Supplied Content
Jacinda Ardern
Oceania Room, Te Papa Museum
Wellington, May 13, 2017
The following is a highly-edited version of a speech delivered by Jacinda Ardern, Member of Parliament (elected from Mt Albert and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party) at the Annual Congress 2017 of the Labour Party being held today and tomorrow (May 14). For full text of her speech, please visit www.labour.org.nz
For our Children
Labour has been bold enough to question economic orthodoxy when it has failed our people. To say that we actually believe in the notion of full employment, and the dignity of work, as much as we believe in protecting the dignity of those who cannot.
That we are pursuing the absolute eradication of poverty, we did it for our older citizens and now we must do it for our children.
That the well-being of our people, our ultimate motivation, is nothing without our environment- and that the status quo will not do.
And that all of this, is as much about paying it forward for the next generation as it is about the here and now. This has to be our message going into the election: We will pay it forward.
We may have a long ‘to do’ list to demonstrate our belief in this kind of pay it forward politics, things that will leave our country in a better state than we found it. But there are issues facing young people today that also need our immediate attention.
Mental health
As much as this generation is resilient, adaptable, and tough, they are also exposed to hardships that are taking their toll, and have been for some time.
We already know that after the early years, adolescence is the next most crucial stage of brain development, and that has an effect on everything – relationships, risk taking, emotional control and behaviour. Add to an already biologically difficult time a whole range of environmental stresses, like family strain, or material deprivation, and things are even tougher.
It is hard to be a young person growing up in New Zealand, and our statistics tell us it is there for everyone to see in our suicide rate.
It is hard to remember a time when the number of young people taking their own lives was not staggering, but it has not always been as bad as it is now.
In the 1980s for instance, the jump for young males in particular was horrific, going from 58 to more than a hundred in just eight years.
Effects of suicide
I was a little child living in Murupara in those days, and I distinctly remember as a primary school aged child learning what suicide was because it was talked about in our tiny community just so much.
And that is the sad truth. When someone in our community is affected by suicide, it causes a ripple effect.
I was only 13 years old when my best friend’s brother took his own life. I had just started high school and was waiting for class to start when I heard the news. I can remember exactly where I was standing, just outside the science block.
I went straight to my friend’s home and spent the next few days with her as her and her family went through the unimaginable grief of losing their only boy, grief that was felt by everyone that knew him, and was captured in the handwritten notes and messages from his classmates that hung around the walls at his funeral.
Everything about it seemed unfair, and still does to this day. Even at my friend’s wedding just a few years ago, the sense of loss, of there being a missing member of that family, hung in the air. He was just 15 years old when he died.
Behind every single entry in the suicide statistics lies not only a life lost, but a community shattered. We can repeat the statistics over and over, but it is the names and stories that almost all of us will know, that bring home the effect of this disease in our country.
National disease
I use the word disease with purpose. Suicide is a nationwide disease. We have come a long way when it comes to discussing issues of mental health and well-being, but I still fear that we treat it as something that can be overcome with will power.
No one would tell someone with heart disease, to pull it together, sort themselves out, or focus on the positive. Mental illness is an illness in every sense of the word, and one our beautiful country is plagued with.
We have some of the highest rates of teen suicide in the developed world.
There should be no politics in addressing an issue like this, there should only be one thing- the value we place on new Zealanders of all walks of life having a sense of belonging, a sense of support, and a sense of hope. And none of that is truer than for our young people.
We have made progress in some areas. The incredibly useful youth health surveys conducted since 2000 have shown us that risk taking behaviours have changed.
Binge drinking, smoking, teen pregnancy rates – all have dropped. Researchers overseas have interestingly all found the same trends. But despite that, we haven’t seen the same change in mental health.
There are answers out there. Ones that give me hope.
And there is one in particular that I want to share today.
School mental health teams
Research has shown that well-resourced comprehensive health teams in schools have lower depression and suicide rates amongst young people by up to two thirds. Two thirds.
These teams are special. They are a mixture of nurses, GPs, social workers, youth workers and guidance counsellors depending on the school. But perhaps most importantly, they are based in the school, and are a genuine part of it. That’s a huge part of their success. It is a fresh approach to looking out for the health of the next generation.
If you have health services that visit for just a couple of hours a week, it sadly, is not sufficient. Ask anyone who works in mental health and with young people and they will tell you that in crisis, having someone you know and trust to talk to is critical. And trust takes time.
All in all, these services, done well, have had a significant and measurable impact. And I want to acknowledge that nurses have already been funded in low decile schools.
But we have two problems: (a) Many programmes at those low decile schools are not comprehensive; and (b) Mental health issues are not confined to low decile schools.
The upshot is that for all of their success, comprehensive school based health services are only in just over 10% of our schools.
Why do we not have comprehensive school based health services in every single secondary school in New Zealand?
Yes, we know that poverty and deprivation does have an impact on mental health and wellbeing. But recently, I asked a few principals in schools who do not fall into a lower decile what issues they had had with youth mental health.
One replied frankly, “We have a real problem. We lost a student just last year. No one expected it. It had a profound effect.”
Associate Professor Simony Denny who has worked on the evaluation of school based services concluded with this assessment “We need these sorts of health services across all deciles; all schools are struggling with student wellbeing.”
The government’s approach to social spending has increasingly been to heavily target every single service. But last year even their own officials told them that “focusing on school decile could ignore other drivers of vulnerability and mental health issues”.
Vulnerable areas
Vulnerabilities exist everywhere. Crude measures of who is at risk of low to moderate mental health issues are just that, crude. Labour has always believed that there is a place for universalism, and when it comes to youth health services, that is exactly what we need.
That is why, under Labour, every state secondary school will have a comprehensive school based health service. Every school. Decile 1 or decile 10.
Every student who needs it will have the option of someone they can go to, and someone they can trust. A young person’s well-being, no matter who they are or what community they live in, will be our priority.
I know that this is just one small act though. And we cannot let this be a substitute for improving the other factors that effect a young person’s well-being.
Like housing, inequality and work prospects.
All of our goals as a party, whether it be eradicating poverty, ending the housing crisis, or lifting the quality of our education system will have an effect on our young people, and we will pursue these as much as we prioritise the health and well-being of our young people too.
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