In this blog, Dr Kate McAnelly discusses the historic institutionalisation of women at Aotearoa New Zealand’s Seacliff Lunatic Asylum/Mental Hospital.
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog about the ways in which ‘refrigerator mother theory’ was weaponised to vilify the mothers of disabled children for VIDA’s ‘vilification’ series. The reception that the post received has prompted me to reflect on the historic vilification of women with mental health issues and disabilities more broadly.
In this blog, I have chosen to highlight the ways in which women were callously maligned, institutionalised and hidden from the moral gaze of society at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum/Mental Hospital in Aotearoa New Zealand, my home country. This blog’s title, ‘I learned to live as I was already dead’, hails from renowned New Zealand author Janet Frame’s autobiography, An Angel at my Table (1989), where she recounted her days as an inmate at Seacliff. The dehumanisation and vilification of these women, often without a second thought and for the flimsiest of reasons, calls to mind the saying ‘those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it’.
With that in mind, let’s take a trip back into the past.
Seacliff Lunatic Asylum/Mental Hospital
This trip is littered with ghosts, and one such ghost exists a 30-minute (give or take) drive from my house, just off the old Coast Road heading north out of Dunedin here in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, later the Seacliff Mental Hospital, was built in the late nineteenth century. Noted for its extravagant Gothic architecture, it was at the time the largest building in the country. Women of all ages were incarcerated at Seacliff from its earliest days, with committal most often being initiated by their husband, father or brother, depending on their domestic circumstances.
Common reasons for committal included (but weren’t limited to) being an idiot or imbecile, feeble-mindedness, feelings of persecution, physical aggression, rebellious and/or disturbed behaviour, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, being socially deficient, hereditary taint, being ‘dirty’ and unable to keep themselves, their families or their homes clean, not fitting in neatly with prevailing social norms of the time, breaches of the domestic ideal, rejection of motherhood and domesticity, or simply being unmarried, menstruating, pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding, menopausal, senile or old which appear to have posed inherent risk in women’s lives.
Some of these women would’ve indeed experienced varying degrees of disability, according to contemporary social relational as well as psychological and/or physical definitions of such. Many others, however, were labelled difficult (read: disabled) simply because they didn’t neatly prescribe to the feminine ideals that society foisted upon them. This mirrored the experience of women at other asylums in Australasia, including Old Ararat Gaol and J Ward Asylum in Victoria and the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum in Western Australia.
These ideals were mirrored by the long-time medical superintendent at Seacliff, (later Sir) Frederic Truby King, who espoused deeply problematic, sexist views about womanhood and its true purpose. In line with these views, just being a woman was dangerous and disabling when compared to what was considered the superior physical and emotional capacities of men.
Whether the ‘insanity’ that earned a woman’s committal to Seacliff was real or conjured up to align with the moral sensibilities of those recommending the committal mattered little. Such women were often abandoned to their fate at Seacliff, and were rarely enquired about, visited or even spoken of again. This often led to yawning unacknowledged gaps across generations in family and society.
Their reported experiences within the Seacliff environment are mixed. Those who staffed the asylum have been inclined to describe the experiences of inmates as being marked by care, compassion, understanding and encouragement, thus as quasi enjoyable for inmates. Former inmates who managed to secure release from Seacliff’s confines tell quite a different story though, one typically marked by abuse, abandonment and ignominy.
These were all exemplified in the fire that took place at Seacliff on the night of 8 December 1942, which razed a two storied wooden ward to the ground claiming the lives of 37 ‘difficult’ female inmates that were secured inside it in either single rooms or a 20-bed dormitory. The doors in and out of the ward were locked at night, with most of the windows permanently sealed shut.
The fire went unnoticed and had fully taken hold as the ward was only checked once an hour due to wartime staffing shortages. Within a short amount of time the ward was reduced to ashes, with only two inmates managing to escape the inferno alive.
At the time, this fire was Aotearoa New Zealand’s worst loss of life in a single event. However, because of where the fire had taken place and who had died, its cause was given little consideration by broader society thus resulting in the event quickly fading from public consciousness.
Janet Frame
One former inmate who spent time in and out of Seacliff and lived to tell the tale was the renowned Aotearoa New Zealand author Janet Frame. Born in Dunedin in 1924, but primarily raised in Ōamaru (approximately 110kms north of Dunedin), Janet was a highly creative yet incredibly shy and introspective child. Her early life was punctuated by family dysfunction and the trauma of losing two sisters to drowning. Janet’s anxiety about needing to fit in followed her to Dunedin where she undertook study to become a teacher at the Dunedin Teachers’ College (now the University of Otago College of Education).
