, the author recounts her discharge from a mental hospital after more than 200 applications of ECT in the 1950s. She describes them as "each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution, and in the process having my memory shredded and in some aspects permanently weakened".
Today things are different.
Modern-day ECT is given "just like any other hospital operation", says Crawshaw.
Administration is ongoing, usually twice a week, and patients are wired up so an electrical current can pass through the whole brain causing a brief intentional seizure.
The reason it works - although the claim that it works is hotly contested - remains a mystery. There are multiple theories such as that the seizure causes alteration of certain chemicals in the brain. Another suggests it adjusts the stress hormone regulation in the brain which affects energy, sleep, appetite and mood.
But passing a jolt of electricity through the brain isn't without risk and many doctors think the side effects - permanent memory loss, confusion, disorientation - can outweigh any possible benefits.
Steve Green, the executive director of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, has been petitioning for New Zealand to completely ban ECT - one petition which nearly went over the line in Parliament was to stop it being forced on pregnant women, the elderly and children. "Some people say it works as a last resort but how do you define that?"
In 2013, 253 people had ECT, according to the Director of Mental Health Annual Report, and 2341 treatments were administered - about nine per patient.
Of this number, 60 were deemed as not having the capacity to consent and were involuntarily treated. Another six were seen as having the capacity to consent but were still involuntarily treated.
Emma was involuntarily given ECT and says it was the most invasive treatment she had against her will. She was made to have it when she was suicidal and refusing medication. As is legally required, two psychiatrists had to agree it was in her best interests.
In her discharge sheets the hospital stated: "an improvement in physical depressive symptoms was objectively identified" and that "she also intermittently acknowledged some subjective improvements in feeling better in herself for short periods after ECT".
"It's terrifying to know someone is going to give your brain an electric shock and make you have a seizure," Emma says. "I got used to it, though. It was twice a week. Basically you can't eat the day you get it until after you've had it because you have to go under a general anaesthetic. You're asleep while it actually happens. I did get pretty bad headaches afterwards and the first few times I threw up when I woke up . . . I experienced some memory problems . . . and I tend to assume any memory problems I have today, over a year later, are because of the ECT."
Former National Health Minister Bill English expressed horror in 1997 at the claims and said it had to be cleared up quickly,
Judy Keall: Why has this matter taken so long to resolve?
Hon. ANNETTE KING: The issue has taken so long to resolve mainly because of the previous Government. In July 1997, when Bill English was the Minister of Health, he said that the Government could not be seen to be hiding behind a wall of legal complexities. He did nothing for 2 years. When he became the Minister of Finance, he decided on 23 February 1999 that the claims would be litigated. He was strong on words and weak on action.
The money does not go half the way to healing the violence that occurred. They could have come with an apology," Mr English said
I seek leave to table two documents. The first document is a press release dated 9 July 1997 from the Hon. Bill English when he was Minister of Health, in which he said: ``The Government cannot hide behind a wall of legal complexities.'' The second document is a health report to Wyatt Creech and Bill English on the Lake Alice Hospital claim.
Sue Kedgley: Does the Minister agree that it is unacceptable that people can still be compulsorily treated with electroconvulsive therapy against their wishes; if so, what is she doing to stop that practice?
Hon. ANNETTE KING: Electroconvulsive therapy is not administered without a person's consent.
BULLSHIT Annette it can and is forced on people without there consent was in lake Alice and also on me again in 1999 in Aucklands conally unit
2004-0306 - Manawatu Standard - Raped and tortured: A New Zealand childhood
The Manawatu Standard March 6 2004
Raped and tortured: A New Zealand childhood by Lee Matthews
The demons of Lake Alice still haunt the people who lost their childhoods there.
Lee Matthews talks to a survivor.
"We were doomed people in Lake Alice because nobody helped us. We soon learned not to complain. We knew nobody would listen."
Stephen McMahon * is a survivor. From age 13 to 16, he says he was raped and tortured. He was also injected with gut-wrenchingly painful paraldehyde and put through unmodified electroconvulsive treatment--shock treatment with no anaesthetic.
