MELBOURNE, Australia, March 13, 1999 — This article was originally published in Australia's The Age, March 13, 1999. It is reprinted here with permission.

Stephen McMahon† was just 13 when he was first given shock therapy at Lake Alice Hospital. For him and others, the pain lingers.

McMahon was anxious as he sat in the small reception room waiting for the man who had haunted him for about 20 years. A week before he had phoned the man’s psychiatric practice only to be told he needed a referral. Undeterred, he got one, and now was about to confront the man who had stolen his childhood, his life, and still seemed to infect his very being.

At last the door opened and a tall, elderly man stepped out and, in a very gentle voice, told him to come into his surgery. At that instant, as far as McMahon was concerned, anything was possible.

YOU WON’T FEEL A THING

In the mid-1970s, Stephen McMahon, a 13-year-old with a passion for music and the local brass band, was living near the provincial university town of Palmerston North in New Zealand. He and his stepfather were fighting. One day he came home from school and found his mother packing his bags. “You’re going on a holiday,” she said. But instead of going to an aunt’s place as he expected, McMahon was taken on a 90-minute drive to Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital.

As he drove into this large property far from anywhere, he saw market gardens and rows of dormitories painted a dull yellow. A barbed wire fence surrounded a big maximum security facility.

The car stopped outside villa 11, a two-storey dormitory for adolescent boys. This would be his home for the next three years.

Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital was used, it appears, by local Department of Welfare staff as a place of last resort for children too unruly for their families or welfare organisations to accommodate. Many had fled families that had abused them sexually and physically. Others came from boy’s homes or welfare supervision.

On the surface, Lake Alice looked just the thing — fresh air and space aplenty, a school, dorms … a village for boys.

McMahon arrived on a Friday and early that afternoon found himself in villa 11’s day room with about 15 other boys, aged between 10 and 16. Most were crying and shaking with fear. No one could explain what was happening. Someone said something about a Kombi van.

Twenty minutes later, after a tall man, the doctor, had parked his cream Kombi by the front door, two male nurses dragged a hysterical boy up a short flight of stairs. Horrible screams followed, then silence. The nurses then picked another boy and the same thing happened. When it was his turn, McMahon walked up the stairs, not knowing what to expect.

He was pushed and held down on a bed by three male nurses. A tall, softly-spoken man was at the foot of the bed.

“You won’t feel a thing,” he said assuringly. McMahon felt a wet cloth sponging his temples, a thick rubber gag was shoved into his mouth, water ran down his ears.

“Just relax, it won’t hurt a bit,” the man said. Suddenly, incredible pain, like sledgehammers belting his head, shot through him. The water on his neck was getting hot.

He awoke on the same bed with the gag hanging from his mouth. Someone helped him into an adjacent bathroom. He was being washed in a bath by an older boy. Before long, though semi-conscious, he realised the boy was rubbing his genitals.

After all these years, a former patient still remembers the impact on McMahon of unmodified electro-convulsive therapy — that is therapy without anaesthetic or muscle relaxants.

“I had never seen anyone change so much after going through this treatment. It seemed that his spirit and enthusiasm was gone,” he says.

McMahon’s recollections of his experiences at Lake Alice Hospital, under the head of the adolescent unit, Dr. Selwyn Leeks, are identical to those of other former patients.

One hundred former Lake Alice patients, including McMahon, have made statements to lawyers for a class action that is to be filed in New Zealand against the Government and Leeks. About 70 of these statements detail, often vividly and emotionally, incidents in which electro-convulsive therapy was given as a punishment for things like smoking or answering back.

Another common punishment involved injections of paraldehyde, a sedative and anti-convulsive drug that is extremely painful when given. Nursing notes from the time support claims that the treatments were used to discipline the boys.

Electro-convulsive therapy, which involves electric currents jolting the brain into convulsions, is used today for severe depression once drugs and other therapies are exhausted. It is not generally applied to children. Unmodified ECT, as was used at Lake Alice, is not accepted practice with children or adults.

DO YOU BUM, BOY?

Today McMahon is 40 and lives with his partner in a cramped and stuffy bungalow at the back of a house in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. He doesn’t do much. He has been unable to hold a job and survives on an invalid pension. He says he has an anti-social personality.

He is articulate and intelligent and has a sense of humor, but in the day-to-day matters of life, like organising loans and jobs or dealing with people in authority, he is hopeless.

He tenses up and says he can’t get Lake Alice out of his mind. His anxieties are triggered when he sees a Kombi van, or a segment on TV, or people who look like friends from Lake Alice. He suffers deep throbbing pain in his temples where the electrodes were clasped and on his arms and legs where shocks and injections were given, more than 20 years ago.

