Content warning: This story discusses the physical and sexual abuse of children, as well as suicide.
Terry Kingi remembers waking to blood in his mouth and spitting out teeth after clinicians ran an electric shock through his brain.
He was just a teenager when he was admitted to Ngawhatu Hospital, near Nelson, in 1967.
It was not entirely clear what conditions they were trying to treat, but the 14-year-old was subjected to uncontrolled electroconvulsive therapy - an electric shock passed through his brain without pain relief.
Kingi said he suffered horrific sexual, psychological and physical violence at the hands of priests, stepfathers and his mother.
An ACC report showed when admitted to Ngawhatu Hospital, he was suffering from head injuries after being hit with a 4x2 and an axe.
It was possible his mother wanted him admitted as he had been running away and disclosing the sexual assaults he had suffered.
"I remember being taken up there in a car, literally boot marched into a ward. Sat on the edge of bed - they did all the checks ... and I had all all my teeth - and so that was the first day," Kingi told RNZ.
"The second day, boy, I must have done something wrong because that was my first beating in the hospital. I can remember this nurse. He was huge, bald-headed, he had a moustache, bad breath - but he just 'bang'," Kingi said, motioning with a fist.
Terry Kingi survived months of abuse at Ngawhatu Hospital in the 1960s. Photo: Supplied / CTV
"That was my first beating in there.
"The next day, I was frog-marched into a special room. They slapped these electrodes on my head - I had no idea what was going to go on - tie me to the bed and I remember them abusing the s*** out of me and next minute, just blast me in the head. That was the last thing I remember for two or three days."
He received no anaesthetic or muscle relaxants during the electric shocks.
"To me, it felt like a punishment. I was fully aware that everything I did, and when I got brutally hurt, it was the punishment. Nothing to me was treatment," Kingi said.
"I remember back answering a nurse and saying I wasn't going to do that. It was a really mundane thing. So they dragged me off and next thing I knew I was down getting strapped to the table and clamps on and I thought 'oh, this is going to be it'. And I do remember one day coming back blood pouring out of my mouth and I was spitting out teeth."
As a result of the electric shocks, which were administered without a mouthguard, "all my teeth were blown out", he said.
"By the time I was the age of 15, I had full steel plates in my mouth - I had not a tooth left in my head because of what they'd done to me."
His recollection of the electric shocks were memories of terror.
"When I was going there, it was horror - terror. I didn't think I was going to be alive. I thought they were going to kill me.
"That's how I thought as a 13-, 14-year-old. I thought they're going to kill me."
But the abuse was not limited to physical and psychological torment.
"I've been raped a couple of times in the hospital as well," Kingi said.
"I do remember being held on the bed by two or three of them and bent over."
He also witnessed other children suffering abuse and torture.
Kingi was left changed by his time in Ngawhatu Hospital. Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon
"One of the other lads who was in the bed next to me, I remember the night they brought him back - he'd gone down and done the same thing - he came back to his bed. He couldn't open his eyes. I can remember the horrid look I saw on him, he was black and blue. Couldn't speak. There was blood coming out of his mouth," Kingi recalled.
"I tried to sneak over and see how he was going and then I got another hiding for that. But we were pretty close.
"Next morning, he'd disappeared, never to be seen again. And that always, that memory, stuck with me."
Kingi only spent a period of months in Ngawhatu Hospital, but it profoundly affected him.
"By the time I came out of Ngawhatu I was pretty well brain-dead. I couldn't remember things for months."
When he was discharged, he was returned to his abusive family life.
It culminated in his stepfather threatening to kill Kingi and his siblings.
He shot Kingi in the knee, before ending his own life in front of the terrorised children.
Police and other agencies were in and out of Kingi's life and never took steps to protect him from the abuse, he said.
Kingi wanted the government to acknowledge its failings and the horror of New Zealand's psychiatric system.
"It not only happened at Ngawhatu. It happened at Hokitika. It also happened at Hillmorton - happened down in Dunedin, everywhere. And at the moment everyone's focussing on Lake Alice, but there were a lot of facilities in New Zealand that all did the same thing or even worse," he said.
"It's coming out. After the Royal Commission we really now start to realise ... just how brutal it was."
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Where to get help for male survivors of abuse
- Road Forward Trust, Wellington, contact Richard 0211181043
- Better Blokes Auckland, 099902553
- The Canterbury Men's Centre, 03 3776747
- The Male Room, Nelson 035480403
- Male Survivors, Waikato 07 8584112
- Male Survivors, Otago 0211064598