Routinely. To punish him. To modify his behaviour, because he seemed to live in a world of his own.
This happened not because Mr McMahon * needed psychiatric treatment but because he was a boy with no place to go when he was 13, back in 1973. For family reasons, he needed a place in a boys' home, but there was no place. He ended up a ward of the state at Lake Alice Hospital's open child and adolescent unit, villa 11.
He's spent the past 30 years thinking about what happened to him and brothers-in-suffering at Lake Alice. He was part of the group that in 2001, after 15 years of trying to make people believe what happened, received a public apology and a share of $6.5 million in government compensation.
Mr McMahon *, now 45, is tall and quietly spoken. Horror seeps into his eyes when he talks of Lake Alice. He has health problems: muscle cramps, migraines, night terrors, other damage to his body. Right now he's in acute pain, a side effect of withdrawing from the morphine prescribed by Australian doctors. He also has depression problems.
"I know I need to do serious work to overcome what has happened to me. Coming back to Palmerston North is the first step," he said. "This is fresh-start time."
The first time he went to Lake Alice was in March 1973. His affidavit for the class action court case records what happened.
On his first day, he was taken to villa 11 and into a day room where there were about 15 boys, all his age or younger. They were crying.
"I asked one of them why and he said, `You'll find out.' There was screaming coming from upstairs and I was confused. I didn't know what was going on."
What was going on was unmodified electroconvulsive treatment. Mr McMahon * was called upstairs, told to lie on a bed and electrodes were slid onto his temples.
A rubber gag was wedged into his mouth, then unit head psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks "played with the dial" on the ECT machine.
"They told me I wouldn't feel anything. All of a sudden I got hit with a sensation like a sledge hammer. I can't put the pain into words. Absolutely nothing compares with its intensity. Dr Leeks turned the dial down low and then up high.
"It was like having little sledge hammers and then big sledge hammers hitting my head."
Mr McMahon * woke up in a warm bath. One of the other residents was playing with his genitals.
A diary was kept at the unit. Anyone caught smoking, answering staff back or committing any other trivial transgression had their names put in the "blue book". Then, on Fridays, those transgressors got unmodified ECT.
Sometimes the youngsters had to help set up the ECT equipment. When this happened, Mr McMahon * tried to convince himself he was just a helper and that he would not be shocked--but generally the helpers got ECT.
"Normally the smoke doors were kept closed (between the day room and the shutter cell room in villa 11, where ECT took place), but when Dr Leeks performed his ECT sessions, the doors were left open.
"This was so the boys downstairs could hear the screaming and muffled cries of pain from the boy being tortured upstairs.
"We were all terrified for each other. We were controlled by this fear. We just sat in the day room and waited," Mr McMahon * says.
The staff used that fear.
"The words they used for it were to `ride the thunderbolt', `the national grid' and `the zappidy zap'."
He was also given unmodified ECT in the left shoulder by Dr Leeks, who said it would help Mr McMahon’s * asthma. This made Mr McMahon * too frightened to get his inhaler and medication from the office.
Shock treatment was also administered during the week by other staff to the boys' knees, buttocks and testicles. One boy was shocked as he lay in bathwater. These staff also gave paraldehyde injections as a punishment.
Paraldehyde is a psychiatric drug used to subdue out-of-control patients. It hurts as it is administered, leaving a feeling like hot, burning acid. It has a foul smell and leaves a sickening taste in the mouth for several days.
Sometimes staff would "harpoon" the boys, throwing paraldehyde syringes at the their naked buttocks from across the room.
Sexual abuse was also common, not only from staff but from some of the residents themselves. Some staff threatened that raped residents would get the thunderbolt if they complained.
After residents complained about one resident, Dr Leeks set up a punishment session where the complainants were told to administer unmodified ECT to the abuser.
Mr McMahon * was also beaten and kept in solitary confinement while at Lake Alice. On one occasion it was for refusing to scrub a floor with a toothbrush.