The scars of Lake Alice remain for other former patients.

They say they can not trust anyone, can not deal with authority figures such as doctors. Like McMahon, they have nightmares about receiving shock therapy.

“I’ll never know what it’s like to be real happy. A lot of my feelings seem like they have been torn out. That place really destroyed me,” says “Peter,” 42 in his statement for the class action.

“John,” 39, says: “You can cut yourself and it will heal but there is still going to be a scar there and Lake Alice definitely left that.”

Christopher Zaal was in Lake Alice for three years. He says he got to the stage he just wanted to huddle inside himself. Sexually abused by his father most of his life, he later was caught experimenting with another boy at high school and was taken to the hospital. There, he says, he was sexually abused by staff.

Zaal has since spent time in prison for sexual offences against boys. Now 41 and married, he says: “I haven’t been able to work full-time for so long I can’t remember, not without looking over my shoulder, being absolutely paranoid … let alone working in an environment that’s got fluorescent lights going, or the hum of it so close to the hum of the ECT machine. You don’t trust the system, you don’t trust authority, you don’t trust doctors, you trust hardly anybody because of it.”

Like Zaal, others have spent time in prison for sexual offences and cite sexual assault at Lake Alice in their statements. McMahon says he was assaulted sexually by two nurses. “One staff member used to push his knuckles into our temples and rub them hard, and ask us, ‘Do you bum, boy?’”

In the early 1990s, McMahon, by now living in Melbourne, tried to track down Leeks. He rang medical boards around the world.

Then one day he discovered the psychiatrist was working less than 30 minutes drive from his place. He wasn’t sure what to do with that knowledge. But he did think he might do something he could regret.

THE NATIONAL GRID

At Lake Alice, Fridays were known as black Friday, and electro-convulsive therapy was known by the boys as “riding the thunderbolt,” “zappedy zap” or “the national grid.” The patients — the boys — sat in the day room waiting for Leeks’s white Kombi van to turn up. Some of them urinated or defecated in their pants through fear.

Before the psychiatrist arrived, the boys, including those about to get shocked, had to set up and plug in the grey ECT machine. They had to fill the stainless steel bowls with water and salt and wash dried saliva from the rubber gags. They received shocks on their temples, arms, knees and shoulders. “They would go from knee to knee with the electrodes,” McMahon recalls.

He estimates he received more than 100 shock treatments — always as punishment. He believes he was shocked more than the other boys because he was bigger and often stood up to, and at times hit out at, the staff.

“Tom,” in Lake Alice for running away from several institutions, received ECT on his knees for fighting and trying to escape from the hospital. Leeks, while preparing the shock machine, said to him: “What did I tell you last time you ran away…”

Tom recalls: “After the last incident the doctor made me hold the electrodes on my knee then made me turn the voltage dial myself. I was completely powerless to do anything. I can remember on at least two occasions being made to operate the machine myself so that I gave shocks to myself.”

“It felt like someone getting two little hammers, with sharpened ends, hitting on both sides of the knee and then as the current is turned up the tapping feels like it’s getting really fast and then all of a sudden your whole body goes stiff and it’s really painful because it’s like a cramp but it’s not a cramp…”

Chris Zaal got his first ECT for smoking. Just before it was administered, Leeks told him that smoking was not acceptable. He was never knocked out. The voltage dial was just turned up and down, till he felt as though his lungs were exploding through his ribs.

Nursing notes support the memories of the patients. One, about a boy who had three lots of ECT, says: “ECT having little effect on (name), cheeky, sadistic and evil as ever.”

In 1972, a nurse wrote: “This lad has not benefited from ECT at all. Will still take off for the toilet or any place to hide so he can smoke and when reprimanded will get very sullen.”

Other notes, dated 15 June 1973, say: “ECT by Dr Leeks, smoking once more in spite of repeated warnings.”

As well as the ECT, McMahon, like others, received “the punishment injection” of paraldehyde in his arms, legs and buttocks. Patients recall the particularly the excruciating pain it caused, and its taste, like “warm earth,” and a smell that seemed to seep from every pore soon after.

A nurse noted in March 1977: “Caught out of bounds smoking after school. Paraldehyde 1cc i/m (intramuscular) given as deterrent.” Another note about the same boy: “Reported as seen rifling through (name) jacket pockets, given i.m. paraldehyde.” Also, “given a therapeutic dose of paraldehyde 1cc for stirring other boys into argument.”

