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Allegations
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Tokanui's buildings
still stand as a testament to the former psychiatric institution which closed
eight years ago. Was it a place of healing or of horror? As an exhibition
covering its history opens, former staff and patients talk to Kate Monahan
and Lester Thorley. -------------------- PHILLIP LONGLEY
remembers the exact date he first entered Tokanui. He was 13 years old when
his doctor admitted him to the psychiatric hospital on January 15, 1976. Longley, who has autism
and asperger's syndrome, spent six months in B Ward. It was a terrible time.
He says many unpleasant things happened, including abuse between patients. "I thought it
would be a nicer place, but after I was admitted it turned out to be a nasty
place," he says, clasping his hands. He was overmedicated by
a charge nurse for being disruptive. "I slept for nearly 24 hours. I
wish they wouldn't have done that," he says. "In those days, no one
recognised autism." Longley, now 43, has
been in and out of boys' homes and psychiatric hospitals, including Lake
Alice and Kingseat. But he now lives
independently in his own flat in Hamilton, supported by the Richmond
Fellowship. This week, he is looking ahead as well as back. Neatly dressed in a
grey suit, hair slicked back, he talks about his plans for Christmas -- a
barbecue or perhaps dinner out. He loves get-togethers,
and pronounces himself "a bit of a foodie". Last week, a Richmond
staff member was treated to a tuna pasta dish at Longley's home, and he's
considering a cheese evening. As for Tokanui:
"There were some good times, parties and ward functions, sports days and
swimming sports, but most of the time I didn't like it. We were put into
locked rooms every night. There were no potties or buckets." If patients needed to
go to the bathroom? "They ignored our cries." A SHORT drive away, off
SH3 south of Te Awamutu, the place that holds such troubling memories for
Longley stands eerily quiet, a crumbling monument to a time when psychiatric
patients were kept far from the public view in institutions whose legacy is
still contested. Tokanui, which opened
in 1912, had more than 1200 patients in its heyday, employing hundreds of
people from around the district. Many people living in the area know someone
who worked there. But eight years after
it closed in 1998 there is no sign of human life among the sprawling
buildings. Sometimes the site is
used as a military training site by army territorials. A security guard lives
on site, and visitors are kept out by high fences, locks and chains. Inside the fence, the
swimming pool contains only leaves. Dying vines climb up brick walls, and
faded signs direct no one. Boards cover several broken windows, and through
others, empty wards can be seen. Overturned beds with springs exposed are the
only thing remaining in B Ward, where Longley once stayed. B Ward also evokes the
past for Felicity Saxby, who ran group therapy sessions there. "Are there echoes
for you?" she asks on a return visit this week. "There are echoes
for me. I see people everywhere." Saxby, 74, moved to
Tokanui from the UK with husband John in 1966. The charismatic English couple
worked there until the early 1990s when the hospital began to wind down --
she as a psychotherapist and he as a psychiatrist and later medical
superintendent. They lived next door in
a house they built, with their four children, Ned, Fritha, Blithe and Halcyon,
a house she sold six years ago to move to Te Awamutu. "It is where the
Saxbys grew up and where two died," she says. John committed suicide in
1993 while still working at Tokanui, and daughter Fritha, who died aged 25,
had her tangi there. The hospital took a
wide range of patients, from acute psychiatric to the depressed, to
psychopedic (intellectually handicapped) or people brain damaged through
accidents. There were others there
who perhaps shouldn't have been, people who fell through the cracks in
society. Drug addicts, social welfare children with nowhere else to go,
borderline normal people who may once have been admitted for a reason, but
continued long after they should have been discharged. It was a ragtag
community of sorts, a village. Patients worked on the farm, tending pigs and
milking cows, or picked fruit in the orchards. There was a store, a chapel,
and a pa down the road. There were no security fences: patients wandered
around the grounds, and the wider community wandered in, with kids riding
bikes or swimming in the hospital pool. Saxby spent a lot of
time at B Ward, the red brick building which opened in 1925 and stood between
the shop and dispensary. "They (the
patients) were intelligent, highly unpredictable, disturbed, from dysfunctional
lives and families, and they were delightful people," she says fondly.
"It was great fun, but they acted oddly. You never knew what was going
to happen next. One minute there would be cream buns flying through the air,
people jumping out of windows, and then everyone would have a group
hug." Healing techniques were
progressive, she says. They developed new services for teenagers, for
survivors of sexual abuse, and Maori patients. John helped develop the Maori
cultural ward, Whaiora, based on Maori protocol, innovative for its time. The
staff were 50 per cent pakeha, 50 per cent Maori. The therapy in B Ward
was based on psycho-drama -- re-enacting of traumatic events to promote
healing, and tended to be for the less fragile patients. "Our end was loose,
free and reasonably autonomous," says Saxby. "Clients formulated
their own programmes." She freely admits to
hitting two patients. One woman accused her of only coming to work for the
money. Saxby knocked her to the floor, literally putting her in her place.