Mr McMahon * left Lake Alice in 1975 and says his release and "rehabilitation" were typical. He was given his medication as usual that morning, then taken to Wellington, where a staff member booked him into a YMCA hostel and jacked up a labouring job at the old cigarette factory. Mr McMahon * was then given $100.
End of rehabilitation.
The job didn't last long. Co-workers taunted him about coming from the nuthouse. He was also cold-turkey withdrawing from medication and had no idea how to be responsible for himself.
"One minute I was at Lake Alice, woken up in the morning with an air raid siren, being told what to do every minute of the day and being governed by fear, and now I found myself suddenly expected to fit into the workforce."
He ended up jobless and homeless, sleeping in a Courtney Place bus shelter. A homosexual transvestite picked him up. Eventually, Mr McMahon * fled to Australia and to England.
"To this day, I wake up crying, with nightmares about Dr Leeks and Lake Alice," he says. "The situation has not improved over time. It irritates me immensely that I just can't seem to get Lake Alice out of my life."n
--------------------
Fear at first sight
--------------------
The first sight of the old water tower rearing out of trees makes Stephen McMahon * shiver.
"I hate the sight of that thing," he says. "It's so ugly. It used to be the first thing you'd see coming back after a weekend's leave. It meant you were going back there."
Mr McMahon * was a ward of the state at Lake Alice Hospital's open child and adolescent unit from 1973 to 1975. He was 13 when he arrived.
He went back last Friday for the first time in 30 years, to the place where he was tortured and raped while staff either participated or turned a blind eye.
Driving there, he talked quietly of what has happened to him since Lake Alice, how the experiences there had shattered any chance of joy or a happy life.
"I've got to go back there. I'm having a lot of difficulty dealing with this. I tell you, if it wasn't for my family, I would have taken my life over this," he says.
"I know the place is all closed down now. I know that, but I don't believe it.
"I've got to go back there and make sure that those people aren't still torturing children in those rooms.
"I've got to be able to walk through those rooms without feeling scared."
The remains of Lake Alice Hospital sit a bare kilometre off the main road between Bulls and Wanganui. The hospital closed in 1986 and the national secure unit closed in 1999. Services shifted to Auckland.
What's left now lurks behind locked gates and warning signs about guard dogs. Trees are overgrown and long grass invades the drive. Cows graze peacefully.
Mr McMahon * goes to the caretaker's cottage. He quietly explains that he nearly died at Lake Alice as a child and he must see villa 11. His voice carries 30 years of conviction.
The caretaker--who wouldn't let in the Manawatu Standard because it's more than his job's worth--warns that the place is wrecked. Vandals have got in. There's nothing left.
This is what Mr McMahon * needs to hear. He also needs to see it. He goes with the caretaker.
Half an hour later, Mr McMahon * comes walking back. He's carrying a cracked old wooden plaque-style sports trophy, recording the efforts of the Lake Alice bowling teams.
"Look," he points out one of the little silver shields on the trophy. "S. McMahon *. 1974. That was me."
There's a pause. He lights a cigarette, sits down.
"I must have done something right while I was out here."
His hands are shaking as he describes how good it felt to stand in villa 11, the place ruined and empty around him. Gutted. Reduced to a building nobody wants.
"It's all covered in graffiti inside. Everything's broken. Even the toilets are broken.
"It's a bit of a shock to the system, but I had to come here and see this, to be sure."
The caretaker told him other survivors of his era have come back. It's not a pleasure trip for anyone.
Mr McMahon * takes another look at the neglected grounds.
"I've carried this place around the world with me, wherever I've been."
He nods slowly.
"That's all blown apart."
But he says it has made him stronger to go back, to face the Goliath.
"I will never understand why they did this to us."
It all started back in 1997 when a ex patient's brother said to him we need to do something about the terrible things that happened to you in that place. The brother who is a lawyer realized how big of a case he had so he contacted Grant Cameron. There is talk that money was exchanged and Grant brought the case off the brother, the brother knowing its value etc, but I can not be sure of this.