One day McMahon was asked to clean the floor and toilets of villa 11 with a toothbrush. He hesitated and was placed in a maximum security cell for 14 days. The cell was bare except for a bucket and toilet paper. On 21 July 1976, a boy was caught in an office stealing cigarettes. The notes describe his behavior as completely uncontrollable and suggest the only effective threat was seclusion. He was isolated in a cell for two days. The notes on 23 July read: “S/b (seen by) Dr Leek (sic) ECT X2 unmodified. Medication reviewed? Monthly ECT in future. (Dr Leeks) Released from seclusion at midday.”

The nursing notes provide a unique, first-hand glimpse at the culture that prevailed among some nurses at the time. They indicate a particularly disdainful attitude. One nurse expressed delight that a troublesome boy had became a most reliable stool pigeon and was very useful to staff.

Other nurses talk about boys thumbing their noses at authority, playing staff off against one another or being devious and cunning.

McMahon says one Friday Leeks instructed him and about six other boys to give ECT to a boy who had made homosexual advances towards them — the same boy who had rubbed McMahon’s genitals that first day.

“I remember I turned the dial as far as it would go to the right-hand side. I remember it was that powerful that he was screaming but no noise was coming out. I’ll never forget that. I started crying. I just remember the look on his face when I gave him the shock treatment.

“Everyone stayed in the room to watch it happen. After we all had a go, Dr Leeks finished this session on (the boy) by placing the electrodes on his genitals. We saw him pass out …”

This extraordinary story was repeated by former patients who appeared two years ago on a documentary on the 20/20 program on New Zealand television. One said: “We were taken up there one by one, filed up there and just invited to give this guy a good zap, which we did. He (Dr Leeks) was there, he was supervising the thing.”

Another former patient told 20/20: “I know of one instance where he electrocuted someone on the penis … because he was caught masturbating under the covers of his blanket at night. They especially called in Dr Leeks to give him ECT.”

Chris Zaal told The Age that he had been caught masturbating by a male nurse, and was told: “You’re in for it this time.” That Friday, he had unmodified ECT to his hand, temples and penis.

Lake Alice Hospital’s nursing notes refer to Zaal and another boy performing fellatio on one another. “Both boys were counselled by Dr Leeks and a course of ECT was given. Both boys will sleep in single locked rooms.”

“Martin,” a Lake Alice patient who did not get shock treatment or paraldehyde but did see other boys being punished this way, remembers meeting Leeks. He says Leeks told him that as a child he used to stand up on his pedals while riding his bike. His father told him to sit down, but he wouldn’t.

“One day, while he was riding like this the pedal broke and he came down on the bar of the bike. He related to me the excruciating pain and told me that he learnt a valuable lesson that day – to listen and do as you are told.”

When he was about 16, McMahon was driven by a staff member to Lower Hutt, just outside of Wellington, and directed to a YMCA hostel and a tobacco factory where he could get work. He was given $100.

“That was it,” he says.

It was an awful time. McMahon says he was scared and was withdrawing from a regime of psychiatric drugs that left him feeling sick. After several months he went to Wellington, the New Zealand capital, and lived for a time in a bus shelter.

FAIRLY DEFINITIVE TREATMENT

Disquiet about the practices at Lake Alice’s 46-bed child and adolescent unit grew in the mid-1970s with several groups, including one linked to the Church of Scientology, making public allegations about the use of ECT.

The Government ultimately conducted two inquiries into separate incidents involving ECT. Their conclusions differed, but both found that boys were given the treatment without proper authorisation.

A commission of inquiry, headed by magistrate William Mitchell reported in March 1977. It examined the case of an aggressive 13-year-old boy, originally from the Polynesian island of Niue. Mitchell resisted calls to examine the broader issue of the use of ECT on children.

His outright rejection, without any detailed examination, of claims that ECT was used as a punishment led former patients to view the inquiry as a whitewash.

In essence, Mitchell concluded that there had been no express authority by the boy’s family or social welfare officials for him to be given ECT. But once he had received it three times in November 1975, everyone knew about it and had allowed the boy to return to Lake Alice after a Christmas vacation.

Mitchell reported: “I consider that authority for his treatment can be implied from the conduct of the people concerned, both the family and the Department of Social Welfare.”

Leeks told the inquiry he understood the boy was a state ward and claimed he had discussed the boy’s treatment with welfare officers. This was denied by the officers.

On 12 December 1975, Leeks wrote a telling letter to the Department of Social Welfare about the boy. According to Leeks the boy, on admission, “appeared … to be a living memorial to the inadequacies of the immigration system in New Zealand. He behaved very much like an uncontrollable animal and immediately stole a considerable amount of staff money and stuffed it into his rectum. Incidentally, the amount of money which he had pushed into his rectum was retrieved along with a considerable amount of interest, which will be forwarded when he returns to you.”

