Speaking up for youth
An 18-year-old student has run a powerful and unorthodox campaign in a bid to save a specialist youth mental health service. Warren Gamble reports.
Her Facebook profile says: saxophonist, painter, humanist, environmentalist and M*A*S*H enthusiast.
You could already add a lot more to the resume´ of Nelson teenager Zoe Palmer: youth advocate and campaigner, budding politician, documentary maker, comedian, mental health survivor.
You won’t see that on her profile, though, because Palmer is not one to blow her own trumpet (as opposed to a jazz saxophone).
To hear her tell it, her bid to save Nelson’s specialist youth mental health crisis service has been a series of almost random and fortunate events. But spend a little time in her company and it’s apparent that the 18-year-old Nelson College for Girls student has carried out a powerful, inspiring and unorthodox political campaign.
It’s one that has involved the often unheard voice of youth, the reach of social media, and a rare consensus among the city’s politicians, and has led to the intervention of Health Minister David Clark.
Palmer is now hoping to take her case to Parliament and the Government directly; perhaps another step towards a future career in politics.
In a college office that has become her de facto campaign headquarters, it’s easy to see why Palmer has been so effective. She is articulate and humorous, selfdeprecating but determined.
‘‘I love talking to people,’’ she says. ‘‘And listening to people, unless it’s the mall at Christmas.’’
She is also disarmingly frank. Asked if her own experience of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS), at the centre of her campaign, had been beneficial, she says: ‘‘Well, I mean, I haven’t killed myself. It’s helped me reintegrate into society.’’
She has been a CAMHS outpatient for five years, dealing with delayed trauma from a childhood incident she doesn’t want to share publicly.
She says her personal struggles led to a desire to make a difference for others: ‘‘Helping people has helped me.’’
So when the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board last year proposed changes to the CAMHS specialist afterhours service, it struck many chords.
The board’s plan, since approved but now the subject of a review ordered by Clark, is to take child and adolescent specialists out of the after-hours crisis service.
One of the DHB’s arguments is that it would free up the specialist team for the heavy daytime workload. Palmer and her supporters argue that young people especially feel vulnerable at night, and that’s when they need specialist help – ‘‘at night time, you feel most alone’’.
The proposal came shortly before last year’s election campaign, when mental health and New Zealand’s high youth suicide rate were among the key issues.
‘‘Everyone was saying they were going to make everything better for mental health,’’ Palmer says. ‘‘At the same time, it (the CAMHS proposal) didn’t make sense. I wanted to know why.’’
The cause fitted with her love of a project. ‘‘I’m one of those people that can’t sit still; I have to be doing something.’’
Her first move was naturally a millennial one; creating a Facebook and email survey to see what others thought of the health board’s plan. As a Nelson city youth councillor in 2015, she learned that collaboration was key.
A remarkable 311 responses to her survey were almost all from teenagers, and overwhelmingly supported retaining an unchanged after-hours CAMHS service that had helped many of them.
One of the survey questions was: what would help mental health in the region?
Palmer’s answer was the next step in her campaign, but not the most obvious one – to hold a poetry slam. Why? ‘‘Because slam poems are just cool.’’
The Word On the Street event in January was organised by Palmer and her friend Yazzie Millener, who also used the CAMHS service. It drew a full house at the Ghost Light Theatre, and powerful words from participants about their personal experiences with mental health.
Fuelled by the ‘‘amazing’’ feedback from the evening, Palmer launched an online petition against the CAMHS changes, which has so far attracted 2270 signatures. Her campaign also gave her a growing media profile in newspapers, online, and on radio and TV.
She says her own foray into the small screen was inspired by a dream. She woke with the idea to make a documentary.
But it also showed her strategic thinking. She considered holding a street protest, but realised its impact would be short-lived. Making a documentary would have a much longer impact and cover a wider range of opinions. Plus, she says, ‘‘I thought it might be fun’’.
In typical style, she convinced the college’s media studies teacher to let her borrow camera gear, and learned as she went along, including the essential first step of ‘‘taking the lens cap off the camera.’’ The result was a sixminute, thought-provoking video featuring Yazzie’s positive experiences with CAMHS, particularly after hours; the union representing mental health workers affected by the proposal; and a teacher’s plea that young people need more mental health services, not less.
In May, Palmer spoke to the Government inquiry into mental health when its six-member panel stopped in Nelson.
In June, she organised a public meeting at River Kitchen cafe, where a full house, including mental health workers, heard some compelling testimony about the worth of CAMHS specialists. A teenage boy moved the audience when he stood up and thanked a member of the CAMHS team for saving his life.
‘‘At the end, I just burst into tears because there were so many people that voted ‘yes’ [to halting the restructure],’’ Palmer says.
It also brought about a rare political consensus when Nelson’s representatives from National, Labour, the Greens and NZ First banded together to call for the Government to halt the planned changes to CAMHS. Shortly afterwards, Clark sought an urgent review of the board’s planned changes.
Palmer’s initial reaction to the review was ‘‘that we are finally being listened to’’. But she also worries that it is a publicity stunt, and will not take into account the public opposition, especially from young people. ‘‘I want to make sure all 2000 people get heard as well, not just a bunch of politicians coming down and poking around the DHB and saying everything is fine.’’
Labour’s Nelson representative Rachel Boyack, who has run many campaigns as a union organiser, has been impressed by Palmer’s efforts and the way she has inspired other young people to speak out.
‘‘What impresses me about her is her tenacity. She has not given up, and made sure the issue has stayed in the public mind. I spoke to her earlier in the year and she made the comment that, ‘They haven’t met me yet’, which meant she wasn’t going to drop it.’’
Boyack would love to see Palmer involved in politics. ‘‘What’s really great about Zoe is she is really community-focused and peoplefocused. It’s not a campaign about her, it’s about something she genuinely cares about.’’
Greens representative in Nelson Matt Lawrey – who, like Boyack, has given Palmer advice during her campaign – is similarly struck by her communication and organisational skills. He likens her to one of her political idols, Green MP Chloe Swarbrick, who at 23 last year became the youngest to enter Parliament for 42 years.
‘‘I’m particularly impressed with her stamina. A lot of people would have been put off by now; she has just kept hammering her message,’’ Lawrey says. ‘‘She constantly impresses me with her sense of purpose, her just remarkable capacity and confidence and conviction.’’
Palmer has not counted up the hours she has spent on a campaign that has taken on a life of its own. But somehow, she still fits in a myriad of other interests; jazz with the Nelson Big Band, painting, riding her ‘‘dude’’ of a horse called Finn, volunteering at the Stokebased Whanake Youth group.
Life, she says, has been ‘‘pretty crazy’’, but you get the feeling she wouldn’t have it any other way. She is thankful for all the support she has had from her parents, friends and those who have helped her campaign.
As for her future, she jokes that her childhood dream to be an airport baggage handler ‘‘driving one of those little carts’’ is still alive.
Others have suggested she could run for the city council at next year’s elections. ‘‘It could be fun,’’ she says.
Palmer is studying art, music, geography and English in her last year at college, but she has also learned a lot more over the past year.
Her biggest lesson? ‘‘The power of the people, seriously.’’
‘‘Everyone was saying they were going to make everything better for mental health. At the same time, [the CAMHS proposal] didn’t make sense. I wanted to know why.’’