To sum things up in 2001 Helen Clark the then Prime minister apologised, sending a letter to the past patients to say 'sorry'. I must say the letter is pretty pathetic. This was followed by compensation.
Who received payouts? Out of about 300, 150 did. These where ONLY people who where in the adolescent unit during the dates of 1970- 1978, the unit closed in 1978. not all ex patients wanted to be involved in the court case therefore have not received any money.
This is not to say that other patients in Lake Alice during those dates did not receive ECT or where sexually abused. It is very hypocritical of the NZ government to pay out money to patients for a medical treatment that is still practiced today and causes serious long term damage to the muscles and brain while also burns the tissue, that's just to name a few side affects. Guess they don't think so huh!
The government said they first put aside $100 Million for the Lake Alice compensation. when the lawyer Grant Cameron decided to do a out of court settlement with the government this meant the patients would receive less money and lawyers would still cash in large. Compensation Patients received different payout amounts. This could have been due to the more time you spent in the hospital or perhaps abuse you where subjected to. Grant Cameron made over $2 Million for his 'effort' not bad considering he settled out of court so he could get the better deal.
One patient paid fee's of ($52,000) to Grant Cameron and only walked away with ($77,000) thats almost half of his $131,000 compensation in fees!
It was supposed to be an island boot camp to scare youngsters straight. But it spun out of control, scarring many participants for life and prompting comparisons with the classic dystopian novel Lord of the Flies.
John da Silva, who ran Whakapakari on his family's land. Phot / Bauer Media
The second time Simon visited Great Barrier Island he says was made to dig his own grave. The man with the shotgun who supervised his spadework said: "You think this is a f***ing joke?"
Simon (a court suppression order means the Weekend Herald cannot use his real name) was 15 years old.
It was May 8, 1998, and the boy was one of four who'd escaped from the nearby Government-funded Whakapakari Youth Trust camp. The rustic tent facility was used to hold those too young for prison and as a dumping ground for difficult-to-manage wards of Child, Youth and Family.
The four boys hadn't got far before being recaptured: no one escaped from Whakapakari. The nearest road was a 4km boat trip, or a hike across a thick scrubbed ridge, away. The Coromandel peninsula, the tantalising mainland looming on the horizon, was dozens of kilometres of choppy waves away. This isolation was a boon for containing young people who had a habit of escaping, but some of the boys sent there claim it took on a sinister life of its own.
"The culture of the place ended up a bit Lord of the Flies, to be honest," says University of Auckland social work researcher Dr Ian Hyslop, who has reviewed the facility's files as part of an upcoming job as expert witness for nearly 40 former residents who are suing the Government.
The camp had its own prison island, an isolated rocky outcrop in the middle of Mangati Bay, formally named Whangara, or Cliff Island, but known as Alcatraz.
Despite repeated directives from CYFS head office in Wellington (dating from at least 1988 and continuing until the camp shut down suddenly in 2004) to cease its use, a whole generation of kids claim Alcatraz was used as a dump for camp troublemakers. Many say they were left there, or even dumped into the sea 100m from shore, without supervision or bedding and with only minimal supplies, for weeks at a time.
During their brief, heady, afternoon on the lam the four escapers had broken into a Department of Conservation hut, ransacked a boat, taken a Casio watch, and stolen some marijuana and smoked it. The dope and watch belonged to the man with the gun. He'd demanded from Whakapakari staff, and apparently been granted, an afternoon alone with the petty thieves.
The watch held sentimental value and was said to be a gift from a long-dead mother. The man with the gun, a hard man with tattoos, understood to be a senior gang member, didn't believe the boys when they claimed they'd lost it.
Simon says it was after being interrogated about the watch - which first involved kneeling with gunshots being fired over their heads and later being forced at gunpoint inside a kennel containing a snapping dobermann - that the man brought up grave digging. "The others were digging their holes as well. They were crying. I had just turned 15 - the other boys were younger, 13 or 14. The look on their faces, I'll never forget it. The fear on their faces. We all thought we were going to die," he says.
A still from the documentary Breaking The Barriers (1992).
