The New Zealand government released the results today of a Royal Commission of Inquiry,
the highest investigatory body of the government, into child abuse from 1950-2019 in various institutions in the country, including religious care facilities, foster care institutions,
and psychiatric hospitals.

     The most egregious crimes against young children and adolescents occurred at the Lake Alice Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Lake Alice, Manawatū-Whanganui, New Zealand. Despite it being a psychiatric facility, most of the children admitted to Lake Alice did not have a mental illness. The Department of Social Welfare records showed that 60% of admissions were for “behavioral” problems, and many of the children simply came from
disadvantaged communities. Their mean age was thirteen years old.

     Former patients of the hospital’s child and adolescent units revealed to the commission that the abuse they endured during the 1970s included being punished by electroconvulsive therapy without anesthetics and being injected with paralyzing drugs such as paraldehyde (a central nervous system depressant). These young patients were also frequently victims of sexual assault on their ward.

     All of the children who were shocked, drugged or sexually abused named the same perpetrator, Dr. Selwyn Leeks, the lead psychiatrist of the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit.

     Leeks administered electric shocks to them for minor infractions such as passing wind, being anti-social, being picky about food, “being in a world of his own,” “showing off in front of the girls in class,” annoying others during work periods, and being argumentative, the Lake Alice medical records show.

     Leeks would use electroconvulsive shock treatments as punishment for what he termed “aversion therapy,” and he applied the electrodes not just to the temples, but also to the children’s breasts, groins and genitals. He also required some young residents to administer shocks to their peers and he forced others to watch while their mates were being shocked.

     When the first of these children’s allegation about him became public in the 1970s, he dismissed them as coming from “bottom-of-the-barrel kids” who had been lying. Leeks’ unit at Lake Alice had opened in 1972 and over the next six years admitted between 400 and 450 children and adolescents. The unit permanently closed in 1980, but Leeks had already moved to Australia to continue practicing. In August 2006 Leeks was ordered to pay a $55,000 in damages for sexually assaulting a former patient. The victim said that Leeks had told her that complaining would be futile.

     “You’re a long-term psychiatric patient and no one will believe you,” he said.

     In 2023 more evidence of his abuse was uncovered, but he was by then 92 and was deemed medically unfit for trial. In 2020 a United Nations committee labeled Leeks’ acts at Lake Alice “torture.” This sad story of an institution originally created to help the unfit and the disadvantaged being turned into a psychiatric torture chamber is not unique.

     Lake Alice had opened in August, 1950, and its therapeutic rural setting included its own farm, workshop, bakery, laundry, swimming pools, glasshouses, and vegetable gardens. These facilities could be used for the original nineteenth century “moral therapy” concept of work and worthy endeavor being used as part of the therapy for resident patients.

     Like many similar, charitable institutions around the world which had evolved from the community almshouses of the previous centuries, the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit in New Zealand was intended to be a sanctuary for care and healing. However, like many other once benign institutions for the public good – the word “asylum” means sanctuary, in fact – these facilities became mental hospitals.

     Psychiatrists now controlled populations of vulnerable, unprotected people, and these too often sadistic “doctors” were now free to unleash the brutality of their insulin shock therapies, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive shocks on the innocent victims without oversight.

     No one would see, no one would hear, and psychiatry could experiment on or, worse, simply destroy these poor souls without interference.