Pūtahi Hauora
Defence Health HubSelf-harm and suicidal thoughts
Te haehae me te whakaaro whakamomori
If you are pushed to the edge, know there is always support available, you just need to ask.
If you are thinking about self-harm and suicide, seek professional support. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 111.
If you are worried about a mate ask them if they are ok, and support them to seek help. If they say they are ok but you are still worried, reach out for support: NZDF helpline 0800 NZDF4U (0800 693348, TXT 8881), Lifeline (0800 543 354), or Suicide Crisis Support helpline (0508 828 865). The chaplains, marae, or our social workers can also help. For more helpful tips and resources refer to Helping others.
About self-harm
Self-harm can be used to deal with painful feelings, as a way to punish ourselves or others, or even to ask for help. When we talk about self-harm, we’re usually referring to when someone deliberately hurts themselves without wanting to die. Sometimes it can take the form of very risky behaviour like driving recklessly or starting fights.
If you or a friend are self-harming, it’s important that you talk to someone about what you’re going through before consequences escalate. There are a number of services listed below available to help.
Thoughts about suicide
If your life (or someone else’s life) is in immediate danger – call 111 or go to your nearest hospital emergency department.
Its not a rare occurrence for people to have thoughts of suicide or feel that sometimes life isn’t worth living. Most people don’t act on these thoughts and are able to get over feeling this way, sometimes with professional support.
If you or someone you know has felt like this at some point, remember:
- Many people have felt the same way at some stage, that they can’t go on, but they’ve come through it and lived great lives. There is light at the end of the tunnel and there is hope for a better future.
- Just because you’re having suicidal thoughts today doesn’t mean you have to act on them. Make a 'contract' with yourself (or even better, with someone else) to wait 24 hours, or a few days, or a week. You’ve already put those thoughts aside by reading this, so you can put it off a bit longer.
- You don’t have to go through this alone. Talk to someone you trust-a friend, your GP, a counsellor or psychiatrist, a chaplain, a kaumatua/koro/kuia, a colleague, commander, or anyone you trust to help keep you safe. You can find a list of people to call when you need support at NZDF Mental health or call 0800 NZDF4U.
Things that might lead to thoughts of suicide
There are many reasons why you or others might have thoughts of self-harm or suicide. Commonly they are relate to a desire to escape from distressing feelings, to cope with life stressors or to escape pain.
Sometimes, people who try to hurt themselves or take their own life have just lost someone or something they cared about. Maybe a close friend or loved one passed away, or a relationship or career has come to an end. If this sounds like you, finding out more about grief might help.
Experiencing depression or anxiety can be related to thoughts about self-harm. One of the reasons for this is that they can prevent people from seeing the positive things that are still in life, alongside any current negative experiences, and they can cloud our ability to see hope for the future too. That can make self-harm seem like a solution to a problem when the truth is there are way better solutions out there.
People are also much more likely to try to hurt or kill themselves when they’re under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
People who have been through frightening or traumatic events, such as childhood abuse to serious accidents or combat operations, may suffer from post traumatic stress which can also increase the risk of self-harm or suicide.
Sometimes it's the stresses and strains of life, like financial problems, physical pain, unemployment, or a relationship break up, that build up to the point where it seems life isn't worth living.
Remember that all of these problems can be solved, some not easily, and maybe not perfectly, but there are solutions and there are people who can help (like financial counsellors, job agencies and health professionals).
Things will get better.
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Read A sister's story on losing her brother to suicide
Before Jon died we’d planning an ‘epic roadtrip’ for months and I was so excited. We were going to drive all the way up the North Island right to the very top and be crazy all the way there like we always were. Then one day my entire world came crashing down on top of me. Jonathan was gone forever.
I remember that moment like it was yesterday. When the words came out of my sister’s mouth I looked at her wishing for her to tell me it wasn’t true and it was all a horrible mistake. When I realised he was really gone the tears started and rarely stopped for the next six months. We were never going on our roadtrip, I’d never hear his voice again, hug him, laugh with him or be able to tell him how much I loved him ever again and his son would never see his father again. I thought I would never be able to recover from losing my big brother, I loved him so much and couldn’t bare the thought of going through life without him. Jonathan and I became very close in the last few years of his life. We often tried to figure out how it happened and decided it was the day he spent all day trying to cheer me up when I was sick. Coincidentally this was only two days before he went away for basic. He was so busy getting ready for all of this but still had time for his little sister.
Whenever he came back to Auckland for visits we were always going on little escapades together – late night takeaway runs, random drives, going to the beach, talking in Spanish in a sombrero – we always found something to do. In the end he became more than just my brother to me. He was my best friend and my protector. I always felt so safe like nothing bad would ever happen as long as he was around. In fact when he died, the person I needed most to pick me back up was him. I’m not going to lie…there have been many times that I have been angry at Jon for leaving, for giving up and wondering how he could ever leave us to go through life without him, especially his son who he loved most in this world. I thought that his love for us and our love for him would miraculously fix everything that was wrong.
