CIARAN FOX: We're going to get straight into our first presenter for the morning,
and he is the Director of Policy and Development at the Mental Health Foundation,
Hugh Norriss and we asked Hugh these three questions, the three important questions.
What is one word that could summarise the essence of Hugh?
And Hugh came up with "radiant".
And he is looking radiant today, particularly his Movember accoutrement.
And one thing that you may not know about Hugh, although you do now
is that he's secretly a hippie sympathiser.
It's changed my perspective of Hugh entirely, irrevocably, forever.
And we asked Hugh if he could please give us a sentence to describe flourishing,
his definition of flourishing, but without using that word. You're gonna hear it a lot today.
And he said, "meeting our full potential". So, to talk to us more about that
please put your hands together for Hugh Norriss. [applause]
HUGH NORRISS: Kia ora koutou.
Yes, I put "radiant" because I've realised that actually everybody's radiant when you get to know them
so I thought that I must be too. [Laughter]
And yes, I do think that the 60s were a great time. That's the hippy thing.
And I was going to apologise for the mo, but it's for a good cause.
"It's a remarkable paradox that at the pinnacle of human material and technical achievement
we find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, worried about how others see us,
unsure of our friendships, driven to consume and with little or no community life."
That's a quote from a book called The Spirit Level that some of you might know of,
it's doing the rounds at the moment. A very good book, very well researched
and that's the opening sentence to the book.
I have another quote,
"Māori potential for high standards of health and wellbeing has never been greater.
"Rangatahi have levels of vitality that far outweigh
"the sum total of misfortune and disadvantage." From Mason Durie.
So the first quote I put up is a very common state, from the research in that book.
In the so-called "advanced" Western countries of the world, the affluent societies.
What some have termed "affluenza".
The second slide and quote gives us a hint of the potential
to flourish and to thrive.
So I'm going to talk about flourishing, but it's a huge concept, actually.
And I'm really just going to brush over a lot of the research and the thinking
and the ideas and ways of being behind it.
Won't really do it justice in this short time, but if you're interested in more of the research
and ideas I'll be around later and we can hopefully have
a continuing dialogue with you anyway after today.
So, at the Mental Health Foundation, we are interested in looking
at the whole of our lovely little country and promoting changes that benefit and are equitable for all.
And there's two things we want to do in promoting mental health across the whole population.
The first is to create a demand for a more mentally healthy society
and the second, in response to that demand once it's out there,
to facilitate dialogue and provide information and creative ideas and actions on how that demand can be met.
So we want to create a demand and then work out ways to meet that demand along with all of you.
So why do we need to create this demand?
Well, we think that if the demand out there is in the public. that's far more powerful
than just the Mental Health Foundation or even the people in this room can...
we can come up with all the great ideas about why we should be more mentally healthy,
but it's going to be more powerful if we can get real interest in the whole population,
as Judi said, if we can have a mental health revolution
so that we actually have everybody out there on the street or wherever
demanding that they want good mental... a more mentally healthy society.
Even if we had as much interest as the Rugby World Cup, that would be fantastic.
And having this mass interest in things is a great way to affect public policy these days.
So how would we create a demand for better mental health?
So, and why is this going to be relevant to the general public?
Well, mental health is currently relevant to people, obviously, but usually it's only...
what we've noticed, it's only really on the problem side of things.
There's a general view reinforced in our culture
that mental health is actually associated with problems all of the time.
And that's really pretty much all it is. Pretty much a focus that's
very much about individual problematic experiences, illness with a medical focus generally.
So our mental health services are really mental illness management services.
The Mental Health Act is all about the law and when people are very unwell.
Our mental health surveys measure illnesses that people have. Nothing about the health.
So for most people, or for a lot of people, mental health is really seen as a bit of a liability, or something
you might to distance yourself from. So it's kind of, is conceptualised a little bit like this:
so that mental health is really a state of, if you have no mental illness symptoms,
you're not diagnosed with a mental illness, then you're well
and you don't need to worry and you just hope that you don't
have any symptoms at some point, and it goes in a continuum through to what's called "severe",
so we have this mild, moderate, severe kind of symptoms of mental health that are talked about.
However, the WHO, an organisation not known for its radical views on life,
I mean this is their definition of mental health.
Which is, this is really like a resource, isn't it?
I mean it's not a liability and it's actually deeply relevant to everybody.
Everybody in our community and in our country.
And furthermore, there's increasing research to show that
the positive side of mental health is not just the absence of illness.
There's a typical kind of quote from there, and a quote from Margaret Barry,
who some of you might know, very respected international academic on...
one of the leading academics on mental health promotion,
that this positive mental health is gonna be, is really important
and it's going to be really important for us.
So we call this positive state of mental health "flourishing".
So what is flourishing?
It's more... this is where I'm going to do the once over lightly.
But it's more then just, like, happiness or just feeling good or feeling great.
It's to do with our natural positive tendency of the human spirit to thrive
and it relates to our personal and interpersonal deep well being.
We think that the outcomes of Whānau Ora are
flourishing type concepts.
So it's great we've got that kind of becoming enshrined in our, in our national policy.
And of this particular kind of flourishing which is going to be unique to Aotearoa.
But more international definitions that have been used in
some big epidemiological studies in Europe and North America
is that flourishing tends to have these core features here, so it does include
having positive emotions or positive management of emotions.
But it's much deeper than that. It's also, more importantly, it's about being engaged with life,
and with other people in positive ways, and really important to
have meaning and purpose in life, contributes to flourishing.
And as you'd be aware, there is quite a bit of that lacking in our community sometimes.
So it's quite a deep state, it's not just about feeling good,
and there's other elements to it as well.
So there's different definitions but they tend to be similar to this in the research.
So how would we align this more positive state of mental health
with what is the reality of the experience of mental illness, as well,
because that is very real and we don't want to diminish that.