The boys didn't die that day. Simon told the Weekend Herald they ran for it when the man put down the gun and started waving around a garden slasher.
Interviews with nearly a dozen former Whakapakari residents detail claims of regularised violence, which, though not as lurid as Simon's brush with the alleged gang member, was consistent enough to form part of the everyday background.
They say larger and longer-serving boys were recruited formally as "Young Leaders" and informally as the "Flying Squad", deputised and encouraged by adult supervisors to maintain order through physical discipline.
THE CAMP was finally closed in 2004, after a steady stream of complaints about abuse turned into a torrent. Initial investigations by CYF revealed a third of the boys said they'd been seriously assaulted by staff members. One alleged he had been raped by a supervisor but was too scared to press charges.
Interview notes said many of the boys were traumatised, with one of them telling his social worker: "Before I went to the island I was different, always laughing. People say I'm different now."
The camp had long had a mixed reputation among social workers. It was known as rough and ready, but also one of the few places available to send the most troubled of teens.
Many of its former residents would go on to become some of New Zealand's most notorious hardened criminals, including RSA triple killer William Bell.
Former resident Andrew (whose real name is also suppressed by the court) settled his claim with CYF earlier this year. He is blunt when describing Whakapakari as the worst of many state facilities he spent time in during his youth. "It was a f***ing hellhole," he says.
Two years after the last boy had been evacuated, CYF undertook a formal study of how effective the facility had been at reducing reoffending. Of the 69 boys who attended the camp in 2004, only one in five had not offended, and 61 per cent had racked up multiple convictions.
Simon, considered a nuisance and the instigator of the 1998 escape attempt, got his wish and was soon sent home to Dunedin. He says he's never talked with anyone from Whakapakari since, but can recall his last conversation with the three other failed escapees.
"As I left they told me 'Get us some help'. I did the best I could - I told mum, told the courts - but it got swept under the carpet and covered up."
It wasn't just Simon who tried raising the alarm. The quartet had shared their tale with the Whakapakari supervisor tasked with picking them up after the incident, who was concerned enough to blow the whistle. The supervisor's complaint included the observation that two of the four boys had, literally, pissed themselves.
Documents obtained under the Official Information Act as part of a wide-ranging civil suit against the Ministry of Social Development by Wellington law firm Cooper Legal on behalf of former Whakapakari residents, appears to show CYF's investigation into this incident was botched and the opportunity for justice - given the statute of limitations - has been lost.
A still from the documentary Breaking The Barriers.
The investigation report, dated September 7, 1998 shows the investigator didn't interview any of the boys, or the whistleblowing staff member, or the police, and instead preferred the explanation provided by Whakapakari director John da Silva.
A former professional wrestler and star of 70s television staple On the Mat, da Silva had run Whakapakari on his family's land since the early 1980s. He claimed:
• Gunshots would have been audible to locals but weren't heard;
• The mock executions never happened;
• The gang member was actually just a "heavily tattooed local fisherman," and;
• The youths' work detail had been arranged by local police.
The investigator concluded that the complaints "need to be viewed in the context of police involvement of arranging the work with the aggrieved neighbour" and that the camp director was well-intentioned.
"At worst on Mr da Silva's part there was a concern to right the wrongs in order that the programme's credibility on the island could be maintained and the victim's loss [be in] some way atoned," the report said.
But the whistleblower was not satisfied and made another complaint, this time to the Commissioner for Children. Another investigation was opened in 1999, but despite finding serious problems with da Silva's version of events, the Commissioner was unable to reach a finding of facts as he too was unable to locate and interview the boys involved.
Crucially, the Commissioner's report shows that police formally denied any involvement in arranging the claimed work detail with the neighbour - a key plank of da Silva's version of events. The report also shows the final decision by police not to prosecute - delayed until July 2000 by the demands of an unrelated homicide investigation - was an almost shrugging of institutional shoulders.
The allegations "may well have some truth to them", the investigating officer told the Commissioner. "Nevertheless I would not be prepared to pursue a prosecution with evidence of this standard - specifically the unco-operative and unreliable nature of the complainants."
