Lake Alice Hospital: Former lead psychiatrist and accused Dr Selwyn Leeks dies aged 92
A former lead psychiatrist at Lake Alice hospital – who was accused of torturing children at the facility in the 1970s – has died.
Dr Selwyn Leeks was 92.
Leeks was accused of using electric shocks and paralysing drugs to punish patients at the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit, which operated near Marton.
The monster is dead!
The monster who was protected by other abusers is dead!
The monster who tortured and who was protected by the NZ Police is dead!
There will never be justice for the monster’s crimes and despite his death, all those who enabled and protected him are still free.
The system who protected him is still free.
The ghosts of his victims are not.
May you rot in hell Selwyn for your insufferable arrogance and obscene ego, and may all those who protected him forever fear being outed for their role in enabling his horrific crimes.
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The era in which this particular abuse occurred is the 1970’s. Chalk and cheese to 2022. NZ was a conservative socialist state who, like the rest of the world, saw disobedience and diversity going hand and hand with crime and a threat to good moral public order.
Kids who ended up as wards of the state, so much more frequently then thanks to our conservative moral norms and were defiant could be shifted to a nightmare like Lake Alice with almost no oversight based on the word of an academic for correctional treatment. Enter Dr Leeks in January 1971. Top of his field, returning from learnings overseas, his word was utterly respected because of his title, Psychiatrist. The courts of this land love that shit and still do, respected to the max and unimpeachable.
In 1977 one tortured boy’s case was taken to the High Court and thrown out because as the Judge pronounced “that children could be given electroconvulsive shock treatment without anesthesia because their bones were supple and would not break during the violent convulsions induced by the treatment”. In 2022 that seems like something from a totalitarian Pol Pot regime, not little ol’ 1970’s Aotearoa.
It’s all well and good to put the boot into police then or even later but if that is the precedent set by the High Court of New Zealand, what’s the chances of challenging, let alone winning against a system so supportive of monsters like Leeks? None, less than none. It is to suggest police officers joined an organisation to aid and abet torture of children and went home at the end of each shift satisfied they played their little part. Thing is I don’t think so.
Leeks I assume plain as day stated he was using all his infinite unchallengeable medical knowledge to turn these lost souls around. And if it appears like torture to outsiders, be rest assured your Honour, it’s nothing of the sort.
Our mental health system then was an abomination (it is now) because you only had to be different to end up there, forgotten. That is the way this country, incorporated, conducted its business.
To blame police alone for what most definitely an entire societal failure is cheap and wrong.
Psychiatrists seem to have gained the same mystical significance as the religious. With a carte blanche which isn’t always clean.
Good job. More of his ilk doing the same would make me happier.
Psychiatry is not one bit scientific, and seems to attract a certain type of scary person to the trade.
Here are two data points worth never forgetting.
1. Doctors commit suicide more than any other profession. And within doctoring, psychiatrists suicide out more than any other type of doctor.
2. Psychiatrists are also world champions among professions that sexually abuse their clients.
Essentially the problems in medicine revolve around profit and power over psychopathy. It is a terrible business model to fix your clients as quickly and cheaply as possible. Much better to make them customers for life.
Permanently injuring traumatised people with chemical and electrical lobotomies has been and is still the modus operandi, and will likely only change once the profit dynamic imperative changes. Until then, these abhorrent creatures will continue to hurt and injure poor vulnerable people.
In Thailand, orphans and people with mental health issues are usually directed toward Buddhist monasteries and nunneries. For life. As well, normal everyday Thais will often do a rains retreat for 3 months in the year leading up to their marriage, so their marriage gets off to a good start.
In India, those who struggle mentally often become sadhus and smoke weed all day and live on footpaths outside temples and in tents under trees and in the mountains with long hair and beards, covered in ash and thin from eating only once a day or less.
Both systems provide a very high level of companionship from similar peers, as well as communal meals and spiritual exercises.
Its time to take a long look in the mirror NZ, at what a truly civilised approach to mental health looks like. Or keep writing cheques to medical costs for all the disability and suffering the NZ health system creates.
Ok ok are we sure he’s really dead?
Many psychiatrists have a side gig; mental health is run by Corrections and they must love the all the new tech at their disposal; https://www.pace-systems.co.uk/team-view/les-leek/…
why has Leeks got off the hook by claiming dementia while Assange is incarcerated for telling the truth?
The harm he and others (at Oakley, Kingseat, eg) inflicted was multi-generational.
Those harmed became parents.
Their children struggled in turn to deal with what could not be comprehended outside of a torture camp.
The children’s children then had to deal with passed along trauma.
…and so it goes.
Why did the Police protect him?
If he had molested them would they still have done so?
MartinC. It may have been more of a matter of the medical profession closing ranks, they have always been better than the mafia at protecting each other.
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/lake-alice-doctors-death-puts-spotlight-on-govt
Excerpts from that Newsroom link:
Many Lake Alice survivors learnt of their chief tormentor’s death in an email yesterday from lawyer Frances Joychild QC, who represented them at recent Royal Commission hearings…
Truth is one thing, but there was a vain hope it would be linked with justice…
Last month, police charged former Lake Alice staffer John Richard Corkran, 89, with ill-treating children – accused of injecting patients aged under 16 with paralysing drugs as punishment between 1974 and 1977.
Leeks and another ex-staffer would have been charged, police said, had they been medically fit to stand trial.
And now, weeks later, Leeks is dead – something picked up almost three weeks later through a family Facebook post.
“He should have been made accountable decades ago and this would have helped with your own adult lives,” Joychild told survivors yesterday.
“For my part, I consider it a total and abject failure of our medical, social welfare and justice systems that he was allowed to live out so many happy years in Australia with a family who loved him while you/your loved ones suffered so much as a result of his actions.”
If the brutal torture at the hands of this grotesque monster wasn’t bad enough, the twice failure of the police to properly investigate him and charge him when they should have is disgusting and they should be held to account. The off-hand apology from a high ranking cop to the victims during the Royal Commission is too little, too late and smacks of, if we apologise now we should be ok. To turn around and also say that there was now, (as there always had been) sufficient evidence to charge him with serious crimes only adds to the distress of his victims especially knowing that he spent the remainder of his life living for many years in luxury in Australia, obviously without a care in the world and probably believing that the system, including the police, will continue to protect him, which it did.
I read that the Royal Commission has said that in its report it can make findings against the Police – https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/our-progress/news/abuse-in-care-royal-commission-can-make-findings-against-former-lake-alice-psychiatrist-dr-selwyn-leeksnew-news-page/
If it does make any findings against the Police it should be a finding of blatant negligence and in that finding highlight that it is clear that the failure by the police to prosecute the monster was deliberate and wilful.
Final question – will the cops ever be held to account for this? Answer – apart from possibly having an adverse finding made against them in a report that will quickly be buried – nope, because they and the system will say, well that was then and lets just let it be, or we have learned from this and have moved on. All the same old platitudes which we are expected to accept because of that horrible belief that the police can do no wrong.
Very strange man and a peculiar set of circumstances. Protected by people in high places ?
I notice the Department of Internal Affairs has an operating budget of around $700million perhaps it should be up to the survivors and heroes like Leonie McInroe, Tyrone Marks and Hakeagapuletama Halo to decide who gets what kind of compensation.
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