The cruel advice for young people from a Mental Health Chief Executive
Given the current mental health service crisis for young people – that was apparently in the making for decades – what with hundreds of young people on DHB waiting lists, one must wonder about the pathetic ‘advice’ given by a highly-paid ‘Chief Executive’ who is supposed to be an expert on mental health. Thus, it is no surprise that mental health services are top-down organisations with endless ‘executive’ managerial layers at the top and vastly underfunded, under-staffed services at the coalface.
Let’s have a look at the advice given (in bullet points):
· Don't give up hope
Obviously a mental health crisis is premised on having no hope.
· There are far more people who get through their tough times than don't
This is cruel: if the statistics show that a certain disease has a 90% survival chance and you are in the 10% mortality statistic, do you attribute your situation to statistically bad luck?
· Keep looking for other options
Like what? Get psychoanalysis and therapy at $500.- an hour?
· There's more capacity than before, such as the 1737 counselling helpline
All the phone/txt helplines listed do have some value but are pointless at the point of crisis, for the only advice is to ring 111 and go to ED. For the ‘capacity’ at crisis centres like ED, you will find a mental health ‘team’ consisting of a single, stressed-out mental health nurse with over-worked registrars on-call (sorry, you will have to wait for the doctor to arrive in a couple of hours or so), with no beds available in ICU, no watches for violent/self-harming patients brought in by exasperated police, no cultural support for Maori, Pasifika and other ethnic minorities, no ‘capacity’ for chronic cases that are brought in again every second day because nobody ‘out there’ knows what to do with them, complaints by medical staff about mental health patients clogging up the corridors, and so the list of ‘no capacity’ goes on.
· Even if you're waiting for specialist support, reach out to your GP for support
So this is the infamous merry-go-round that takes you nowhere. The GP has a 15 minute consultation time. Last chance is ED (see above).
I have previously commented on the He Ara Oranga, Report of the Government Inquiry into
Mental Health and Addiction, published in November 2018 by the Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction, in a letter to the Nursing Journal Kai Tiaki, predicting that the report will result in yet another ‘commission’, as recommended by the authors, some of whom will be no doubt appointed to such a commission, drawing a good honorarium in addition to their other well-paid, high-ranking positions. If you check on the personnel, you will see that my prediction has come true.
So while the NZ Government has ploughed billions of dollars onto mental health, most of the money is disappearing into what is couched as ‘research’ but ends up as meaningless reports to assuage the guilt of the top echelons of mental health services in the face of a never-ending crisis. The teen sharing her story in the RNZ article quite rightly says that ‘nobody is listening’ while the experts are busy writing about what the supposed problems are, like ‘societal injustice’ problems of poverty and crime, which is fair enough even when seen from the ivory tower (being part of the problem – not the solution).
