Mother objected to shock treatment

Press, 17 December 1976, Page 4

Mother objected to shock treatment

PA Auckland The mother of a 13-year-old Niuean boy who was given electric shock treatment at Lake Alice Hospital said in Auckland yesterday that she had asked for the treatment to be stopped. The woman said she first heard of the shock treatment in a letter from her son, after his transfer to Lake Alice from the Owairaka Boy’s Home. She wrote back and told her son to tell the authorities to stop using the treatment, she said. The woman made these statements in reply to questions by Dr Oliver Sutherland, the spokesman for the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, through a registered Niuean interpreter. The boy’s grandmother also made statements.

Both the relatives rejected an assertion by the Minister of Social Welfare (Mr Walker) that: “The parents, in co-operation with the Social Welfare Department, gave the medical superintendent at Lake Alice full authority to perform whatever medical treatment he felt necessary.”

The mother and grand- i mother said that an officer I of the department had called ’ at their home, and told them ’ the boy was to be transferred from Owairaka to < Lake Alice. < They were asked to sign a paper, but did not know I then, and still did not know, i what was on it, they said, i because there was no Niuean I interpreter present to explain the paper to them. The mother and grandmother said they knew noth-

ing about the treatments the boy might get at Lake Alice. They were told that he would "go to school” there. They had not been told officially about electroconvulsive therapy. The mother said she had been led to expect she would get a report on her son’s progress at Lake Alice, but none had been received. Mr Walker’s statement, Page 3