Intellectual Disability in the Twentieth Century

Transnational Perspectives on People, Policy, and Practice

Walmsley, Jan, Jarrett, Simon

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781447344605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Behinderungen in der Soziologie

With contributions from distinguished authors in 14 countries across 5 continents, this book provides a unique transnational perspective on intellectual disability in the twentieth century. Each chapter outlines different policies and practices, and details real-life accounts from those living with intellectual disabilities to illustrate their impact of policies and practices on these people and their families. Bringing together accounts of how intellectual disability was viewed, managed and experienced in countries across the globe, the book examines the origins and nature of contemporary attitudes, policy and practice and sheds light on the challenges of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCPRD).

NINE

Institutionalisation in twentieth-century New Zealand

Carol Hamilton

“We see life within a family as a fundamental right for children as well as the best option. We see no place for children in institutions solely on the grounds of intellectual disability and believe that the appropriate assistance in the home will help to sustain the family. This will also be less costly to the State.”

Craig et al, 1991, 22

“E rere ki a puawai, e tipu ki a puwai, huia ka puwai.” [“As the water flows and the new buds of the forest arrive: So there is growth.”] Catherine Colebourne and the Waikato Mental Health History Group, 2012, 146

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the impact of processes of institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation on the lives of people with learning/ intellectual disabilities in twentieth-century New Zealand.¹ Knowledge about what happened during this period has been slow to emerge, in part due to widespread acceptance within New Zealand society of the idea of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ that surrounded the notion of (intellectual) disability at this time. Later on, the desire for families and communities to move on from institutional practices meant that talk about what had happened was not encouraged. Further, many who had been employed in institutions had signed Declarations of Fidelity that promoted a code of silence about the nature of their work. Gathering information about the experiences of the people themselves has been difficult (Catherine Colebourne and the Waikato Mental Health History Group, 2012, 227–9). However, the two decades since 2000 have seen a growth in material about this still sensitive area of New Zealand’s social history. Records about individual patients have been archived and made available to the public. Personal stories are also accessible in a variety of on-line and text formats. As Craig et al (1991) suggest, the twentieth century saw a consolidation of the right of all intellectually disabled people to live within family and community groups and to access the support needed to do so. Yet to what degree the state actively supported deinstitutionalisation as a means of defraying costs rather than upholding rights is a question that remains open. I return to this at the end of the chapter.

Beginnings: institutionalisation in pre-twentieth-century New Zealand

European settlement in New Zealand began in earnest in 1840 and the first institution was built in Karori, Wellington in 1854. Between 1860 and 1900 large numbers of migrants, the majority from the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland, arrived, many on assisted passages. Patterns of migration affected local M?ori who struggled with the twin effects of European diseases (eg diptheria, tuberculosis, measles) and social and economic dislocation due to land confiscation (Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, n.d. a). The rapid building of what were called asylums is testament to how quickly European ideas about physical and social ‘fitness to belong’ took root. Early asylums – Sunnyside (1863), Auckland (1867), Seaview (1872) and Nelson (1876) – followed a UK Victorian-style architecture: large, austere brick buildings in which ‘the disturbed, the dangerous, the unpredictable’ (Campion, 2012, 12), the ill and the socially vulnerable were confined. Yet asylum use took on a distinctly New Zealand dimension. Asylums offered a workable substitute for the loss, through migration, of wider family support networks. They also provided a one-stop-shop for both migrants and M?ori that best utilised the skills of the few specialist medical practitioners (Brunton, 2003). Furthermore they provided employment for local community members (Kearns et al, 2012).

Asylums were initially overseen by provincial governments as no philanthropic or religious group was big enough to take on the financial responsibility. In 1876 responsibility was transferred to the newly formed Central Government in Wellington and subsequently held alongside the general hospital system under a Ministry of Health (MOH). State control provided the basis for management of confinement, care and rehabilitation in these settings for the next 80 years. Overcrowding soon became a problem. Two further asylums were built: Seacliffe Hall (1882), and Porirua (1887). Ashburn Hall, also built in 1882, was the first to be privately owned. It was located in Dunedin and operated alongside Seacliffe Hall, catering to the requirements of more well-to-do colonial families:

[At Ashburn Hall] there is nothing in the cheery-looking block of buildings and picturesque surroundings to suggest the idea of a home for the insane…. Inside the buildings, as outside, there is really nothing, apart from the eccentricities of the occupants of the rooms, to indicate that Ashburn Hall is a home for the insane … (Torrance, 1890, 233)

Its opening indicated growing acceptance of institutionalisation as a means of managing the stigma involved in having a family member whose appearance and/or behaviour was deemed difficult or undesirable within the vision of New Zealand as a fit and moral society. Whether people with physical or cognitive disabilities were initially included within these euphemisms remains unclear. However, the issue of who was to be considered ‘fit to belong’ soon became such a pressing concern that in 1899 an Immigration Restriction Act prohibiting ‘any idiot or insane person’ (Office for Disability Issues, n.d.) from settling was put into place.

