CCHR joins survivors of electroshock torture in NZ in condemning a very late apology issued by a psychiatric association, spanning half a century of neglecting the abuse endured. The group wants justice for victims of similar abuse in the U.S.

By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
February 23, 2024

The U.S.-based Citizens Commission on Human Rights International joined former child victims of psychiatric electroshock torture in New Zealand in rejecting a very late apology from the local psychiatric association for failing to protect them.[1] The mental health industry watchdog has been at the forefront of the campaign to ban electroshock use and helped its chapter in New Zealand to expose the torture of children at the now-closed Lake Alice psychiatric institution in the 1970s. After more than 50 years, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) formally apologized last week to the survivors for the abuse they endured. Advocating for justice, CCHR demands a more sincere apology, rigorous accountability, and rightful compensation for the survivors not only in New Zealand but also for those brutally treated with electroshock in the U.S.

The RANZCP apologized for the “torturous actions carried out and directed by psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks,”[2] a member of the College who was responsible for electroshocking children without anesthetic, including to their legs and genitals.[3] Leeks died in January 2022, aged 92.[4] Eleven months later, only then did the College posthumously rescind his fellowship with it.[5]

In 2021, the Lake Alice survivors were granted a Royal Commission—the highest form of government inquiry in New Zealand—to testify about the terror and trauma they still suffer from their 1970s treatment. In December 2022, the Commission confirmed the hospital had been a place of misery, neglect, terror, fear and torment.[6] Despite the lapse in time, there are now recommendations that the survivors be adequately compensated.  

Recent local media reported, “Vulnerable children in the adolescent unit at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital faced unimaginable abuse. They were drugged, punished with electric shocks and subjected to physical and sexual assaults.”[7]

Dozens of survivors and their supporters, including CCHR New Zealand’s director Mike Ferriss, heard from the RANZCP president Elizabeth Moore. “On behalf of the college, and on behalf of psychiatry I am deeply sorry,” Moore told the group. “Oh this is just bulls***, what a load of crap,” said someone in the audience. Some of the survivors called the very late statement of professional regret “hollow lip service and a fairy tale apology.”[8]

In the full written apology released to the media, the RANZCP wrote “We know the courageous attempts to raise concerns by young, vulnerable people detained at Lake Alice were ignored.”

Australian psychiatrist Niall McLaren has been outspoken about the RANZCP for years and his response to the College’s Lake Alice “apology” is refreshing and applauded. The following are but a few of his comments from his blog (italics added as emphasis):

• He cites the New Zealand Government report on its Royal Commission inquiry into Lake Alice released about two years ago and entitled: “Beautiful Children: inquiry into the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit.” He points to Selwyn Leeks stating that he “instituted and oversaw a program of grotesque mental, physical and sexual abuse of children and adolescents who had been committed to the unit. In 2020, the United Nations Committee against Torture found their prolonged mistreatment amounted to torture. That’s an important decision. It establishes (yet again) that torture is what the victim says it is, not what the perpetrator claims to have had in mind: torture is as torture does….”

• “The executive summary of the report starts on page 34 and there is a timeline on page 40 (both fairly brief). While the entire report should be compulsory reading for all workers in mental health/social welfare/prisons, etc., everybody should look at these parts at least, as they show two very important points. First, that these ghastly matters should not only take place, but they did so with strong support and enthusiasm of practically all the staff involved…Second, it’s not just that nobody with the power to do something about it lifted a finger, but everybody went out of their way to conceal it, at the time it was happening and for decades after. That is what the RANZCP needs to explain, and that is what the ‘apology’ doesn’t touch.”

• “The institution of psychiatry was well aware of these matters by 1975 at the latest but carefully and discreetly understated and obfuscated them, handing the NZ police the license they needed to continue doing nothing. From the underwhelming reaction to Dr Moore’s apology, it would appear that nothing much has changed. One thing is crystal clear: the claim by the RANZCP that it couldn’t act until after the egregiously sadistic psychiatrist, Selwyn Leeks, had died, is patently false. They act when it suits them, and sit on their hands when that’s more convenient.”

• “In her ‘apology,’ Dr Moore said: ‘We are committed to people receiving the best mental health care, guided by evidence and expertise. The barbaric abuse conducted by Leeks at Lake Alice was not psychiatry of any form. It is not and never will be condoned. That this harm occurred at all, under the guise of treatment, is a travesty.’        

