Goal to set up role and ‘look under the hood’
NZ’s first mental health minister Matt Doocey, on his own mental health
‘‘Mental health has always been a poor second cousin to physical health.’’
Matt Doocey
Minister for mental health
When NZ’s first mental health minister Matt Doocey was a teenager he was thrown through the back windscreen of a car and ended up in hospital for weeks with a brain injury.
Once discharged, the Christchurch MP had several follow-up appointments for broken bones but none regarding the impact of the head injury on his mental health.
“Now I know I had things like anxiety and depression. I struggled to concentrate. I got frustrated very easy.
‘‘I was getting angry, more and more isolated,” Doocey told Jack Tame on Q+A yesterday.
“Everyone said you need to get some support around it.
‘‘As a young bloke, I sort of refused to do that for a while. But it got to a point where I needed to get some help, and I reached out. I always say that was a lighbulb moment.
“Not only did I get the support that helps me today form a better relationship with my mental health, but I thought to myself I want to do what that person [his counsellor] does so I trained in counselling psychology.”
He went to work in the UK for the National Health Service.
Doocey said New Zealand needed someone in government dedicated to mental health as the health minister tended to be focused on the physical.
“Mental health has always been a poor second cousin to physical health,” he said.
“I looked around the world at some of the examples other jurisdictions had done – they created mental health ministries.
‘‘There’s a role that Australia introduced a few years ago that I think has been quite successful.”
Doocey accepted there was nothing in Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s 100day plan for mental health, but said his
own goal was to quickly set up the role and “look under the hood”.
Jacinda Ardern’s government announced an investment of $1.9 billion to improve mental health services.
“I want to know where $1.9 billion went,” Doocey said.
The minister planned to have a primary mental healthcare system that people should be able to access in a “matter of a week”. “We have some real constraints about publicly funded mental health.
“I think we need to look at how we get some of that money out of Wellington into the grassroot organisations who are already delivering.”
Doocey, who is also the ACC minister, said covering mental injuries in ACC was an option he could explore, but didn’t provide specific details.
Currently, ACC covered a mental injury under within a narrow set of circumstances. They were recently criticised for not covering cost of mental injuries of survivors of the Christchurch terror attacks.
The minister said he was keen to explore the possibility of widening the access to mental injuries resulting from traumatic events.