SARAH LEE: Kia ora, everybody else.
So what we're going to do now, is,
it's a great pleasure for me now to introduce my... our SPINZ Director,
who's also my friend and my colleague and my boss,
and yeah, so it's been a privilege to work alongside Merryn for nearly five years now,
and welcome you to the stand, Merryn.
[applause]
MERRYN STATHAM: Kia ora koutou.
A very, very warm welcome to the people who have made it here today.
We really appreciate the effort that you've taken
out of whatever it is that you usually do on a Thursday,
and come to be part of this forum.
Murdoch, thank you very much for your karakia,
I think that it's really important for us to acknowledge the role of mana whenua,
to have a process for us to help to gather our energy and our focus
so that we can participate constructively in this forum today.
It's nice to have an opportunity to pause and gather that energy together.
So kia ora for your contribution, Murdoch.
And I'd also like to just mention the fact that the Minister has
very generously said thanks to me these things happen.
And I would love to accept all of that kudos,
but I would like to deflect that to Sarah Lee, who is our events coordinator extraordinaire,
and has done a sterling job on the organisation of these events.
So I would like to keep that going, because without her, these things don't come together
in the way that they do. So thank you Sarah, very much.
I want just to pause and reflect, and it's probably already been echoed
in the Minister's speech here today,
but I want for us to... before we start on the technical things
of what we're going to discuss today,
to keep in mind the true cost of suicide.
At our seminar yesterday, we did cover briefly some questions
about the relative contribution that media could make,
and I think that we need to think about suicide...
well, often those of us who work in population health,
with a public health approach, think about big numbers, and big events.
But I want us to think about the individual events that contribute to this issue.
It is the fundamental reason why so many of us seek opportunities
to learn more about suicide prevention.
So I also want to acknowledge all of those who manage ongoing suicidal ideation
in their lives, and I want to acknowledge all of those who've lost a loved one
or loved ones, to suicide.
And we hope that your healing journey is a well supported one.
I want to just very quickly give you an overview of SPINZ,
and it will be a very quick slide through the slides,
because we want to keep to time today.
We appreciate that particularly media contributions are tightly timed,
and we want to make sure that we manage our time well.
So, could I just have an indication of those of you who know about SPINZ before you came today?
Excellent, that's a good sign, thank you.
There's another evaluation point...
So letting you already know what you know,
that SPINZ is an organisation that works with information.
We provide information to support the New Zealand Suicide Prevention Strategy and Action Plan,
and to guide safe and effective prevention activities.
We are part of the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand.
The Mental Health Foundation provides us with an infrastructure
and an overview that is quite complimentary with regard to mental health promotion
and Like Minds, Like Mine work across the country,
that all contibutes to good suicide prevention activity.
And as you can see, we've been around since 1999.
We were one of the first services that were funded under the Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy.
And just briefly, this is how we work.
We have tiers of audience, as you can see,
represented on the right hand side there.
This is the way that we engage with our audience.
It happens mostly through our sector engagement roles,
but obviously we want to be able to make sure that our information is appropriate and useful
for quite a range of audiences.
Now, we're a small team, perfectly formed but small,
and so making sure that this information is useful and relevant
for an enormous range of audience is quite a challenge.
And so we cannot do that without the input of a wide range of stakeholders.
We also have an advisory group that contributes
a range of expertise from suicide prevention research, clinical skills
and expertise, communication skills and information specialism.
So that's a really important body for SPINZ,
because it guides us at a very high level
and helps us in the direction and the decision-making that we take.
And our activities, as listed,
and just to finish off with, and it's...
... she's just flicking over her next note page because she hasn't got her glasses on...
We'd like to remind you that we're filming the event today.
This is an important resource for us, the fact that we have
Associate Professor Pirkis with us from Melbourne
is going to make a contribution that we can have on our website
and make available for those of your colleagues who weren't
able to be with us today.
We will also be capturing... we captured some of the keynote speeches
in Auckland yesterday, and we're hoping that they will be up
on our new and wonderful website by the end of October/November.
So we will certainly send out alerts for those people who are on our contact list,
and invite you to go to the webcasts,
and have a look and see whether we've done a good job or not,
and we certainly invite your feedback on that.
One of the things with working with media is...
and I've been doing this over the last six years,
there has been a noticable shift.
And this is one of the reasons that we've decided to get into
this area today.
It was always going to be a challenge.
There has been a history of some difficulties and challenges
about how best to do this work.
And who is the best person, or who is the best group, to do this work.
And certainly, the media, as the Minister has already pointed out,
have a completely different agenda than many people who work in suicide prevention.
They have their own goals and deadlines and aims to meet
and it's really the responsibility of those of us who have
a greater understanding about suicide prevention,
to share that knowledge in the most constructive way that we can.
So what we've noticed over the years is that
generously, editors have given us their time,
out of their incredibly hectic schedules,
and those people who sit and listen and engage in the conversation
are demonstrably changed in terms of the way that...
you can see some lightbulbs going off,
in terms of their understanding of the complexities of how this works.
So the encouraging thing is, for us,
when we see media that is improved and better after those visits.
And we have repeated contact from those media representatives.
That's a success in our book.
Not very many times, the media get to hear when they've done a good job,
so we really try to make sure that we provide feedback
when we can see improvements in things,
and acknowledge the fact that there's been some skill applied
to this particular avenue, and it looks great,
and this is much better.
So, we certainly do try to do the, "Yes, you've done a good job,"
message as well.
So, let's get into the programme,
let's hear from the specialists who are involved in this work closely.
I do encourage you to think really carefully about how
any of the material we have available could inform your work.
We have a wide range of resources up the back there.
Please avail yourself of those,
if there's things there, things that we do have that are not on the table,
Russell's happy to take your information requests.
This information is free,
it's there to support safe practice.