History traces back to asylums being
the places where people who were mentally ill,
that's where they would go.
And they'd be treated as loons, or
nut bars. or
just crazy.
We're um...
how would you say, second class citizens in our own country.
And that's how a lot of Māori are.
You know, Māori are high in prisons, we're high in mental health,
we're not equal partners in this thing that we call New Zealand.
Just because someone fell outside of a box,
they get left behind.
It just doesn't sit well with me.
It's OK that it happened to me. I'm OK with it.
But it breaks my heart that it's happening to other people.
It's just not fair.
[music swells]
One of the areas that's sort of become important in my work
is our ability to know our full histories, to understand,
so that we are able to heal collectively and individually.
But so much of our histories are not revealed to us.
What are the processes that silence trauma?
Why is some trauma legitimate and other traumas seen as illegitimate?
Māori haven’t failed, we’ve been let down since the beginning.
So when you live in low-decile, low socioeconomic communities,
mental health is going to be a big thing.
You know, I went to a Māori boarding school.
Pretty much, most of the, 90% of the Māori boys that went to the college,
all came from broken homes, broken communities.
They had already chosen their life well before they even started college.
Intergenerational trauma really speaks around
the experience and the responses of trauma over long periods of time.
One of the issues around the way we think about trauma,
is to think about trauma in a highly individualised space.
I think, actually, under all circumstances, that's unlikely to be the way that trauma is experienced.
How our culture is brought up is the male is the pou
or the pillar of the whānau.
Yet, males hurt just as much as anybody else.
The other thing is that stigma on how people are going to look at me as a Māori,
suffering and being open about my mental health.
How are they going to look at us if we are weaker?
So when you are looking at historical trauma in New Zealand
you're really looking at the
cumulative effect of colonial oppression,
of alienation of land, of alienation of resources,
of the disruption and loss of language, of different forms of
what others would call ethnocide
where particular types of cultural practices
have been surpressed or indeed eliminated.
All of those are very powerful, powerful forms
that generate or reproduce trauma.
I acknowledge firstly,
the intergenerational trauma that Māori
are going through in New Zealand.
But when I speak of Asian, African and Middle Eastern communities,
the trauma is post colonisation.
And I think we shouldn't forget that
colonisation comes with racism and subjugation and exploitation.
Almost all the frameworks that we study in
universities are developed in Western countries.
They are written, theorised and propagated from a white lens.
Families often go to a large extent,
to great extent rather, in hiding,
that they have family members who suffer from these illnesses.
Because the simple formula in our communities is that we have to be stoic and we have to
walk our way through grief and trauma, and pretend it never happened or pretend it will go away.
The lack of normalising mental health
as just part of our human state of being,
has created generations of stigma and shame around being able to say,
actually, I'm struggling.
Somehow we're able to say, "I have a headache," and that's OK,
but we're not able to say, "I have a soul ache", and that's OK.
[music swells]
Christchurch City has been through
so much, obviously, in terms of distress,
but because of where I am,
it's recognised a little bit more than other places.
I think people tend to think that because I'm young,
that one, I don't know what I'm talking about,
and the other thing is, um, it's very centred around people who have been through war.
"No, no, you couldn't possibly have PTSD. That's for veterans only."
Or, "you're choosing not to let it go."
"You should be over it by now. It's been two years."
"How much longer do I have to hear you talk about this?"
My injury fell outside the ACC parameters
because it was not sexual abuse, a physical injury,
it wasn't a work related traumatic incident and it wasn't a treatment injury,
So as a result of that, I wasn't able to get any help.
I know that there are people that I've personally known who have tried to get the help,
but they haven't been 'bad enough' on the criteria to be receiving help.
And, um...
that's really hard for me because I'm sitting back here
thinking about how much of a great experience I had with the mental health system,
and then there's people out here suffering because they can't get help.
And trying to get yourself help can also be another added element of trauma.
Um, because you don't feel heard or the person you're talking to dismisses you or,
you're trying really hard, but you're running out of money and
you're not getting the help that you actually need.
I started my own support community,
um, because I thought that there might be other people out there that needed help too.
You know, in the end, it became too much of a challenge with
getting funding and all the rest of it
that was really going to be required to be able to spread nationwide.
This is where the revolving door comes.
We had this huge mental health review
and there was identified the revolving door
why do people go in and out, in and out of service?
Because we're not treating the root cause.
We are treating symptom clusters.
PTSD does not capture the full effect of trauma,
it captures one part of it.
But there is a whole slew of other things that happen.
We follow what is called the DSM diagnostic classification,
which is an American system that was developed first way,
way before we had any significant knowledge of neurobiology of the brain.
We need to go one step further and ask the question:
Why?
What happened to you?
What did you go through?
Who was there with you?
Many who present themselves before the criminal justice system
do have mental health issues that have not been previously picked up.
So if we look at wāhine Māori
or just women more generally in the prison population,
about 52% of them have a diagnosis across a lifetime of PTSD,
against maybe 22% of men.
Now both of those are high,
much higher than in general population and as I said
both of those are probably very, very conservative.
So trauma can occur within a prison population,
but it's much more likely that cumulative, long-term, sustained forms of trauma
have occurred outside of the prison, but are amplified within a prison environment.
You're away from whānau, you're away from your support systems,
you're away from your places where you can stand,
you're away from the things that give you particular forms of joy.
Particularly when there's a power, gender or a cultural difference,
it can be very disempowering. It’s far more likely to shut a person down
and put them into a prolonged state of buried feelings, emotions and responses.
There's a price to pay
There’s a price to pay individually for each person who's been affected.
And they pay the cost in terms of their quality of life,
their productivity, their happiness, their ability to function
and also their life span.
So if you look around, every system we know will pay a cost.
I think the mental health support in Te Tai Tokerau would be similar to
local doctors, where it's...
there needs to be more.
Sometimes we don't know what we need,
and we don't know what what will be the most helpful.
And so by not being able to have access — information, education, awareness of
all the different ways that might be helpful —
we're less likely to have an opportunity to try them.
The only way that we're ever going to move into a situation
where people are helped properly
is by having those people that actually have the lived experience
either being in charge of what needs to happen,
as far as policy and education is concerned,
or be working hand in hand with those people that are in charge of that.
But this has too many variables in it for you to be
just a number, in a binder, in a bar graph.
We need a paradigm shift,
and we need our systems and services to be able to respond to people
rather than diagnostic classifications.
And we can bring in healing, instead of just treating,
and we can set up that person for less odds of coming back into the system,
less odds of needing medication
and of actually recovering and being able to go on with their lives.
It is a public health problem,
definitely.