A review of the complaint files by the Weekend Herald shows Simon's version of events, unheard by police or CYF officials, broadly corroborates an evidential interview given by one of the boys and the initial complaint by the supervisor made in 1998.
Garth Young, chief analyst for historic claims at the Ministry of Social Development said he was unable to comment on what happened at Whakapakari - or the handling of the alleged mock executions - as the matter was before the courts.
He said the claims were being defended, but declined to elaborate on how CYF defended its conduct.
Putting aside questions of fact and liability, Young agreed that Simon's description of children digging graves and being menaced by dogs sounded horrifying. "I don't think any reasonable person would have any other reaction to something like that. Absolutely I wouldn't for a minute want you to get the impression that I or anyone would be defending that."
THE CAMP'S director, da Silva, now 81, still lives on Great Barrier Island and his Whakapakari camp has long been swallowed by the bush. He told the Weekend Herald that the neighbour at the centre of Simon's complaint was now deceased, and was simply a local fisherman.
"There seems to be a lot of accusations about ill-treatment floated around, and it's very difficult now - it's so many years ago - to find the people involved," he said.
He said his recollection was that the four boys involved seemed unharmed, despite the allegations of mistreatment.
"They all came back in one piece, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with them."
The former wrestler, who competed at the Olympics and in town halls up and down the country during a curious period in New Zealand history where professional wrestling was a legitimate local industry, defended Whakapakari by noting that no one had died.
"We certainly never lost a life, but we did have some pretty harrowing moments," he said.
His clients were the most difficult young people in the country, Da Silva noted. "Nobody has ever come up with a final solution to that kind of upbringing to magically make them good again."
A still from the documentary Breaking The Barriers.
Simon has a good word for the man who ran the controversial camp. "John Da Silva never condoned violence. I don't blame him for any of this " but he could have done with a second opinion."
According to internal CYF documents, for two years following Whakapakari's closure debate raged over whether the camp should reopen. In 2004 Jessie Henderson, head of the Grey Lynn CYF office was unusually frank in voicing vehement opposition. She said Whakapakari had relied on the charismatic leadership of Da Silva, but as he aged and suffered health problems he moved away from living on-site and his influence waned.
Something about the place seemed septic, Henderson said, noting that a highly-regarded and qualified former CYF social worker with an unblemished record also been accused of assaulting children after starting work on the island.
"The very nature of the programme - the remoteness, the primitive living conditions, the lack of managerial oversight and accountability creates an environment where otherwise sane people start behaving in an inappropriate manner."
Simon says he knows what the senior social worker means about the strange madness that occurred off the mainland. "The law on Great Barrier Island is a lot different from the mainland."
Nearly 20 years on, he says the memory of that day with the spade, thinking his body would fall into the hole he had dug, has never left him.
"Did it last two hours, did it last four hours? However many hours it was life-changing. It changed me."
He says he came from a violent home and had been accustomed to a certain amount of background violence, but this episode escalated matters.
"I have witnessed a lot of violent assaults, but not before this. It was all after this. After Great Barrier and Whakapakari I rebelled against the justice system and spend around 10 years in prison as a result," he says.
"A young man's life can be complicated, no doubt, but I found myself in more trouble than not after that."
He says after his initial complaint didn't appear to have been followed up, he thought no one would believe him and he still had flashbacks of the man with the shotgun who had made a point of writing down the four boys' names in a book before starting his interrogation. "I kind of think no one cared: People thought we were trouble. No one ever followed anything up. It was only a whole year later the police knocked on the door asking questions," he says. "At the time I was very fearful about what had happened. But I'm not afraid to talk about it now.
"At the end of the day I'm now grown up, with kids of my own - and you just can't do that to children."
Some former residents talk of Whakapakari helping to turn their lives around, but the recollections often come with hints of the problems that would later consign the facility to the dustbin of history.
Former resident Zascha Paraku recounted on Oldfriends his 1989 placement, saying though some might call the camp a "doomed place", he had a different experience. "For me I thoroughly enjoyed every minute I spent here," Paraku said.
