Centre offers hope for strugglers
Dunedin woman Corinda Taylor, whose 20-year-old son Ross Taylor took his own life in 2013, recently opened the Hope Centre in the city to offer support to people with mental health problems.
Taylor, whose complaint to the Health and Disability Commissioner over her son’s lack of care by Southern District Health Board was upheld, said university student health services were limited.
She said if a student qualified for publicly funded counselling they were only entitled to six sessions, which wasn’t enough.
“Then you have to pay but the majority of students cannot afford to pay for private counselling.” Derek Wright, Waikato DHB
She was concerned about follow up and treatment plans for those discharged back into the community without a medical diagnosis.
The Hope Centre, which opened on June 1, provides peer support to help people navigate the mental health system and the aftermath, including following an attempted suicide or for bereaved families.
The chairwoman of the Life Matters Suicide Prevention Trust, Taylor said university could be a pressure cooker situation for young people and for every suicide, she estimated up to 25 attempted suicides went unreported.
Waikato District Health Board interim chief executive Derek Wright, who has worked in mental health for more than 40 years, believes children are not learning the skills they need for adult life.
“Our kids now are growing up without resilience. There’s no competitive sports at school. No one wins, so everybody gets a medal in the running race — well real life’s not like that.”
Wright said instead of being prepared children can’t handle the pressure of life as a grown up the way previous generations could.
“The problem is they’re managed through school because we don’t really have an exam system any more and they get to university and start failing their assignments . . . and go ‘I dunno how to cope with this’.”
Wright accepted that 1 per cent of the population have a psychotic illness, but blamed increasing mental health problems on social media and drugs and alcohol.
“I’m not suggesting it was all perfect when I grew up but we didn’t have social media. We didn’t have 100 people commenting on what you think, or what you say.”