• “Fine words, but why did it arise and, more important, what is there to stop something similar in the future? It arose, she intimated, because Leeks was working in isolation. Isolation like that wouldn’t happen these days because psychiatrists work in teams with ‘ongoing training and development.’ Actually, he wasn’t isolated. He was only 50km from Palmerston North [city] and also went to a number of other centers and institutions. He was in sufficient contact with other psychiatrists for at least one of them to testify on his behalf, that all the complaints couldn’t possibly be true and that his ‘treatment’ was, if not entirely standard, then certainly in keeping with modern trends.”

• Dr. McLaren gave an example of his work “in West Australia (well before the internet), where he was isolated. In that time, not one person from the [West Australian] Health Dept or the RANZCP contacted me to conduct any sort of audit, to offer any support or advice or show any interest. If I’d been eaten by a crocodile, they would have been more inclined to ask how the crocodile was coping.”

• “Dr Moore continued: ‘There are robust, safe channels for external reporting.’ Indeed there are, but who stands guard at the gate? That’s right, the very psychiatrists whose close friends are the subject of the complaint. ‘Complaints,’ she intoned, ‘are not lost or ignored.’ Really?” 

• “…Complaints are accepted and investigated entirely on the whim of the tight little group whose members are the subjects of the complaints. That was absolutely true of the Lake Alice disaster, where the victims’ complaints were dismissed because they were naughty children complaining about the lovely doctor, and it is true everywhere.”

• “So back to the crucial questions: Why did it arise, and what is there to stop it happening again? It arose at Lake Alice because of the same old combination of circumstances: a sadistic person with total legal control over a group of defenseless young people in an isolated setting….”

• “What is there to stop another Lake Alice? In one word, nothing. The institution of psychiatry has convinced itself that the problem was a single rotten apple and there was nothing wrong with their barrel. Moore said: ‘The barbaric abuse conducted by Leeks at Lake Alice was not psychiatry of any form.’ But that, as she well knew, is absolutely false. It is the very institution of psychiatry that lends itself to these and so many other abuses. As everybody who has been on the receiving end of ‘psychiatric treatment’ knows, the legal machinery is in place and there is nothing to restrain it: the prison has been built so that nobody can see inside, so don’t pretend to be shocked when bad things happen. I suggest that particular evasion was what so angered the audience at her carefully-stage[d] little ‘apology.’”

• “She continued: ‘There must never be a repeat of Lake Alice.’ But it will happen again, and again and again, perhaps not so crude as sticking an electric jigger on teenage boys’ nuts but human ingenuity has no limits. It will happen again for exactly the same reason that the ‘barbaric abuse’ (Dr Moore’s expression) called psychosurgery happened, that the Deep Sleep and Ward 10B (Townsville [hospital, Queensland] scandals and so many others happened, just because psychiatry has no theory of mind or model of mental disorder to say ‘This is the limit. Go no further down that path.’ To pretend otherwise, as the President and Board of the RANZCP did, goes beyond mere hypocrisy into the realm of fantasy, if not frank deception.”

• “I have used this quote by Nobel Laureate Peter Medawar before but it’s apposite [apt in the circumstance]: ‘(The) author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that, before deceiving others, he has taken great pains to deceive himself.’”

CCHR says there is a growing trend for psychiatric associations to apologize for everything from psychiatrists’ role in the Holocaust euthanasia murders of mental patients and eugenics to racism. In January 2021, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) issued a formal apology for what it said was psychiatry’s “role in perpetrating structural racism” and that psychiatrists had subjected indigenous people to “abusive treatment, experimentation, victimization in the name of ‘scientific evidence,’….” APA said it had “historically remained silent on these issues.”[9]

In 2010, Prof. Frank Schneider, President of the German psychiatric association broke the society’s 70-year silence and apologized for Nazi psychiatrists who had forced patients “to be sterilized, arranged their deaths and even performed killings themselves.” Patients were killed in the gas chambers, from lethal doses of drugs or by prescribed starvation.[10]

Some psychiatric associations, however, have not been so forthcoming. For example, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which in 1997 investigated apartheid crimes, reported that the South African Society of Psychiatrists “did not play a proactive role in ensuring that the human rights of mentally ill people were upheld” during apartheid.[11] A UN report had concluded that the society had resorted to “blatant falsehood in its defense of South African psychiatric care.”[12] Black patients were warehoused in privately owned institutions, electroshocked without anesthetic, and used for unpaid labor. According to a 1983 World Health Organization report, “This situation has no parallel in the history and present state of psychiatric care; it certainly does have a parallel in the ownership and trading of slaves.” The report further stated that “in no other medical field in South Africa is the contempt of the person, cultivated by racism, more concisely portrayed than in psychiatry.”[13]

CCHR says more than just apologies are needed and they must also be given without added platitudes about how conditions have “changed.” The RANZCP apology drew harsh criticism when it added, “We are committed to people receiving the best mental health care, guided by evidence and expertise” and “Now, psychiatrists work transparently and collaboratively, in teams, with supervision, and ongoing training and development.”