Many times I have felt guilty for not doing enough to help him or for being angry at him and spent countless hours replaying everything I said and did wishing I had done more to help him, wondering if I did enough. I agonised for months over a phone call we had just before he died where we had a bit of a frosty conversation. I couldn’t remember if it was our last conversation and whether I had told him I loved him like I did every time I ended a phone call with him. I couldn’t bare the thought of him thinking I didn’t care and that being his last memory of me. We knew Jon had been fighting his depression, but he didn’t like to talk about. The times he did talk to me, I had to practically force it out of him. He didn’t want to burden anyone with his ‘problems’
and he got so good at convincing people I thought that he was ok until it was too late.Slowly, I have learnt to accept and understand that Jon did love all of us, that he wanted to be there for his son as he grew up and that he didn’t want to die. He was fighting a crippling depression and eventually he got so far into that dark place in his mind he just couldn’t find his way out. One thing he said to me about his depression helped me to eventually understand that he knew we loved him but it just couldn’t take those feelings away. I will be forever grateful to him for giving me that. Depression is a terrible disease that we need to understand can’t just be turned off. It is unforgiving and relentless. I
hope that one day depression isn’t something we hide away from and instead learn to understand and accept that it’s ok to ask for help. His death has helped me to realise that and I may not have been able to prevent his death but if I can do anything to stop someone else making that decision I will always do it. Remember you are never alone.To access the PDF of this story and others, please click here
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Read Karley's story on her experience with suicidal thoughts
Suicide –it felt like the only way out.
Mental Illness such as depression can take the sufferer to a dark place. Like being in a deep dark hole with no light in sight to guide the way out. When I became mentally unwell, I found myself in a very deep, very dark place just like that hole. Past trauma and stress overload made depression & anxiety became my demons, and although I do not serve in the military, I went into combat with those demons and the battlefield was my own mind.
Blessed with a home, job, devoted partner & the love of my beautiful children, I did not recognise how unwell I had become and my once logical mind was over-run with negative thoughts and feelings of absolute hopelessness. I did not have the ability to hold back the thoughts that were overwhelming me nor see them as something that could be overcome. Without help, I felt I had become a burden on my family and I started to conclude that they would be better off without me here causing them anguish and stress. I had become very mentally unwell, and I just wanted the pain I was feeling to stop.
I had lost all hope that I would be or could be well and happy again. My mind just wouldn't let me believe it. My feeling of being a burden on my family over rode any thoughts of the consequences ending my life would have on them.
Did I attempt to take my own life? .... Yes I did.
I was very lucky that my family intervened in time and got me the help I so desperately needed. I take medication now ... I go to counselling ... I have a great support system in place to help me return to mental wellness.
Am I happy to be alive and getting mentally healthy again? ... Yes I am.
Was I a burden to my family like my mind told me? .... No I wasn't ... my family told me so.
To access the PDF of this story and others, please click here
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Read the words of a mother who lost her son to suicide
No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Famous words by John Donne. We may not always realize how much of an impact what we do has on others.
In November 2013 I lost my son Signaller Jonathan Hosken, who was based at Burnham Military Camp, to suicide. This is about my journey since that horrific news came to me.
To lose a loved one is always difficult and no matter why we lose loved ones we naturally have many questions that we ask to try and make sense of our loss. As Jonathan’s mum, I would like to say that losing a child – no matter their age – is unbelievable – it isn’t meant to happen at all, we are supposed to pass before our children. And losing our child because they choose to pass is so hard to get our heads around. We carry our babies for nine months while we dream of how they will lead fulfilled lives. Then we nurture them close to us as young children before sending them out into the big wide world fervently praying that they will make choices that lead to love and fulfilment. If they make choices like Jonathan made, it is gut wrenching. And rightly or wrongly we question what we could have done differently that might have saved him. Even though I know in my heart that Jonathan, and Jonathan alone, made the decision to end his life.
This is part of a message I wrote to Jonathan two years after his passing. It holds as much relevance now as it did seven years ago:
It has been two long years since the tragic day when we lost you. And though you may have thought we would soon forget you, every single day you have been remembered in one way or another.You may have thought those you left behind would be unchanged by losing you. But we have all changed because we lost you. Your passing has affected many people deeply.
As time has gone by it has become easier to talk about you, the funny things you did, the experiences each of us had with you. The tears don’t come as often. But they do come because we will always grieve the loss of you, a beloved and integral part of who we are. Sometimes the tears come out of the blue. It may be a smell, a sound, a song – it could be anything. Sometimes we can relate it to you. Sometimes we cannot. This is part of each of our lives now. We miss you deeply and love you to the moon and back, Son.
He waka eke noa – we are all in this waka of life together. What affects one person, affects the whole crew. We depend on each other. From the depths of my mother’s heart, I plead with you to seek the support of the rest of your crew whenever the urge comes to you, either for yourself or for your mate(s). Whatever you decide to do will have a major affect on the people around you, the people you love. It is unavoidable.
