Fun pursuits are a clear cure-all

negotiation skills, learning to be with others, learning to take direction, learning to wait and learning to cope when things don’t go your way. Great life lessons.

The determination, laughter, and older guys joking about their youth, injuries and mentoring of the younger ones made me think – can we bottle this? But that’s wrong too. It can’t be distilled, or commodified, it must be experienced.

And this is where our thinking about solutions to our mental dis-ease epidemic is deeply flawed. Despite this type of activity-based evidence right in front of us, we continue to hold the service-based model of ‘‘intervention’’ at the centre of what is valued and measured.

Participation data and information about impact could easily be generated. So why aren’t we already measuring the positive impact and scaling these activities up? It seems mass community activities which work along the prevention and early intervention dimension, already occurring in the much touted primary mental health care arena, like Waka Ama and Te Matatini, don’t register as valuable ‘‘mental health interventions’’.

Despite our heartbreaking suicide rates, studies of this are yet to be done while there’s a preference for evidence around pharmaceuticals and manualised talking therapies, like cognitive behavioural therapy.

From rangatahi Ma¯ ori I have worked with, it is clear hands-on, activitybased connections and skill-building is the way to go because when I ask them about their experiences of therapy, I am sad to say I rarely get glowing reports.

Talking therapies have their place, but what are we missing by continuing to hitch our research and service provision wagons to those approaches when the suicide rate for Ma¯ ori is increasing?

Services alone are not going to deliver the big solution to societal suffering. Cultural, social and economic determinants of health are where the gold is. It’s hidden right in front of our noses.