An agent of change in mental health treatment
Dr Robyn Hewland’s family roots stretch back to well before Canterbury’s First Four Ships. Her ancestors on her mother’s side, the Prebbles, founded and named Prebbleton, in the Selwyn district, while a great-grandfather on her father’s side, Henry Jacobs, arrived from the UK on one of the four ships, Sir George Seymour, and was the first headmaster of Christ’s College. Her parents, Leonard and Helen Hewland, were active in the Christchurch community.
She declared her intention to be a doctor at age 10, and didn’t waver from that goal.
At medical school in the late 1950s, women students received many messages that they were not welcome. At their first lecture in 1958, the 10 women in Hewland’s class were told that they were wasting a place that could have gone to a man. The male students had a ‘‘common room’’, while the women were stuck in a small ‘‘powder room’’.
Working first as a rural GP, she became the first psychiatrist at Sunnyside Hospital to specialise in forensic cases, including giving expert opinions at 26 murder trials.
Hewland also worked directly as a psychiatrist at Paparoa, now Christchurch Men’s Prison, spearheading the creation of the Kia Marama unit for sexual offenders. For around 15 years, she also worked as a child psychiatrist for the Department of Social Welfare.
While completing her psychiatry exams, Hewland brought up her two children, Victoria and Andrew, as a single mother. She would produce a weekly schedule each Sunday, then each night plan the following day’s work down to the minute.
She worked 12-hour days throughout her life, seeing patients, writing up case notes, reading medical literature, attending conferences and being an active member of many professional and community organisations.
She was a change agent in many ways and a fighter alongside women and within the medical community. She was involved in the Medical Women’s Association in New Zealand and internationally and was given honorary life membership in 2019.
She served on the National Council of Women, where she remained an active member until recently. Hewland was also a member, and for some years president, of the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists.
She was on the executive of the Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the Canterbury
Postgraduate Medical Society and the Christchurch Family Courts Association.
Hewland was awarded a Queen’s Service Medal in 1990 for public services.
The 1990s saw reforms that pushed health specialists out of government agencies and back into hospital settings. In Sunnyside, the therapeutic community model was replaced with what Hewland called ‘‘tickboxes and timesheets’’.
In 1994, she moved to Queensland, where she took up a regional position as the clinical director of mental health on the Sunshine Coast.
She continued to divide her time between her beachfront unit at Maroochydore and her Christchurch home until 2014 when, aged 76, she retired from her position on the Queensland Mental Health Review Tribunal and from speaking at international conferences.
Hewland lived out her last years at the Parkstone retirement village in Ilam, Christchurch.
She never stopped working and participating in community organisations.
She was interested in producing her memoirs to ensure that the lessons she had learnt were not lost with her death.
Hewland expected to live a long life into her 90s due to her genetic heritage, but was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer in mid-2019. Instead of bowing to the inevitable, she redoubled her efforts to get her story down before she died.
Her archive is to be stored at Christchurch City Libraries, and her memoirs are currently being edited. She died on Saturday, aged 81.
She remained very close to her children and later her grandchildren, and was very proud of their achievements.
Her work as a GP, psychiatrist and advocate put her at the forefront of medical practice for nearly 50 years. Over the past few months, she received many messages from colleagues testifying that she did not waste her place at medical school. –