Photo: supplied by IHC
Clinical psychologist Dr Olive Webb is nominated in the Local Hero category of the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year awards.
A strong defender of some of the most marginalised members of our community, she tirelessly advocated and revolutionised care for people with learning disabilities.
Most recently she also gave evidence to the Royal Commission into the Abuse in State Care and supported others to tell their stories.
Dr Webb released From Behind Closed Doors last year, a poignant reflection on her 50-year journey alongside individuals with intellectual disabilities.
Webb told Saturday Morning's Susie Ferguson that when she started working with people with disabilities 50 years ago, New Zealanders mostly regarded those with disabilities as something to be "coped with - rather than being fully accepted and integrated into the lives of us all".
"The journey's not over yet, but the journey from the cramped institutions, disgusting settings, through to the lives that many people with disabilities have today, it's like going from night to day," she says.
"With some notable exceptions of course."
From her childhood, her family included people with intellectual disabilities in their lives, including a woman with Down Syndrome, who used to read to her as a child, garden parties her mother gave for residents from a nearby institution, and a youth club that Webb herself helped set up for young people living at a nearby hospital.
"I think that what it did was desensitise me to the usual then ... common shock-horror responses to people who are different."
At the time, Western ideas tended to cast people with disabilities or from other ethnic groups as child-like, "differently sensitive", she says.
"Immediately assigning them to a category, 'them'.
"One of the practices that developed was to believe that people who are different need protection and therefore they need to be kept away and be given asylum as it were, but that resulted in large institutions that nobody saw, that were secret.
"And so the noble aspirations - somewhere in the background - were lost with the economy and the institutionalised practices that evolved.
Doing her training internship at Christchurch's Sunnyside Hospital she was met with the shock of what was happening behind the walls of those institutions.
She remembers: "Going into a ward of men and seeing 20 men stripped in their dormitory, marched naked through a very large villa to the bathrooms where they were showered en masse, dried and then marched naked back in order to get dressed with ward clothes.
"And as bad as that was, what was worse was that this was accepted practice. That was a graphic symptom of the passive abuse - because the people involved weren't trying to be abusive, that was just 'how it was'.
Sunnyside Hospital in Christchurch, in 1977. Photo: Supplied / Kevin Hill, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The life of people living in institutionalised residences was one of total disempowerment , stamping out their individuality. And a vast number were overmedicated to make managing them easier (a problem Webb says still exists).
Webb felt deeply that the approach was wrong.
"People with intellectual disabilities are so wonderful, they are so honest, they are not complicated and they say things as they are, and it is so easy to achieve such enormous gains with people who are motivated and interested and keen."
Later, she became the manager of three adult wards at Sunnyside.
"I took the view that we needed to show people that these people could actually do things and they could be productive and they could actually have a quality of life.
"That meant that they got up in the morning to go somewhere or to do something, and they did things during the day that they enjoyed, rather than just lining the walls and gazing into space."
Webb found that among the staff working in the residences there were people who felt a better way was possible.
She introduced working clubs residents could join to do assignments to earn things they wanted from a 'shop'.
It skyrocketed, with more and more residents asking to join and more clubs being formed and the scope expanding. The idea quickly spread to other units and facilities, and Webb gave talks about it to the families of people who lived elsewhere.
At the same time a movement was growing internationally recognising "that we could humanise our services and individualise our services and we could actually start to deinstitutionalise.
"And treat people who have an intellectual disability simply as people with whims and wants and challenges, and to treat them one by one, instead of this one-sized-fits-all solution for bunching them together and providing cheap and efficient care."
She says the people who wanted to further these changes found each other, with pockets naturally forming and beginning to grow momentum.
Webb also found many staff and colleagues who were against these ideals could often be utilised to good ends by giving them their own area of responsibility and recognition for that work.
"In New Zealand at this time it was actually really exciting. At one stage ... I think mid-1990s there were people with disabilities who marched on Parliament and demanded the closure of Kimberley Hospital.
"There were experiences to share and challenges to rise to."
However, Webb says while efforts to provide better lives for people with disabilities has come a long way, the threat of the past ways of thinking gaining a toehold again is still present.
"Hopes for me are tempered with the reality that there are always people who resent expenditure on people with disabilities.
"This pull towards what might be termed pragmatism - but a pull towards efficiency, and a sense that people with disabilities are not worth the money and the resources that it takes for them to have the same quality of life that you and I have.
"And that's a tension that I don't see going away."