While at the University of Otago, she managed to make social connections with a small number of people through taking night classes in psychology. These classes were taught by the then new lecturer, and later in/famous sexologist, John Money. Frame became increasingly dependent on contact with Money to help her navigate the everyday stresses she was encountering in life. One day when he was unable to keep an appointment, which was part of her probationary period as a new graduate teacher, such was her dysregulation, that Janet ran out and attempted suicide.
This suicide attempt prompted Money to facilitate an inpatient stay for Frame in the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Hospital. Shortly thereafter in November 1945, she was committed to Seacliff by her mother Lottie (encouraged by Money) where she was incorrectly diagnosed with ‘incipient schizophrenia’. While her initial committal lasted just six weeks, it would go on to affect the following eight-years of her life.
During this post committal period at Seacliff, Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch, and Avondale Mental Hospital in Auckland, Frame bounced between the tensions of life at home in Ōamaru with her family, abortive attempts at living independently, and multiple subsequent committals (sometimes voluntary, often committed). During these eight years, she was repeatedly subject to electro convulsive therapy and insulin therapy to ‘treat’ her schizophrenia. Unsurprisingly, this treatment did nothing to alleviate her anxiety about making her way in the world on her own terms beyond institutional walls, or how the treatment was dulling her writing abilities.
Despite this, during the time she spent at home in Ōamaru with her family in between inpatient bouts of treatment, Frame continued to write as well as publish short fiction and poetry work. In 1951, her first book The Lagoon & other stories was published, having been assembled by John Money from pieces of her earlier writing. The book received critical acclaim and won the prestigious Hubert Church Memorial Award for excellence in poetry and prose in 1952. This award came not a moment too soon for Janet, whose mother had authorised leucotomy (now called lobotomy) surgery to be performed on her in a last-ditch effort to ‘cure’ her of her ‘illness’.
To Aotearoa New Zealand’s great literary fortune, news of the award arrived at Seacliff in time for the hospital superintendent to forbid the surgery from going ahead. Frame left Seacliff for the last time in March 1955. She later found out, while living in London, that she didn’t have – nor had ever had – schizophrenia. It was concluded that she was simply a shy and sensitive soul who struggled more than most with making sense of life’s social dimensions while doing her best to navigate these hampered by the intrusion of repeated institutionalised trauma.
It could be said that Janet Frame was one of the ‘lucky ones’, as she was ultimately afforded the opportunity to create a life and career for herself outside the limits of institutionalisation. However, she would forever bear the indelible scars left by Seacliff on her soul – scars shared by all women who spent time both in Seacliff and other ‘hospitals’ like it throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the rest of the world.
These women’s committals were often without just cause, for reasons they couldn’t help, and/or were intrinsic to who they were and how they experienced the world. Their disablement, vilification and erasure in and from everyday society made testament by routinely unmarked burials. This was justified by historical persistent, prevailing and patriarchal moral imperatives. Such imperatives were predicated on the view that mental health issues and disability were ugly, sinful and the preserve of the defective, and best attended to in an institutional setting so as not to make decent society uncomfortable. Women were easy targets within this ill-informed meaning-making, and the generational trauma that this vilification caused is still being unknotted.
Let us stay with the discomfort of this grave injustice done to women. Let us not forget.
Dr Kate McAnelly (she/her/ia) is an early childhood teacher by profession, now working in Dunedin as a regional lecturer in early childhood education with the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. Her research interests include inclusive early childhood curriculum, pedagogies and learning environments, disabled children’s childhood studies, the rights of children and families to an inclusive education, the histories and sociology of diverse childhoods and disabled womanhood, and the politics of inclusive education. As a neurodivergent woman who may well have been targeted for institutionalisation as described above in times gone by, this has been a challenging yet important piece for Kate to write. She’s looking forward to continuing work in the vein of vilification and othering alongside VIDA blog Commissioning Editor Michael Stockwell in 2026.
Copyright remains with individual authors who grant VIDA holding a perpetual, world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce and promote content. For permission to re-publish any VIDA blog post, in whole or in part, please contact the managing editors at auswhn@gmail.com.au