Garden cleanup reveals remains of decrepit former ‘mental asylum’

Eerily visible on a Christchurch street are the remnants of the city’s first “mental asylum” – Sunnyside Hospital.

The hospital on Annex Rd was built to house the “mentally insane”, who were previously staying at the Lyttelton jail, and opened in 1886 with 17 patients.

Usually hidden by trees and bush, the remaining buildings of the hospital remained concealed until recently, when the foliage was cut back. Now many have questioned which part of the old asylum they are seeing.

Sunnyside had a total of 109 patients by the end of 1871 – 71 of whom were men, and 38 women.

In 1872 a report from Edward Seager, who had been a warden/keeper since the hospital opened, said that among the male patients was a common cause of insanity – “injuries to the head”.

“Sometimes years may elapse from the time the injury is received until insanity shows itself. These cases are generally permanent, but no effort should be neglected that may tend to a restoration of reason,” he wrote.

“Many of the patients in this institution have been inmates of other asylums in different parts of the world. They seldom have any settled residence, but travel about from place to place, becoming insane at intervals, when they are lodged in local asylums.”

Many patients were poorly treated, and the extent and depth of the inhumane care was revisited as part of the Abuse in Care Inquiry in 2021.

Former Sunnyside psychiatrist Dr David Baron told the inquiry that patients were “dragged down from a dormitory” and forcibly given electroconvulsive therapy while he was there in the 1960s and 1970s.

Patients who died at Sunnyside were buried at Sydenham Cemetery in an area designated for “paupers” from the late 1890s until the 1980s.

Sunnyside closed in 1999, and slowly the buildings were demolished for a Ngāi Tahu housing development, apart from one.

Recently, members of a Remembering Christchurch page on Facebook shared that the asylum was in full sight again on the corner of Lincoln and Annex roads.

Many shared memories of what they called the part of the building known as “the Sunnyside Hospital morgue”.

The owner of the remains of the asylum, Te Whatu Ora, said they were used by the Sunnyside Hospital maintenance teams.

“The building in the photo was an engineers’ workshop,” a Te Whatu Ora spokesperson said.

ALDEN WILLIAMS/THE PRESS Sunnyside Hospital closed in 1999, and was mostly demolished to make way for Ngāi Tahu housing in 2007. Some of the remains were concealed until recently.