Later - much later - when I became a fully fledged journalist, there were personal incidents that again touched me deeply. Not only youth suicides, but also those of younger men (who also dominate suicide statistics) who should have had their lives ahead of them.
The captain of industry (a mentor) who arrived home to find his son dead. I went to the movies (at his request) with him one afternoon when he was in extremis and wanted to take his mind off the event.
A colleague whose son had killed himself without leaving a note.
The beautiful son of a lawyer who also suicided.
The funeral booklet was poignant. Moreso the fact that his good friends - including one from my own family - got drunk on his grave the evening of the burial, castigating themselves and cursing that they did not have the chance to pull him back from the brink.
Many of us would have similar stories to share.
These are stories which are not directly relevant to the economic times.
But I would be remiss if I did not draw attention to the spike in suicide rates in the 1980s and early 1990s.
There was a mellowness about the New Zealand I grew up in. Our wealth was made off the "sheep's back". There was no copycat behaviour back then. Most of us felt the world was our oyster.
Come the 1980s economic revolution in NZ - and its impact - that changed. The TINA ("there is no alternative") mantra ruled the day as the prevailing rationale for policy change.
As a Motu report notes, in New Zealand, interventionist policies instituted in the 1930s grew steadily into the 1970s and turned the country into one of the most regulated economies in the OECD.
"By 1984, the country was facing unsustainable fiscal and current account deficits, inflation of over 11 per cent, foreign debt at 46 per cent of GDP and a foreign exchange crisis. Widespread recognition of the need for macroeconomic and microeconomic reforms led the government to initiate comprehensive market-oriented reforms that lasted until 1993.
"Over time, these policy changes opened the economy to foreign capital and international trade, dramatically reduced government assistance to industry, abolished agricultural subsidies, privatised state-owned enterprises, decentralised the employer-employee bargaining process and changed from universal provision of social welfare to a tightly targeted system."
The policy changes were brutal - "Chile without the guns" was muttered somewhat subversively.
A number of us journalists, including Linda Clark and Al Morrison, were singled out as "enemies of progress" by the then chair of the newly fledged Business Roundtable at the NZ Economists Association annual conference in the mid-1980s.
Our crime was to ask about the social dislocation: farmers who had suicided due to not being able to cope with losing their land following the removal of supplementary minimum prices.
The impact on our youth came later, as swathes of jobs were axed during the corporatisation programme of the late 1980s.
There are conflicting reports on why the youth suicide level spiked in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A report by Stuart Ferguson, Tony Blakely, Bridget Allan and Sunny Collings talks about how, before the mid-1970s, suicide rates were higher in older adults. In the mid-1980s there was a crossover and in the 1990s younger people had higher suicide rates; the highest suicide rates in the 1990s occurred among 20-29-year-olds. Suicide rates among 15-19 and 30-39-year-olds were also high during the 1990s.
Youth rates for suicide did not decline again until later in the 1990s.
What I do know at a personal level is that dashed certainties did have a demoralising effect on our young people in the early 1990s.
Successive governments - Labour and National - were brutal in failing to provide "adjustment policies" to help those young people who could not get work during the 1980s-90s reform period.
There are now hugely transformative changes ahead for the "future of work".
We owe it to our young people to make sure they have flexible job training available to them over their working lifetimes and also a universal income - it will by no means be the full story, but it will help.
Where to get help:
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available 24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO) (available 24/7)
• Youthline: 0800 376 633
• Kidsline: 0800 543 754 (available 24/7)
• Whatsup: 0800 942 8787 (1pm to 11pm)
• Depression helpline: 0800 111 757 (available 24/7)
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
• Samaritans 0800 726 666
• If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