He described how the ECT — “fairly definitive treatment” — had improved the boy’s apparently psychotic behavior. He added that the boy was a pleasant lad “who is in need of firm limitations to his ebullient behavior.”

Mitchell’s report also noted confusion about who was responsible for Leeks and the adolescent unit. It seems Leeks ran the unit without oversight and was not required to report to anybody.

About a month after Mitchell’s report, the Ombudsman, Sir Guy Powles, finished his examination of a complaint by the parents of a 15-year-old boy who also had come to the attention of the Social Welfare Department.

The boy, he concluded, was taken to Lake Alice Hospital against his parents’ wishes, and detained unlawfully. He was given unmodified ECT, against his will, without his consent and without the knowledge of his parents or welfare officers.

In regard to ECT, Powles said: “I take the view that this form of treatment should never be administered to a protesting patient. In all the circumstances, it was my opinion that the actions of the hospital authorities in this matter not only were unreasonable, but also may have been contrary to law.”

The boy had been dealt a grave injustice, he found.

Powles also detailed what he called “disturbing features about the administration of ECT to the boy at Lake Alice.”

Unlike Mitchell, who was of the view that age was no reason to withhold ECT, Powles found a general consensus of opinion that ECT should play little or no part in the treatment of children, to be used only as a last resort, if at all.

Unmodified ECT, the type given at Lake Alice, in most circumstances could not be justified and should be banned.

MURDERERS, RAPISTS & LIARS

By July 1977, Leeks was no longer in charge of the Lake Alice unit he had established in 1972, but he stayed as a visiting child consultant. He had also lost his job as director of the Manawaroa psychological unit at Palmerston North Hospital. Symbolically, the ECT machine was removed from the adolescent unit and placed in central administration.

By now, Leeks was on the outer.

The Health Department’s director of mental health, Dr S.W.P. Mirams, who had ordered the ECT machine be taken from the unit, said: “I cannot envisage using ECT on children at all, except in very unusual situations — perhaps in the case of a profoundly depressed child. Any suggestion that ECT applied to the brain could be justified as aversion therapy would be unthinkable.”

Leeks defended his actions in an interview with Wellington’s The Dominion newspaper published on 12 July 1977. Under a headline proclaiming, “Psychiatrist stands by shock decision” he said his unit was full of murderers, rapists, and liars. He had an open hand to do what he could with them because they were too much for social welfare institutions and too destructive for the Education Department.

He had not used ECT in a punitive way, he said. It was a useful treatment where a patient was dangerous, and was helpful in cases of autism where a child could be violent to himself or others.

He said he was the scapegoat for the Lake Alice affair. He still believed in electro-convulsive therapy.

The following day, in the Dunedin Evening Standard, Leeks said: “Some of these children do not need to be in hospital, but apart from the child unit, there has been nowhere for them. Now there will be little or no help for these children.”

A police inquiry, prompted by claims that children were given electric shocks as punishment, found no evidence of criminal misconduct.

However, the man who made the allegations, Dr Oliver Sutherland, said police had not refuted the claims, which constituted a gross violation of children’s rights but may not have been strictly criminal.

Leeks came to Melbourne in 1978 and was the director of child psychiatry at a child guidance clinic. From 1982 to 1984 he lived in Canada where he was a consultant at the child and youth service at a hospital in Regina, Saskatchewan.

He returned to Melbourne in 1984 to establish a private practice in Cheltenham.

In 1986, he worked briefly as a part-time psychiatrist at the Children’s Court outpatients clinic.

“He had unusual ideas,” says a doctor who worked there at the time. “We felt he delivered … slightly unusual practices. We were relieved when he moved on.”

Leeks’s main role was to prepare psychiatric reports about children for the court. He also treated some children. The doctor said it would not have been possible for children before the court to be given ECT. Leeks left the job on his own accord.

He is still working as a psychiatrist in a private practice in Cheltenham.

HELLO DR LEEKS

Stephen McMahon, resentful and uncertain, walked into the surgery and examined Leeks. He hadn’t changed. For a moment, he didn’t know what to do. Part of him wanted to attack Leeks, punch him on the nose. He sat down. The doctor looked nervous.

McMahon challenged him. “Why the hell did you do what you did to me?”

Leeks explained softly that it was legal and that he had an open hand to do what he could. He had to control the many people in the unit.

To his own surprise, McMahon soon confided that his marriage was breaking up. He needed help. Leeks told him he would help and, between 1991 and 1995, saw him half a dozen times.

“I must have been a fool,” McMahon now says. “I was desperate and this guy was like a father. Even now, if I look at him, it’s ‘Hello, Dr Leeks.’”

The Age contacted Dr Leeks but he declined to comment.