However, a recent WHO and United Nations guideline clearly shows there is ongoing abuse, stating: “Coercion remains a core component of existing mental health laws across jurisdictions and is a major concern.” Such practices include “involuntary hospitalization, involuntary medication, involuntary electroconvulsive therapy, seclusion, and physical, chemical and mechanical restraint.” These “violate the right to be protected from torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment….” and should be prohibited.[14]

To prevent the abuse of patients, the guideline says access to justice is “essential to accountability.” Bypassing colleges and associations who may put reputation above protecting patients or admitting to their abuse, implementation of the guideline would allow “persons interacting with mental health services to challenge human rights violations and to enforce rights, including the right to an effective remedy…. Effective remedies also entail the duty to investigate and bring to justice those who are responsible, to hold them to account, combat impunity and prevent repetition of violations.”[15]

In the meantime, CCHR continues to call for all electroshock treatment to be prohibited, with its most recent protest held on February 22 outside an American College of Psychiatrists’ convention held in New Orleans. Report abuse to CCHR.

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[1] “Lake Alice survivors react to apology from Royal Australia New Zealand College of Psychiatrists,” Newshub, 20 Feb. 2024, https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2024/02/lake-alice-survivors-react-to-apology-from-royal-australia-new-zealand-college-of-psychiatrists.html 

[2] https://www.ranzcp.org/news-analysis/apology-to-the-survivors-of-lake-alice

[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2022/12/30/lake-alice-psychiatric-hospital-children-were-tortured/; https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/royal-commission-of-inquiry-into-state-care-finds-lake-alice-children-were-tortured/ZB3EVQL765ATLMDKSX6XHSTXEA/

[4] “Why a key figure at Lake Alice was not charged,” Stuff NZ, 3 Sept. 2023, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/rnz/300963742/why-a-key-figure-at-lake-alice-was-not-charged

[5] https://www.ranzcp.org/news-analysis/apology-to-the-survivors-of-lake-alice

[6] Op. cit., Newshub, 20 Feb. 2024 

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/01/26/american-psychiatric-associations-apology-for-harming-african-americans-rejected/ citing Megan Brooks, “APA Apologizes for Past Support of Racism in Psychiatry,” Medscape, 19 Jan 2019, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/944352?src=wnl_edit_tpal&uac=345404PY&impID=3143084&faf=1; “APA’s Apology to Black, Indigenous and People of Colorfor Its Support of Structural Racism in Psychiatry,” 18 Jan. 2021, https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/apa-apology-for-its-support-of-structural-racism

[10] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/01/26/american-psychiatric-associations-apology-for-harming-african-americans-rejected/, citing “Psychiatry under National Socialism – Remembrance and Responsibility,” Speech by Prof. Frank Schneider, Nov. 2020, https://www.dgppn.de/en/Core-areas/psychiatry-in-time-of-National-Socialism/speech-schneider.html#0; Frank Schneider, M.D., “Psychiatry under National Socialism: Remembrance and Responsibility,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Volume 261, Article number: 111 (2011), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-011-0243-1; “Registered, persecuted, annihilated: the sick and the disabled under National Socialism,” DGPPN, https://www.dgppn.de/en/Core-areas/psychiatry-in-time-of-National-Socialism/travelling-exhibition.html; https://www.dgppn.de/en/Core-areas/psychiatry-in-time-of-National-Socialism/stations-of-the-exhibition-1.html

[11] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. 4, 29 Oct. 1998, pp. 149-152, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%204.pdf

[12] “The Case for South Africa’s Expulsion from International Psychiatry,” United Nations Centre Against Apartheid report, May 1984

[13] “Apartheid and Health,” WHO report (Geneva) 1983, pp. 166-248

[14] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/09/18/who-guideline-condemns-coercive-psychiatric-practices/, pages 13, 15 of guideline

[15] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/09/18/who-guideline-condemns-coercive-psychiatric-practices/, page 29 of guideline