Content warning: This story discusses the physical abuse of young people, as well as mental health and suicide.
Joan Bellingham received more than 200 electric shocks and a stupefying cocktail of drugs over more than a decade with the aim of changing an immalleable part of who she is - her sexuality.
As a result of the shocks, she suffered severe burns to her head, memory loss and bouts of blindness.
As a result of the drugs, she suffered pain and a decade of her life was reduced to feeling like a dream.
Her clinicians called it treatment.
But Bellingham calls it torture.
"Grand mal torture," she says, summing up her time in the care of Princess Margaret Hospital from 1970 to 1982.
The full extent of what occurred would never be reconciled as Bellingham's electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) records had been lost.
A review of an ACC claim in 2008 explained: "Unfortunately it seems that all the documentation concerning Ms Bellingham's ECT treatments have been lost".
Canterbury DHB told the reviewer "the old ECT records were held separately from the main clinical file and destroyed in a flood".
However, the summaries which remained detailed dozens and dozens and dozens of electric shocks.
Bellingham said she received what was called electroconvulsive therapy more than 200 times.
"I knew every time I went in there that I was going to experience this horrific pain," she said.
"Something was injected into me which paralysed me - I couldn't move. There'd be someone standing over there with the ECT box and there was someone that was in recovery moaning and groaning, and I knew that was going be me - if I survived it. Each time I thought I was going to die.
"I can remember the pain; the horrific headaches afterwards; vomiting continuously; going blind sometimes; severe burns to my head, and they'd be seeping, and then they'd still give me shock treatment again the same day."
She believed the drug used to immobilise her was paraldehyde - a carcinogenic sedative which had to be stored in glass ampoules, as it destroys plastics.
"It was like a death drug. I just felt horrific pain with it. I couldn't move. It was scary and you saw them come in and put the electrodes on your head but you couldn't move. After the seizure I must've gone into a state of unconsciousness."
The cocktail of drugs and the ECT were administered in the hopes of 'curing' Bellingham's homosexuality.
The so-called treatments were accompanied by interrogations about her sexuality.
Joan Bellingham. Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon
"The doctor that was giving me the ECT had a lot of power. These men seemed to have a lot of power and they seemed to be able to ask lots of inappropriate questions and give out lots of inappropriate drugs and give out inappropriate treatment," Bellingham said.
"He frightened the hell out of me. He used to ask me so many inappropriate sexual questions all the time. He had this power about him. I've never been frightened of a man like I've been frightened by this doctor.
"I can still remember him so clearly. I knew every time I went into his office I was going to get asked about something to do with sexuality - every time."
The doctor responsible for those interrogations and the electric shocks was John Dobson.
In the ACC claim review, a reviewing psychiatrist had expressed doubts ECT could cause burns to the scalp.
But extracts from Bellingham's medical records showed even at the time it was administered, clinicians noticed the burns caused by the electric shocks.
The injuries caused by the shocks, combined with the unnecessary treatment for conditions she did not suffer, meant it amounted to torture, Bellingham said.
"If they were doing something to fix someone who was sick it would be a different cup of tea. When I went in there I wasn't a sick person. They were giving me this indescribable pain, they were taking away my memory, they were taking away my personality, they were making me blind, they burnt my head - that's torture to me."
Her medical notes also showed she attempted to take her life following ECT.
"It was indescribable, the pain," Bellingham said.
"The fear of going in there to start with was indescribable, it was shockingly scary for a young person. Every time I thought I was probably going to die.
"I can remember looking up at the doctor who I was very scared of and I can remember them injecting this muscle relaxant, which just felt like razor blades going through my body, I remember waking up . . . and just wanting to vomit and I had this most horrific headache and my mind would be fuzzier and fuzzier."
She also carried the baggage of another life lost due to her experience with ECT at Princess Margaret Hospital.
"It was well-known at Princess Margaret that I was having a lot of shock treatment and . . . there was one young lad who was told he was going to have ECT and so he talked to me about it and I told him how it was for me and that young boy went and ... killed himself, which lay on my shoulders."
Bellingham said it was time for the government to acknowledge torture was carried out under the guise of medical treatment at facilities throughout Aotearoa.
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