Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

In the mid-1970s, Stephen MacMahon, 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, MacMahon 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.

Stephen MacMahon 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, MacMahon 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. MacMahon 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 MacMahon 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.

MacMahon'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 MacMahon, 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.