Sunnyside Hospital was the first mental asylum to be built in Christchurch

Christchurch

Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the country's second-largest urban area after Auckland. It lies one third of the way down the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula which itself, since 2006, lies within the formal limits of...

, New Zealand. It was initially known as Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum, and its first patients were 17 people who had previously been kept in the Lyttelton

Lyttelton, New Zealand

Lyttelton is a port town on the north shore of Lyttelton Harbour close to Banks Peninsula, a suburb of Christchurch on the eastern coast of the South Island of New Zealand....

 gaol. In 2007, Hilmorton Hospital is just one of the mental health services that are based on the old Sunnyside Hospital grounds.

Architecture

Sunnyside was primarily designed by the New Zealand Victorian Gothic architect, Benjamin Mountfort

Benjamin Mountfort

Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort was an English emigrant to New Zealand, where he became one of that country's most prominent 19th century architects. He was instrumental in shaping the city of Christchurch's unique architectural identity and culture, and was appointed the first official Provincial...

, with an administration building designed by John Campbell

John Campbell (architect)

John Campbell was an architect, responsible for many government buildings in New Zealand.Born in Scotland, he travelled to New Zealand in 1882 after training in Glasgow under John Gordon. From 1883 to his retirement in 1922 he worked for the government, holding the title of Government Architect...

.

Staff

Edward William Seagar was the first superintendent of Sunnyside Hospital.

In 1995, four years before the hospital's closure, nurses walked off the job because of dangerous working conditions.

Famous patients

• Rita Angus
  Rita Angus
  Rita Angus was a New Zealand painter born in Hastings. Along with Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston, she is credited as one of the leading figures in twentieth century New Zealand art...
  
   (1950) Artist

• Janet Frame
  Janet Frame
  Janet Paterson Frame, ONZ, CBE was a New Zealand author. She wrote eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, an edition of juvenile fiction, and three volumes of autobiography during her lifetime. Since her death, a twelfth novel, a second volume of poetry, and a handful...
  
   Writer. Frame described some of her experiences in Sunnyside Hospital in her autobiography An Angel at my Table
  An Angel at My Table
  An Angel at My Table is a 1990 New Zealand-Australian-British film directed by Jane Campion. The film is based on Janet Frame's three autobiographies, To the Is-Land , An Angel at My Table , and The Envoy from Mirror City ....
  
  , and her novel Faces in the Water.

[Mrs R. said it would] be a good idea for me to admit myself as a voluntary boarder to Sunnyside Mental Hospital where there was a new electric treatment

Electroconvulsive therapy

Electroconvulsive therapy , formerly known as electroshock, is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Its mode of action is unknown...

, which, in her opinion, would help me. . . . I woke toothless and was admitted to Sunnyside Hospital and I was given the new electric treatment, and suddenly my life was thrown out of focus. I could not remember. I was terrified.

• Mabel Howard
  Mabel Howard
  |-...
  
   ( - 23 June 1972) Union worker, politician, and New Zealand's first woman cabinet minister.

• Richard Pearse
  Richard Pearse
  Richard William Pearse , son of Cornish immigrants from St Columb near Newquay, a New Zealand farmer and inventor who performed pioneering experiments in aviation....
  
  (June 1951 - July 1953) Inventor and aviator. Pearce flight tested aircraft in New Zealand from 1902, and is reputed to have successfully flown on about the 31st March 1903.