Aversion Therapy

On this archive at the moment is a story about boys being punished at a special school for wayward teenagers.

This story has haunting parallels to real life.

In the early 1970s, at Palmerston North in New Zealand, boys who for various reasons such as parental problems or minor offences had been made "wards of the State" were sent, not to a youth centre but to mental home.

Here they were placed under the "care" of a particular Doctor and his team.

There they faced a rigorous regime of punishments for even the smallest infractions of the rules and what amounted to torture for more serious offences such as smoking or attempting to abscond or worst of all masturbating.

There were two types of punishments, electro shock "therapy" or pain causing injections.

The boys to be punished were gathered each Saturday in a waiting room and then one by taken into a room for punishment.

If they were to receive electric shock as punishment they would be strapped down on a bed and then electric shocks would be applied to their legs, arms, knees or more dramatically their heads.

The equipment used was that used for mental patients receiving ECT therapy but without the muscle relaxants and anaesthetic.

The shocks would cause intense agonising pain and muscle convulsions that would last for some time. Memory loss would also accompany shocks to the head.

In at least one case, electric shocks were applied to a boy's genitals for making homosexual advances to another boy.

On occasion the boys themselves would be forced to administer the shocks to their friends.

If the boys were to receive injections, used particularly for boys who tried to escape, they would be required to drop their pants and would receive large injections of paraldehyde in their buttocks

This drug, often used to help patients suffering an epileptic fit to relax their muscles, would cause intense pain and result in the boys being unable to walk for some time and it would take days for them to fully recover the use of their legs.

These punishment were described as "aversion therapy"!

This barbaric treatment ended when the doctor left the establishment.

The NZ government at least recognises that what happened was unacceptable and has paid compensation to the victims.

But the Doctor is still practicing psychiatry!