THERE are renewed calls for a state inquiry into the institutional abuse meted out at local mental asylums in previous decades.

South Ripley woman Anne Rolfe spoke to The Ipswich Tribune after our story on the case of Randall Carrington who took his own life after being locked up at Wolston Park Hospital, at Wacol, in the late ’70s.

Ms Rolfe said she knew of a similar case in which justice should be served.

The Ripley woman first met Helen Frahm in 1992 after joining a community group to befriend and care for the disabled.

“As I spent time with Helen, I realised there was more to this lady than I thought,” Ms Rolfe said.

“Helen would often say to me things like: ‘In 1969, so-and-so did this to me.’”

Ms Frahm was the youngest of six children whose father and brother were violent.

Her father beat her causing brain damage and at 11 months old she went to hospital with a broken foot.

She suffered a lifetime of pain and epilepsy.

Deemed an ‘at-risk’ child, and with her father in prison, she was sent as an infant to the Challinor Centre in Ipswich – an asylum for the insane.

“She remembered what was done to her at these places, and where her trust in people was stolen from her by cruelty beyond belief,” Ms Rolfe said.

She was transferred to Wolston aged 13.

“Helen suffered constant abuse,” Ms Rolfe said.

Ms Frahm died recently, and Ms Rolfe was given her personal effects.

One statement among the notes read: “Helen likens much of her life at Challinor to a concentration camp or prison camp … [her drawings] resemble the images of concentration camps.”

Ms Frahm spoke of receiving electroshock treatment, brutal beatings and of “being locked up like animals in cages”.

“When I was 13, I was attacked by the sister in charge … she hit me with a leather strap … I had blood coming out of my nose and ears, and cuts on my back,” one report detailed.

Ms Rolfe said: “Perhaps people don’t want to admit what happened, perhaps they don’t want to have to do anything about it.

“I was humbled by Helen’s zeal in wanting the world to know the torment and torture she and others had gone through.

“So many people are carrying scars of abuse that they try to hide because no one acknowledges it has happened to them.

“But for the grace of God, there go I.”

Despite Ms Frahm’s exploitation by those in positions of power, she later became an advocate for disabled people on her release into housing in the community in the mid-’90s.

“Helen was willing to stand up for the rights she never had,” Ms Rolfe said.

“Even though considered ‘intellectually disabled’, she fought for the rights everyone else seemed to have.”