A Kiwi black spot

It took millennials to force Americans to confront the scourge of gun violence. Here in New Zealand, we have a failing of our own that our young people are only just waking up to.

At 24, I’m part of that paleo-dieting, selfie-taking, green-smoothie-drinking generation. But I’m also of the generation of crippling student loans, daily cocktails of antidepressants, a nearimpossible housing market and that ruthless beast that is social media.

We were the generation given participation medals for everything we did and never taught to acknowledge failure.

And I can’t count the number of peers I hear sheepishly admitting to experiences with anxiety or depression, confided like an ugly secret.

In the US, my generation has started a movement that could change everything.

The March for Our Lives in support of tighter gun control brought something like a million people to the streets of Washington DC, around the US and internationally on March 24.

What began as a grassroots reaction to the horrific shooting of 17 students at a Florida school could finally make a lasting change in the US, where thousands of people have lost their lives because of the accessibility of firearms.

It seemed government after government took donations from the National Rifle Association and ignored the devastation.

But these protesting youths, led by the survivors of the Florida school shooting, are finally saying what the rest of the world is thinking.

Let’s not be too smug, New Zealand.

We don’t just have one blind spot of our own. We have 606. That’s the number of people who killed themselves in the year to June 30, 2017. That toll has risen for three years in a row. We also have the highest rate of youth suicide in the developed world.

Yearly, mental health problems kill hundreds more than do road crashes.

The Government’s mental health inquiry, alongside the subsequent suggestion that there should be a ‘‘zero tolerance of suicides in services’’, is at least three years too late.

Like gun victims, we are dying – so, where are we, the millennial generation? Because here in New Zealand, we’re not taking to the streets. Why don’t Kiwi millennials push to be heard on an issue that desperately needs attention?

Maybe young adults are wary of our reputation as whiny, pseudo-activist clods, and don’t want to reinforce it.

That is sad, because the suicide rate was highest among 20-24-year-olds.

Last year, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said climate change is her generation’s ‘‘nuclear-free moment’’.

She’s right – climate change is the big one. But it’s global and it’s not really a blind spot anymore, except to the odd climate change-denying loon.

Right now, our crumbling mental health is equally insidious.

And for years we’ve swept it under the carpet, both in our decision-making and household conversations.

Activist Gemma Major, who co-founded Seed Waikato, a group designed to connect young adults – is no stranger to the issue. She has battled drug addictions, among other problems. But being an addict meant she was eligible for 16 months of funded addiction support.

Major says that after the discounted counselling sessions – typically four to 10 – most young people are left with no support other than an 0800 number to call in times of crisis, because they can’t afford to pay $160 a pop.

She says the counselling changed her life. ‘‘But not everybody has access to those services, which breaks my heart. And it kind of perpetuates a bigger problem.’’

A lack of professional help for those with mild or moderate depression or anxiety suggests they’re not worth attention until it reaches desperation stage. ‘‘It is challenging for people to get that support with earlier signs of mental distress,’’ Major says. ‘‘Once you get hospitalised, you have a medical team around you. But the lead-up to that – there is a real crisis in this country around getting adequate support services before it gets too big.

‘‘I don’t want to use the word crisis lightly. We can’t keep waiting for it to get to somebody committing suicide or being hospitalised. That’s not OK.’’ And that is the crux of it. We need to stop pouring money into the the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, and tackle those early stages of mental illness.

It’s no secret – the Government knows it’s a problem and could be putting preventative measures in place.

This is 2018, and we know mental illness doesn’t always traipse, dead-eyed, through a psych ward in a hospital gown.

Yet, when someone kills themselves and their smiling picture circulates on social media, the sentiment is often the same: ‘‘They seemed so happy’’.

Every depressed or anxious person should be addressed as an emergency in the making. Because when professional help isn’t readily available, it’s especially hard for a generation lacking coping skills.

Jess Featherstone can hardly remember the two months after the suicide of her 23-year-old best friend in 2016.

Liam Phillips – who went to a private school and had a great family – had suffered crippling anxiety for years. It wasn’t a secret that he was struggling, he had been hospitalised just days before he died.

Even in the hours before his death, he assured Featherstone he was feeling better.

‘‘To this day, we don’t know what happened,’’ she says.

But he slipped through cracks that shouldn’t have been there.

‘‘I’d want to ask him the usual – what I could have done. I’d want to know what anyone could have done, actually.’’

I won’t pretend to know exactly what needs to happen, but we need to put the pedal down.

As the Government’s mental health inquiry drags on this year, the numbers could keep creeping up.

It might be naivete showing, but for me the answer isn’t rocket science. We need funded face-to-face clinical support for people unable to afford it themselves.

An 0800 number clearly isn’t enough – it must be hard to confide in the disembodied voice of a person you’ve never met.

Most people struggling – lowincome, rural and younger people – simply can’t afford to spend thousands on professional help. And we millennials should be inspired by young Americans – there’s something to be said for being an outraged millennial.

Because the stoic, Kiwi thing hasn’t worked for those 606 blind spots.