The recollection ends with a shout-out to friends met at Whakapakari, including Calvin who, "got the meanest hiding and was shipped to hospital".
THE SIGNS were even broadcast to the rest of the country in 1992, during an hour-long documentary on TV One. Half-way through Breaking the Barrier - a broadly positive take on Whakapakari, emphasising the facility as a last chance saloon before troubled youth entered the justice system - the programme's narrator takes a short but extremely dark detour.
"The camp has woken up to the shocking news that one of the boys, desperate to get sent back to the city, has mutilated himself with a butcher's knife. 'Rat' has taken the extraordinary step of circumcising himself."
"Rat", no older than 15, with his face blurred out and a bloodied towel around his waist says "this place is a shithole, man".
Da Silva is observed fingering the instrument of mutilation, saying "the knife is not very sharp".
He and other camp supervisors appear to have no idea what triggered such an extreme reaction.
Aboard the rowing boat taking the teen to whatever he calls home, the boy who crudely circumcised himself raises his arms in triumph.
Historical Abuse: MSD secrecy over historical abuse claims
FAIRFAX
Recent documents show the categories the Ministry of Social of Development is using to provide settlements for historical abuse, but the ministry is refusing to release the details within the categories.
The Ministry of Social Development is refusing to reveal how it is assessing the claims of victims of historic abuse.
It's also not allowing independent moderation of its assessments, prompting concerns victims are not getting a fair deal.
The ministry is partway through a two-path process to settle the claims of more than 900 victims, who suffered abuse while in state care between the 1940s and 1993.
The accelerated pathway allows for claims to be either assessed against set criteria to determine the level of settlement in line with the abuse, or claimants can try their luck in the courts.
Cabinet documents obtained show a backlog of 921 historic claims has built up. The Government is aiming to settle them by 2020.
Official documents released to lawyer Sonja Cooper, who was representing more than 500 claimants, showed the "risk of client frustration" prompted the development of an accelerated process based on categories of abuse.
The categories determine the level of compensation victims get, and when developing them MSD carried out initial negotiations with Cooper.
They range from Category 1 claimants receiving $42,500, for suffering "serious abuse with distinguishing characteristics", to category five claimants receiving $5000 for "failures not leading to abuse".
But the ministry's chief legal advisor Rupert Ablett-Hampson would not release the finalised details, saying it could lead to the identification of victims who might publicise that they had received settlements within a particular bracket.
"In particular, claimants may have put the amount they were offered and/or received from the Ministry into the public arena without anticipating the public release of information such as the category descriptions..."
He said the ministry had a "duty to the people" not to make them feel re-victimised.
Cooper said from their negotiations, the higher categories (from $30,000 up) were for clients who had been seriously sexually and/or physically abused.
MSD was pushing however, for physical abuse to be at a level requiring hospitalisation – "something we argued against as many were not given any treatment by those in whose care they were placed", Cooper said.
"The highest category required prolonged abuse of that nature, whereas the third category required only a few incidents of that kind.
"Less serious sexual abuse was covered by category four, along with what MSD defined as less serious physical assaults by staff."
Cooper said it was unclear whether any sexual assaults by others in care were covered - one of a number of concerns that could not be alleviated unless the ministry released the category details.
The documents also outlined the process by which the ministry intended to "moderate" the claims.
Ministry officials advised Social Development Minister Anne Tolley that settlements had to be in line with payments that had been made in the past, to be fair.
But Cooper said she could only interpret that as meaning "MSD will have to artificially deflate the categories of many of the claims to fit within the model of payments for past claimants".
It made a "mockery of the process" that the ministry was assessing abuse for which its own carers were responsible for, with no outside input.
"It is worse than the old process in many ways, as parts of the claim (like practice failures) will not be taken into account at all, and MSD will arbitrarily slot a claim into a category, based on what previous claimants have received, while all the time purporting to make payments on the basis of accepting what the claimant has said occurred to them in care."
