Messenger of hope

''Every time we stay silent when a young person passes on, our kids think we just don't care. In our desire to stop contagion, we are sending the wrong message.''

Mike King might have quit the comedy circuit but he’s still packing them in. His audience aren’t punters laughing at his trademark brash piss-taking gags over a few beers though, they’re kids and he’s got a message for them: Lift each other up.

King is touring the country on his ‘I Am Hope’ tour, launched to address youth suicide and empower communities to connect with their struggling youth.

This week he was in Upper Hutt talking to a sea of blue uniformed kids fully engaged in his banter.

At times he asks for a show of hands – who has felt shame, loneliness, been bullied, been the bully?

There is laughter and there are tears. King has them in the palm of his tattooed hand.

The truth is, many of these kids are struggling and King’s mission is to empower them by stripping away shame from their thoughts and feelings about their own mental health and let them know they are not alone. Boost their self-esteem and we’re on our way to solving our crushing suicide rates.

King shares his own mental health journey, a melancholy tale of the bullied turned bully.

He was a lonely kid ‘‘with a big head and buck teeth’’ who escaped the terror of his tormentors by sitting in the safety of a bench outside his school’s staffroom.

Next to him was another kid, Nigel, who sat there day in and day out at every interval and lunchtime.

Nigel became his only friend.

One day King discovered he was funny, got in with the cool kids – and ended up bullying Nigel.

The episode, which he weeps over immediately afterwards and agonises about in the interim years, affected him his whole life – how could he bully a kid who had already suffered the tormentors?

One of five, King was raised in Whenuapai, north of Auckland.

He grew up with no self-esteem, no selfworth. He remembers endless internal conversations. The chatter in his head was mercenary.

His relationship with his parents didn’t exactly instil confidence. ‘‘All I ever wanted from my dad was for him to be proud of me … I always felt like I wasn’t good enough. I would describe my mum as having bipolar. You never knew what you were going to get – the beautiful, loving mum or the terror mum.’’

He discovered booze at 13. Drugs followed.

But humour was his ticket to social acceptance and would become his livelihood. It brought him fame and wealth.

Under all that glitz, though, was an angry man struggling with his demons.

He was a ‘‘shit dad’’, a drug addict and an alcoholic. He has two suicide attempts behind him.

It wasn’t till he was 45 that he sought help for his mental well-being. He got clean, ditched the drink and drugs and went on to start his radio show, the Nutters Club, on which callers discuss mental health issues.

His work with kids, which began in 2013, was a voyage of discovery.

But it didn’t sit well with his stand-up career. ‘‘I didn’t realise how toxic stand-up comedy was to my mental well-being. We look for things that piss us off and put a funny twist on it but you’re always looking for the negative.

‘‘I was an arrogant arsehole.

‘‘By saying the stuff I was saying, it actively encouraged others to say it too. I had to make a choice. I could carry on doing what I was doing or I could carry on with this new love that I’d found.’’

Comedy lost out and King has since become the voice of mental health.

He sat on the government suicide prevention panel but quit last year, saying the draft plan was deeply flawed – or ‘bullshit’ in King’s trademark plainspeaking vernacular.

‘‘I knew the day I started on the panel in 2015 that I was going to be leaving when they started talking about funding, when they talked about starting with a blank piece of paper ... I called bullshit on it straight away.’’

On this month-long tour, King talks to kids at their school in the day and their parents at community events in the evenings.

Children connect with him because he is vulnerable, he says. ‘‘I tell kids what happened to me at school, drug and alcohol addiction. For most kids I am the first flawed adult in their life. We don’t talk to them about our failings because we are constantly wanting to protect them.

‘‘When I talk to the parents I tell them what I’m talking about is not my opinion, this is what your kids are telling us regardless of ethnicity, regardless of demographic, regardless of economics, all these kids are saying the same thing.’’

Some experts have labelled him ‘dangerous’. Local suicide prevention teams have warned schools off him.

He cops a lot of flak from the experts and the clinicians. There’s the belief that talking about suicide will only escalate the problem.

‘‘These are experts who have been around since the 70s but there’s this thing around called the internet and this is where our young people communicate. They know about suicide; their mates are doing it.

‘‘Every time we stay silent when a young person passes on, our kids think we just don’t care. In our desire to stop contagion, we are sending the wrong message.

‘‘We lecture at funerals saying ‘look how many people are hurt here, you need to talk to us’. But all we are saying to any other kid in the room who is feeling the same as the person in the ground is ‘you are someone else I can’t talk to’.’’

King says the alarming rate of suicide in New Zealand last year – 606 – wildly underestimates the crisis. He reckons it’s double that.

‘‘The coroners have to be 99 per cent sure that the person meant to take their life and so there are so many that aren’t ruled as suicide even when they leave a note. Some are deemed impaired, some are deemed too young to have made that conscious decision.

‘‘Here’s a fact: The experts will tell you that since I started talking to these kids the numbers have started to climb. Here’s another fact: The numbers are going to climb. As this issue becomes more open the coroners are going to start ruling differently. It’s a natural consequence of society accepting this is happening, of opening the dark doors.

‘‘Once you open the conversation and lift the tapu things are going to change.’’

King’s own life has changed in the past decade. He is a different dad to his four-yearold daughter to how he was with his other five kids.

He doesn’t lead the flash life and is proud of his South Auckland digs. His day job right now is tonic for his own well-being. For the first time, school is a good place for him.

Just before he hangs up his mic at Upper Hutt’s Ferguson Intermediate a student in the audience asks him whatever became of Nigel, that kid who escaped the bullies on that bench outside the staffroom with him.

‘‘Boom!’’, says King. ‘‘You kids always ask that at the end but the adults never do.’’

Turns out King ran into Nigel at a nightclub 13 years after that day at school.

Nigel was all smiles, wanting to know all about what King had been up to.

King was full of apologies, regret and remorse but Nigel wasn’t bothered.

King was perplexed. How could he not hold a grudge against someone who had bullied an already bullied kid.

‘‘I wasn’t bullied,’’ Nigel told him. ‘‘I sat next to you on that bench because I liked you.’’