Greater minds need broader support
It was good to read that the Herald and NZME are launching a project to explore solutions for improving wellbeing. What was not so good was Andrew Little stating that the Ministry of Health would focus on specialist services for serious mental health problems where
there were "major unmet needs".
His claim that much of the Government's investment has gone into early intervention does not ring true when every day we see evidence of people suffering poor mental health without getting the help they need. Further, the He Ara Oranga: Report of the Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction in 2018 clearly spelled out what was needed.
We know that mental health is more than the absence of mental disorder but is determined by a range of socioeconomic, biological, environmental, and cultural factors. Unless we tackle the determinants of health such as safe and affordable houses. education, poverty, abuse, and deprivation, transform primary health care, and strengthen the NGO sector, so people can get the affordable skilled help in their local communities that they need, nothing will change. Mental health policies need to be concerned not only with mental disorders but also with the broader issues that promote the mental health of us all.
Glennys Adams, Oneroa.
Normal anxiety
The extensive coverage NZ Herald has given to mental health issues, which I applaud, prompts me to respond.
Patricia Casey, a psychiatry professor at University College Dublin, thinks Prince Harry and Megan Markle are misleading young people with their emphasis on "mental health" issues. Not getting along with - or feeling undermined by - your in-laws , or even suffering the loss of a parent in tragic circumstances, is not a mental health issue, says Casey.
Mental health issues are schizophrenia, bipolar illness and severe depression.
Harry has had therapy but Casey doesn't think he is much of an advertisement for it - or he'd recognise the difference between mental health afflictions and normal distress.
The Sussexes are "a high-functioning couple"; people with mental illness can't function at all.
Describing reactions to difficult or sad life events as a "mental health issue" is detracting from serious mental illness, she says. The focus has shifted too far from real mental illnesses like schizophrenia or clinical depression and towards ordinary negative feelings, which are normal. Covid and, indeed, climate change may make some people anxious and indeed fed up, but they are not a trigger for mental illness.
Allan M Spence, Waiuku.
Deeper water
It seems very strange that the permanent closure of the Marsden Pt Oil Refinery has gone very largely unchallenged, while simultaneously an expansionist China has been granted rights of a deepwater port close by in the Solomon Islands. New Zealand is now totally dependent on imported supplies of refined petrol, diesel, aviation fuel, and also roading bitumen. This is carried by shipping where, with NZ defence forces almost totally non-existent, our economy would be totally destroyed overnight if this shipping was interrupted by any aggression in the Pacific.
Have we closed our eyes as a nation?
Hylton Le Grice, Remuera.
Sacrifices of war
Last week I held a funeral for my father, a World War II veteran. I made a point of having his casket draped in the New Zealand flag in recognition of and gratitude for the fact his wartime service meant I could live in a country whose citizens enjoy fundamental rights like equal suffrage.
Imagine my shock when several days later Willie Jackson (NZ Herald, April 25) starts trying to sell co-governance to us by suggesting "democracy has moved on". Jackson's timing in the lead-up to Anzac Day was as insensitive as his arguments are misleading.
Co-governance is not MMP-era consensus democracy. It flouts voter equality and proportionality and, if extended to the provision of public services, will diminish the electoral accountability of those responsible for spending our taxes.
The New Zealanders of my father's generation did not make the sacrifices they did for Jackson and his caucus colleagues to tell us one-person, one-vote is an outdated concept, or to otherwise erode basic democratic principles to realise their ideological agenda. This Government pursues the path of co-governance at its electoral peril.
James Braund, Remuera.
Limited resource
That Māori health care needs to be addressed is not in question. However, that can only be addressed by applying the resources of health professionals.
Our small country has a limited health budget and much of that budget is already committed to buildings, administration and management. It is folly to consider another layer of bureaucracy by creating a separate Māori Health Authority, which would only weaken both systems.
As Sir Bernard Ashwin - who played a key role in transforming the New Zealand government's approach to economic management in the 1930s and 1940s - famously reminded Walter Nash, "You can only spend the same pound once."
Rob Buckett, Remuera.
