Achiever swamped by waves of despair

Saskia Ymker, like many young New Zealanders, has felt the highs — and the lows.

“There is just so much pressure on us — our lifestyle, our culture, even our opportunities,” says the 28-year-old.

“We really can do anything we want. But it’s also huge and overwhelming — wow, I can do anything, but where do I start?

“We know that as an individual we have a lot of power. It makes you feel responsible for everything, like the environment.

“We have been taught to think about all the things that might go wrong, in the hope that we might safeguard the process better.

“But actually there is always a certain amount of risk — you just have to give it a go and trust that it will work out.”

Ymker is doing a masters in biomedical science at Victoria University in Wellington. She has also just finished training as a peer support worker for Piki, a new free mental health service for Wellingtonians aged 18 to 25.

She has experienced unhappiness, and even times when she felt “utterly useless and like a failure”.

In her lowest times, Ymker felt stuck. She saw other people feel low, isolated or overwhelmed and come out of it, but she couldn’t shake it off as quickly.

“In my experience suicidal thoughts are often a way to communicate a sense of hopelessness, or people not being sure how to find a way out of their circumstances,” she says.

“I see it as a way of asking for help. It’s a way of saying, ‘I’m not okay, what’s happening is not okay, I need to do something about this but I don’t know what to do about it, or I can’t get out of it on my own’.”

Ymker finally shared her struggles in her university lab group, and was amazed to find she was not alone.

“It was like this dam that suddenly opened up and everyone was just sharing, everyone from my peers to my superiors were talking

There is just so much pressure on us. Saskia Ymker

about their versions of these experiences and how it’s affected them,” she says.

“When you hear stories you can look around at the other people and see how people cope with these pressures, and you can start to create a bit of movement in your own life about how you deal with them.”

Through Piki, she hopes to help others to break through too.

“I’m not saying this is 100 per cent the solution,” she says.

“On the other hand I think it’s an incredibly important first step. Just the amount of release that you can get from sharing experiences, and feeling like you are not alone, is huge.”