The twentieth century: the first 50 years

In the early years of the twentieth century a growing eugenics movement influenced key developments in the use of existing systems of institutionalisation in New Zealand. The science of eugenics, validated by the publication of The Fertility of the Unfit (Chapple, 1903), proposed that all human characteristics were heritable, with some more socially ‘desirable’ than others (Barker, 1983). The fertility of those with ‘desirable’ characteristics was to be encouraged, while the fertility of those with ‘undesirable’ characteristics was to be curbed. These ideas rapidly became moral imperatives, then government policies with real-time consequences for those who did not, or could not, ‘fit in’. Segregation became the means of managing the behaviour of those who were considered to have the propensity to pass on undesirable traits, with ‘protection, training and other benefits’ available within ‘a “well-regulated colony”’ (Barker, 1983, 203), said to provide the most humane means of separating members of this group from their ‘fitter’ peers. Many with learning/intellectual disabilities became caught up in the practices of confinement that followed.

The New Zealand Plunket Society (NZPS), set up in 1907, attempted to regulate physical and social undesirability. Truby King, founder of the NZPS, was born in New Zealand, graduated from Edinburgh Medical School in 1886 and became medical superintendent of Seacliffe Hall in 1889 (Olsen, 1981). He believed that the high rate of infant mortality and the broader issue of social degeneracy could be reversed by training girls for motherhood:

If women in general were rendered more fit for maternity, if instrumental deliveries were obviated as far as possible, if infants were nourished by their mothers, and boys and girls were given a rational education, the main supplies of population for our asylums, hospitals, benevolent institutions, gaols and slums would be cut off at the sources: further, a great improvement would take place in the physical, mental, and moral condition of the whole community … (Olsen, 1981, 6)

The NZPS instituted a medicalised assessment of the development of infants and young children. Mobile Plunket-trained nurses were to go into homes to gather information about infant development. This information was then set alongside the normative infant/young child developmental standards of the time, against which decisions about ‘fitness to remain’ within the family were made. By 1914 branches of the NZPS could be found in the four main cities and in many smaller towns. By 1947 85% of non-M?ori babies were within the Plunket system (Olsen, 1981). However, as Brookes (2014) points out, family members also played an important part when decisions to remove sometimes very young individuals to institutional care were made. These decisions were not always easy. Mothers in particular could be caught between their feelings for their child, the responses of other family members and prevailing cultural understandings of disability as ‘a problem’ to be solved by committing the child to an institution. Fathers were more likely to opt for institutionalisation (Brookes, 2014). The view that ‘normal’ children would be affected if the disabled child remained at home was widespread. Older children could be admitted when families were no longer unable to manage the individual at home. Factors leading to institutionalisation in these cases included ‘changes in family circumstances, ill health or death of a parent or a change in behaviour of the family member’ (Hoult, 2012, 54).

In 1911 the Mental Defectives Act provided political endorsement of the eugenics movement. Asylums became mental hospitals, and the classifying of specific degrees of ‘deficiency from normal’ was begun. Categorisation of defects underpinned the tightening-up of the nineteenth-century asylum system (Campion, 2012), while the indicators of deficiency – ‘idiots, imbeciles, the feeble-minded and epileptics’ (Campion, 2012, 16) – linked the categories to sets of personal characteristics or conditions. Idiots might have a physical disability as well as an IQ of between 20 and 50, an imbecile an IQ of between 50 and 70, possibly with no physical disability but would require care and control. The category of feeble-mindedness, or the group into which those who were ‘incapable of competing on equal terms with their normal fellows’ (Hoult, 2012, 54) were placed, was less clearly defined and used when individuals were deemed to require more control than care. These diagnostic models enabled medical practitioners to institutionalise ‘defective’ individuals. The 1911 Act also provided the groundwork for the subsequent Education Act 1914 – which obliged parents, teachers and police to report all categories of ‘mentally defective’ children to state authorities. During the 1920s two Committees of Inquiry, into Mental Defectives (1922) and Sexual Offenders (1925), raised concerns about the reproductive capacity of ‘feeble-minded’ children, bolstering the link between disability, delinquency and institutionalisation. A short-lived Eugenics Board was established in 1928. The Board was charged with keeping a register of those categorised under the Act as ‘mentally defective persons’ and to monitor resources used to manage them. It is not clear why the Board was disbanded, but some discomfort in the community about their tasks is indicated in this poem, ‘A Mother’s Lament’, written by a local community member:

“Oh Mother, save me from Dr Gray^[2]

‘Cause teacher says he’s coming to-day

And if I’m stupid he’ll take me away.”

“I cannot save you, my little child,”

His mummie said and her eyes were wild.

“You belong to the State, you’re no more my child!

But Oh, my darling, don’t stupid be

Or he’ll say we’ve tainted heredity,

And must be eradicated – you and me!”

(McClure, 2017)

By the mid-1930...