Imagine these horrors perpetrated with perfect impunity for at least half a century.
Now imagine tens of thousands of children and adults trapped and screaming for help. Their cries may have been heard, but few listened. But among those who did hear and listen and never gave up until justice was done were the staff of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), the nonprofit mental health watchdog co-founded by the Church of Scientology.
Now stop imagining. Because these barbarisms were real, and they described the nation of New Zealand, where too many had been brought to their knees by an industry specializing in torture in the guise of help: psychiatry—until CCHR said STOP.
“I was also given ECT on my testicles for bed-wetting,” he says.
Last month, CCHR, along with the survivors of psychiatric torture at the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit whom they championed, were presented with the prestigious New Zealand Community of the Year Award, an annual recognition bestowed on those New Zealanders who have made stellar contributions to the lives and well-being of their countrymen.
For CCHR, it was a recognition of their work to achieve the impossible in exposing a nationwide disgrace—some of the worst psychiatric atrocities ever perpetrated on innocents. For the child survivors of Lake Alice psychiatric hospital, the first psychiatric facility investigated by CCHR 50 years earlier, it was justice served two-and-a-half generations too late.
In the end, these trusting children—now grown old and bearing the traumatic scars of psychiatric brutality inflicted when they were helpless to fight back—fought and fought again, aided by CCHR’s unwavering insistence.
Take the case of Paul Zentveld, then age 13, who was admitted in 1973 to Lake Alice. There, children were given electroshock for not doing their homework, or speaking out of turn, or not speaking in group therapy, or because someone didn’t like their “attitude.”
According to Paul, the psychiatrist “would pause and say something smart, like, ‘We’re going to change your way of thinking,’ or, ‘You’ve been bad, Paul. We’ve got to change your thoughts.’ Then he would turn the dial up.”
When the first round of shocks was delivered, Paul says, you’d see black zigzags going through your head. The second round, you’d feel excruciating pain. By the time the third came, your teeth were sore from biting down and, by round four, you were unconscious.
“I was also given ECT on my testicles for bed-wetting,” he says.
Paul remembers his father coming to visit him at Lake Alice. “I was upstairs getting zapped,” Paul says. “He could hear me screaming.” Paul described how his father sobbed outside: “I want to see my son.”
For years afterward, Paul had to take 16 Nurofen tablets a day for the excruciating pain, a grim token of his childhood electroshock. Now, over 50 years later, he still suffers blinding headaches. He described explosions in his head, “like a hand grenade going off … when I am being asked or trying to remember things about Lake Alice.”
Paul Zentveld, a child, was powerless against the daily terrors wrought upon him by a cruel and implacable system. But decades later, he would get his chance to bear witness and tell his story—thanks to CCHR.
Judge Shaw, who chaired the official commission, thanked CCHR for its “tenacity and endurance and advocacy over so many years.”
It took half a century from the day CCHR investigators arrived to inspect Lake Alice to get the powers that be to conduct a full investigation—50 years of reporting, filing and reporting even more; 50 years of urging, petitioning, insisting; 50 years of fighting against the denials, delays and deflections by medical authorities and government officials, until at last CCHR found the attentive ear of the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT).
Upon reviewing CCHR’s meticulously documented complaint, UNCAT agreed that it looked like the children at Lake Alice were tortured and that it was time for the New Zealand government to act.
Facing mounting pressure, the New Zealand government finally did. As part of an ongoing formal inquiry initiated by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin, officials launched a special investigation into Lake Alice, alongside a new police probe. Aided by CCHR, the commission pursued the mammoth task of investigating not just Lake Alice, but also psychiatric abuse throughout the country over a 50-year period.
Known as the Royal Commission’s Abuse in Care Inquiry, the probe uncovered a nationwide nightmare of the rampant sexual, psychological and physical abuse and torture of innocents across the nation’s care settings from 1950 to 1999. The inquiry took six years to conduct and involved 300 staff and one million documents, making it New Zealand’s largest-ever inquiry.
Paul Zentveld, they discovered, was just one of thousands of horror stories of psychiatric atrocities across New Zealand.
Judge Shaw, who chaired the official commission, thanked CCHR for its “tenacity and endurance and advocacy over so many years.” She confessed she had no idea that the commission’s hearings would be so wrenching emotionally.
“You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved to tears,” she said.
The inquiry’s full report was made public in July 2024 by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who invited survivors to join him in Parliament to discuss the “horrific and harrowing” abuse they had suffered at the hands of the psychiatric industry of death.
Apologizing for the decades-long atrocities, the prime minister urged all New Zealanders to read the 30-pound report. “Through this, we will understand the obligation we all have to prevent it happening again and to speak up whenever and wherever we see the abuse of anyone,” he said.
“The Lake Alice survivors and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights have brought to light atrocious torture of children by psychiatry,” Mike Ferriss, CCHR New Zealand’s Director, who helped spearhead the survivors’ drive for justice for many years, told Freedom. “The New Zealand Community of the Year Award goes a long way toward recognizing the decades of hard work it took as we celebrate truth overcoming adversity. There is now a heightened public awareness of abusive psychiatric treatment, and the Lake Alice story is now a part of New Zealand’s dark history of abuse of children in care.”
“The ongoing courage and commitment displayed by the survivors and CCHR,” the award judges said, “has resulted in real impact, ensuring that survivor voices are finally heard, paving the way for systemic change and accountability.”
Those survivor voices and others will continue to be heard as CCHR—which overcame incalculable odds to triumph over unfathomable evil—uses its human rights platform to put psychiatrists everywhere along with their industry on notice:
You are seen. Your crimes are known. And we will call them what they are: torture.
