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Reading about Cassandra’s story made me cry. How could it not? Her parents, Steve and Caroline, made heroic efforts to save her, and live through hell knowing they could not. To watch the light go out of the eyes of the most beloved face in the world to you, with the sickening knowledge that your child is too afraid to live and too afraid to die is soul-destroying enough. When they choose the latter because life just hurts too much, it’s every parent’s worst nightmare.

The hopelessly under-resourced, unco-ordinated mental health system couldn’t save Cassandra and many more like her, and this crisis has been 20 years in the making.

The blame should be apportioned squarely on successive governments who knew our woeful statistics on youth suicide and said nothing and did nothing.

Instead of wasting time in Parliament arguing about which party would be the bigger culprit in fuelling greater inflation and who’s truly Maori and who isn’t, work collaboratively to find solutions to this mental health emergency. These children aren’t a disposable generation and it’s immoral to treat them as if they were. Mary Hearn, Glendowie.