"It was a highly tense environment," she explains. In the other incident,
a patient during a group therapy session got "stuck" recalling a
traumatic moment, stopped breathing and become red in the face. "He
started turning purple. I thought he was going to have a stroke," says
Saxby. "I leapt across the room -- and pow. And he took a breath. I was
a scary moment, but someone had to do something." Saxby recalls taking
patients to the swimming pool twice a week, ferrying a bunch of them in an
old tractor and trailer, with her two-year-old daughter in tow.
"Three-quarters of them learnt to swim." Occasionally patients
would make a break for it. "I don't think anyone was frightened of them.
We'd just pick them up and take them back." ROBYN KLOS, chief
executive of IHC vocational service Gracelands, looks out the window of her
Teasdale St office in Te Awamutu, a worried expression on her face. Two
blocks away, across Victoria Park, is the Tokanui exhibition at Te Awamutu
Museum. "My concern is it
will be an attempt to glorify the institution," says Klos. She worked as an
occupational therapist at Tokanui for four years, on the psychopedic side,
and she's not a fan. "From a patient's
perspective, it was the most disempowering, disrespectful place. People were
in a dorm of 18 people. If someone was upset, no one got any sleep," she
says. "They were bathed in groups. They might have had an intellectual
disability -- we thought the clients didn't know, but how did we know? She has horror stories.
"To this day I have visions of people tied into potty chairs, waiting.
By the time they were attended to they had eaten their faeces." Klos describes an
unstimulating environment, of clients not being taught basic social skills,
so when Tokanui closed, they weren't ready to cope with the world. "On the street,
some would hug people they didn't know, or poke them. In the swimming pool,
they didn't know not to take their togs off in public." She was brought in by
IHC and Tokanui to manage a workshop encouraging clients to get jobs in the
community. It was the beginning of what would become Gracelands, established
as a trust in 1990, in which hundreds of clients are supported, working in
the community -- in car yards, at a popcorn factory, at McDonald's. "We have
a clear set of values about how people are treated, and respect is
everything." Klos is at pains to
point out Tokanui had good staff who went the extra mile, but she says it was
"quite an abusive environment . . . client on client. There were fights among
clients all the time." People were locked up, or on cocktails of
medication, she says. "People who played up were seen as badly behaved,
whereas today you would say, `they are communicating -- what are they trying
to say?'." She says many
inappropriate patients ended up there. "There were two brothers in
there. One was IHC the other was normal. The mother couldn't cope," she
says. There was nowhere for them to go, so the brother was also taken in.
Soon he stopped talking, shut down completely, she says. She continues to deal
with patients affected by Tokanui. One man, 20 years out in the world, still
wears a cord with a bundle of keys attached. "Because in Tokanui, keys
meant power," says Klos. "They are a symbol to him." FOR all the problems,
Klos acknowledges Tokanui "was the model of the day, no better or worse
than any of the others". Other psychiatric
institutions included Lake Alice (near Wanganui), Cherry Farm (Dunedin),
Kingseat (South Auckland), Porirua, Sunnyside (Christchurch), Oakley (Auckland)
and Ngawhatu (Nelson). Many are now closed, like Tokanui, in the wake of the
1998 Mason Report, which gave impetus to the move towards community care. Tokanui Hospital has
not been caught up in historical complaints levelled at some of the others. In total, more than 300
former patients, from psychiatric hospitals from Auckland to Otago, have
alleged abuse. The Government has paid out $10.7 million to 183 people, but
has refused to hold an inquiry. It apologised and paid
out $6.5 million in compensation in 2001 to 95 former Lake Alice patients
over allegations of ill-treatment and sexual abuse by staff and other
patients. Complaints are still being investigated at Lake Alice and Porirua. KEVIN, from Centre 401
Trust in Tristram St, knows about both sides of mental health. He is a
manager of the centre, which offers peer support and services to people with
psychiatric problems. He was also a patient
at Tokanui, admitted four times for a psychiatric disorder he declines to
name, between 1976 and 1991. Eleven months was the longest period he spent
there. The experience was isolating. It was a toll call to ring out, even to
Hamilton, and if you didn't have the money, you were unable to call home. "The charge nurse
was a god, the sergeant major. There were matrons. It was: `You're here.
You're housed. You will do as you are told.' "In general, I had
a reasonably good run. I got what I needed, but I saw things," says
Kevin. "The way people were treated. You are powerless, and if you try
to intervene. . ." he tails off. You had to look after number one. He says one of the
saddest things was the patients who shouldn't have been there, like the man
who ran the piggery. "He won all these prizes for pigs," says
Kevin. "When it closed this guy had nothing to do. If this guy was so
good at running a pig farm, what was he doing here? Some kind of mental
illness brought you in here, but I used to wonder, does years and years in
this place keep you crazy? "I still know
people who are unravelling what happened there." Some are concerned
mental health patients in the community now may be living alone, isolated and
lonely. Kevin laughs this off. "I know people who are full-time
employed, married, and they are the most lonely people I know. Why does
society think, house them all together to stop them being lonely? It's a
crock." There are plenty of
support services, he says. People need only look in the blue section at the
front of the phone book, under mental health services and hospitals. Kevin recalls the rats,
mice, birds and possums which lived in the buildings. Dead birds falling out
of the ceiling, maggots falling on a pa- tient's head. During
Desert Storm, when US troops invaded Iraq in 1991, he remembers keeping a
tally of tanks and crafts knocked out on the day-room whiteboard. At the same
time, he and another patient went attacked the in-house rat population.
