Abuse in care: treatments designed to deter disabled patients from ‘bad behaviour’

Children and adults at Mangere Hospital were subjected to traumatizing treatment designed to scare them from allegedly bad behavior, an investigation has found.

Patients were given electric shocks, ammonia capsules, placed in isolation, doused with fire hoses or cold showers, or ignored as part of behavior modification therapies initiated by staff there in the 1980s.

Psychologist Sheree Briggs worked at Mangere Hospital at the time (now Spectrum care), and this week gave evidence of what she saw there to the Royal Commission of Inquiry to Abuse in State Care.

The research has devoted to a series of hearings on the experiences of disabled and deaf survivorsand those placed in psychopedic and psychiatric institutions between 1950 and 1999.

READ MORE:
† Abuse in care: men raped disabled children, paid staff for access
† Abuse in Care: Survivor Shares Sexual Abuse Story Through Sculpture to Find Freedom
† ‘Listen to people with disabilities’: Minister Carmel Sepuloni to new Disability Affairs Minister Poto Williams

Psychopedic was a New Zealand term that specifically referred to the care of people with intellectual disabilities. Briggs was just 18 when she started out as a psychopedic education officer and learned to run the “training center” for mentally retarded children who were passed on from their families.

Briggs, a registered psychologist today, said the center then wanted to change the behavior of disabled children without much analyzing why it happened.

The main technique of that “behavior modification” therapy in the hospital amounted to abuse, she said, and she had to refuse to perform some of the more violent options, such as giving electric shocks to children trying to escape from the hospital. hospital wards.

Briggs witnessed staff administering electric shocks through belts and distributing ammonia capsules to sniff, to prevent patients from becoming aggressive towards others.

Sedatives and antipsychotics were “overused and unevaluated” and used as a form of control, not therapy, she said.

Seclusion in “time-out boxes” was one of the most common techniques, she said.

Children were held tightly and put in one of two time-out boxes until they calmed down — or in some cases, long after.

They screamed into the small, thin, homeless boxes and banged their heads and fists against the walls, she recalls. A boy who was biting was let in for over an hour.

Other rooms were also used for time out and seclusion. Children would be locked up for hours on end — in some cases seclusion was used when staff needed a break, Briggs said.

“As there were a lot of children for the staff to look after, I can imagine some of the children would be there longer than intended at times.”

Being showered or doused with cold water with a fire hose was a “go-to” technique for those who were incontinent, especially the elderly residents.

“There were some nasty punishment tactics the staff used when residents soiled themselves, such as using fire hoses or cold showers,” Briggs said.

“This was used more often in wards where residents with really challenging behavior were housed, because those wards often attracted a certain type of staff member. These employees had fewer inhibitions when handing out punishments than the employees in other departments.”

The staff would also spray faces with water from a spray bottle as punishment for things like burping.

Children who bite too often had their teeth pulled out, Briggs said. Later, she met a group of former children from Mangere Hospital in their thirties, none of whom had teeth.

And despite all this, there was no course for complaints from staff, residents or their families, Briggs said. When Briggs herself tried to fix something harmful she saw, it was added to her personnel file as a complaint.

Briggs said the children in the hospital’s training center, who were just toddlers at their youngest, were practically left to the institutions. Parents were actively discouraged from visiting – there wasn’t even a family center or visiting space.

“If you had a child with a disability, it would go to an institution and move on with your life. I never saw parents in the units.”

The Abuse in Care – Royal Commission of Inquiry Disability, Deaf and Mental Health, the institutional care hearing runs from: July 11 to 20 and will be held at Tii Tu Tahi on Khyber Pass Road in Tāmaki-Makaurau.