Keegan takes his plea to minister
A young Taranaki man who carried out a knife robbery while in the grip of mental illness has taken his crusade to help others with similar conditions to Health Minister Jonathan Coleman.
Keegan Jones, who has a bipolar disorder, wants to see annual mental health checks carried out in schools so others affected by the condition can get the support they need.
In 2013 Jones held a knife to a taxi driver’s throat and stole his cab.
‘‘My intention was to highjack a plane to fly it into the sky tower,’’ the 23-year-old said.
He was sentenced to three years in prison and ended up in the forensics unit at the Henry Bennett Centre in Waikato where he got the help he needed.
Now he wants high schools to have annual mental health checkups using a survey or questionnaire to identify and treat atrisk youth.
The screening would help catch people earlier and might also highlight family violence or bullying, he said.
Jones’ proposal so impressed Taranaki King Country MP Barbara Kuriger that she used her Airpoints to fly him to Wellington to talk to the Health Minister.
‘‘The mental health system in New Zealand is at a crisis point,’’ Jones said.
‘‘It’s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
‘‘We focus and put money into the acute stages, and by then it’s too late. By then people have gotten to the point where they are in a crisis state themselves.
‘‘With this testing, it could go to a counsellor, and the counsellor could see red flags and the counsellor could then refer to the appro- priate agencies to help this young person who is struggling to get the help they need.’’
Jones was first hospitalised when he was 13 – his teenage years were a blur – but he didn’t get the help he needed until he went to prison, he said.
‘‘It’s disgusting that it took me to get that unwell and to be that, I don’t know what the words are, that much of an unwell monster ... it took me to go into criminal forensics, criminal psychiatry, to actually to get me the help I needed. It’s wrong that you have to commit a crime to get better help.’’
The mental health system let him down, he said. ‘‘I’m very remorseful about what happened. I did fall through the cracks, but that doesn’t take away from what I did.’’
He said he feared he wouldn’t have any credibility because of what he had done and the stereotype around being a 23-year-old beneficiary with a mental illness
But Kuriger, who is deputy chairwoman of the health select committee, said she took her hat off to Jones for coming forward.
‘‘He is really passionate about doing some work with his peers. He wants to make it better. He’s been in a place where he’s really been in a struggle, and now he’s coming up with ideas.’’
The Government put aside $100 million in the budget for a social investment fund to look at new proposals to tackle mental health issues, she said.
‘‘Keegan had a good session with Minister Coleman, and he has taken the ideas away to have a look at.’’
New Zealand’s representative on the International Association for Suicide Prevention, Sylvia Huitson, said the screening idea was good but had to be done correctly.
‘‘The screening has to have a robust way of follow up and how you are going to deal with what you find.
‘‘Hopefully, you can do an intervention early on, so people don’t carry that stuff to a point where it gets too much. I hope Jonathan listens.’’