"By the end of it, we exceeded the number of tanks. I'm not joking.
Every place will get rats, it's part of where you live, but it's never acceptable
in health services. Somehow, out there the standard was less." BOB ELLIOTT, a former
nurse at Tokanui, remembers a time when electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) was
administered in open dormitories, simply by moving a machine from bed to bed.
The patient in the last bed would hear and see all the others being treated. "That system
didn't last very long, thank goodness," he says. Later patients were
given ECT in privacy, often under sedation. Though it is
controversial, Elliott says ECT worked for some patients. He recalls one who
came in suffering severe psychosis, completely unresponsive. Doctors gave him
ECT twice a day -- most patients were given one dose. After the third day the
patient came round and said "where am I?", and was able to go home
two days later. "As he was leaving
he said `Bob, if I come in again like that, give me shock treatment',"
Elliott says. Elliott left the
hospital in 1996, and is now a staff member at Te Runanga O Kirikiriroa Trust
in Frankton, where he helps with mental health programmes. He has largely fond
memories of Tokanui: children from the kids' ward enjoying a picnic; people
hard at work in occupational therapy; laughter in the canteen or at the pool;
local organisations who adopted wards bringing afternoon tea treats. "For some people,
Tokanui was their home, and staff were their families to some extent." As a child, he grew up
on a farm over the road from the hospital and occasionally watched patient
escapees run across the farm, pursued by Tokanui staff. He went on to work
there for 31 years on land taken from his whanau in 1908. Today, the whanau is
part of the Manga Maniapoto Research Committee which has a claim over the
Tokanui site. The title was vested in the Office of Treaty Settlements in
2000. Elliott and other
descendants of the Te Haate family want their land back. Their claim was
supposed to be heard two years ago -- they are still waiting, Elliott says. "I'm looking
forward to it coming back to my family. Soon would be good. It's almost 100 years
now since it was taken." LIKE Kevin, Phillip
Longley was in and out of Tokanui over the years. In 1979 he was in Ward 7,
which took acute admissions, and he also spent time in A Ward, for long-term
patients, and the secure Ward 2. In December 1997 the
ward he was in closed down and he moved to Hamilton's Henry Rongomau Bennett
Centre at Waikato Hospital. "I was sad at the time, tearful,
emotional," he says. "But today I'm glad it's closed down. I think
it's better to be in the community. It's a much better place to live than
being shut up in a mental institution." Now he works part time
at Fulton Hogan two days a week, cleaning up around the site. He is also an
advocate for the Autism Association, and will attend the national conference
in Wellington later this year. Longley sings bass in
his church choir and paints landscapes. One of his paintings hangs in a
corridor wall at the Richmond Fellowship's Hamilton centre on north Victoria
St. Like an allegory of his life, it shows the grey peaks of mountains
against a high blue sky, with bold red and orange strokes of an emerging sun
rising behind one peak. ------------------------------
A HOSPITAL'S PAST Tokanui opened in July
1912 -- just one wooden building with two staff and a handful of male psychiatric
patients. The first patients transferred from Porirua Hospital, arriving by
train, and were marched to Tokanui. Female patients arrived
in 1915, and by 1920, five wards had been opened and a doctor was on site. Buildings were added
every few years, including the iconic two-storey brick wards in the late
1920s, and a recreation hall in the 1940s. In 1941, the patient population
was 738, and by 1943 it had shot up to 1008. In its heyday in the 1960s,
Tokanui was one of the largest psychiatric institutions in the country with
more than 1200 patients, and hundreds of employees. The chapel was built in
1962, the swimming pool in 1968. By 1981, there were 740
in-patients and 900 staff. By the end of 1997, when the hospital was winding
down to closure, there were 150 psychiatric and 165 intellectually disabled
patients. Henry Bennett, a key
figure at Tokanui, was medical superintendent from 1964 to 1984. He battled
to get money to improve patients' conditions and later helped write the 1988
Mason Report, in which serious deficiencies were revealed in New Zealand's
mental health services. The decision was made to close Tokanui soon after it
was released. In the 1990s, as mental
health evolved to independence in the community, the writing was on the wall
for big psychiatric institutions. Some of Tokanui's old brick buildings were
demolished. By late 1997, patients were being moved from Tokanui to a new
Waikato Hospital psychiatric ward -- named after Henry Bennett -- or
community housing, and Tokanui closed in 1998, after 86 years. The hospital's 91.8ha,
taken from Maori under the Public Works Act in 1908, is subject to two
Waitangi Tribunal claims. -------------------- CAPTION: ECHOES OF THE PAST:
Felicity Saxby outside B Ward, where she ran group therapy sessions. PICTURE:
Mark Taylor PHILLIP LONGLEY:
Tokanui "turned out to be a nasty place" when he was admitted as a
13-year-old. PICTURE: Kelly Schicker ROBYN KLOS: Damning of
Tokanui. |