Ngā mihi
To access the PDF of this story and others, please click here
Suicide Prevention Presentation by Michael Hempseed
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what was the author of the book being a true hero encourage you to get a
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copy if you haven't got one or sort it sort them appearing you'll be outlining about today uh so he's the water of the
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book being a true hero understanding and preventing suicide in your community
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the book has been used by the New Zealand Police Army Medics fire and emergency New Zealand uh GPS councilors
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as well as many parents and teachers so Michael gained an honors degree of
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Psychology from the University of Canterbury in 2008. in 2016 he spoke at
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tedx on overcoming failure which led to him becoming a Sorter and proficient
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speaker in the last two years Martin was delivered more than 300 seminars on
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topics such as overcoming failure mental illness and suicide being changes
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so this presentation has been filmed and will be available on the IOP page
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once it is uploaded great thank you very much
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good afternoon everyone so uh yes I'm Michael hempseed now there's one thing
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that everyone wants to know about me and the first question everyone always has is what is the deal with your last name
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for those of you that don't know hemp seed is someone associated with marijuana um this really is my last name it is not
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a joke so my first little advice today is if you have children please do not give them the last name hemp seed it has
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made my life rather difficult over the years if you want to know where the name came from it came from hemproven Scotland
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they used to use it on ships not the stuff you smoke I don't know why people always jump to that conclusion
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so I traveled all over New Zealand giving talks something about suicide prevention and understanding PTSD
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before I got into this line of work I had a different goal in life I wanted to run my own read-alone company and I was
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going to call it hemp seeds grass right so these are the things that we
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are going to cover today for those who have just joined us is there anything in particular that you want to know today about mental health Suicide Prevention
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the meaning of life anything like that anything you're welcome to join us okie
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dokie so there we go okay when we don't have a global
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pandemic on I love traveling I've been all over the world uh so from top left to bottom right China Morocco Pisa Rome
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and the bottom left there that is the Chernobyl nuclear reactor so I have been
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to Ukraine and yes in case you're wondering I now glow in the dark we've got Brazil and Cambodia
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and I've done some interesting things a part of the robotic plane jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at 13 000 feet
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doing a Lamborghini around a racetrack in Las Vegas it's a little bit hard to see but my legs are actually bent over
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that is not a joke they did not design sports cars for six foot three tall people
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and I've been hang gliding right so what are we seeing at the
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moment in terms of mental health uh unfortunately it's not good so this was
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a study from the US we don't have any decent New Zealand data yet but hopefully it's coming shortly
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before the pandemic eight and a half percent of the U.S population reported clinical levels of depression
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in the first couple of years the pandemic that jumped to 27.8
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the really disturbing number there though is severe from 0.7 which is almost nothing to 5.1 as far as I'm
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aware that is the sharpest rise in mental illness that has ever been recorded in human history
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does that surprise you is that what you're seeing
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yeah so it's one of the big questions is um is this just we're recognizing this more
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now or is this actually more common I don't think I've got another slide deck there's a study called the
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epidemiological catchment area study a bit of a mouthful they interviewed people that were born in 1905 and they
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found that people that were born in 1905 they had a one percent lifetime chance of having depression they carefully
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interviewed them it was Anonymous reporting so there wasn't a reporting bias and it seemed like mental illness
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was fairly rare then they interviewed people that were born um in later and today we think something
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like one in four people in any given year will have clinical levels of depression
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so it's not just that we're recognizing it more we think there has been a staggering increase in this
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why do you think there's been such a massive increase in this
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we've got time yeah
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um you just say um yeah I think some of the laws that have made probably don't actually help build resilience in people
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yeah uh cost of living that's a massive stress for people and I work with a lot of people on really good salaries and
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some of them are struggling to live so you can imagine how much worse off it is for other people
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like 100 years ago was pretty simple there's no technology yeah
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quite a simple yeah it's estimated we've used somewhere between seven and a half and ten
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thousand ads on social media each day and we interact with more people in one day than someone in the Middle Ages
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interacted with probably in their entire lifetime so there's a lot more complexity yes
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yeah yeah and one of the other things is and before smartphones came along you used
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to be able to leave your work at work now what happens a lot of people take their work home with them and they never get a break
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there's a couple of other things to look at as well it's not just depression also just a
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second before you get that one um now people are wondering well what is depression and is it real so there's this interesting study uh
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they took a scan of people's brains and they found there's a bit of the brain called the hippocampus that's one of the
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parts of the brain's brain associated with memory and emotion and they found that people that have depression this
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part of the brain can shrink by up to 17 so they're a very real and very
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significant changes that have within the brain does that surprise you that I see that
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this part of the brain could be associated with memory we don't really think of depression as being affected by memory do we
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but if you listen carefully to what a lot of people with depression say sometimes they say things like I can't
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remember the last time that I was happy I can't even remember what happiness is
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and people with depression often have stronger memories of the negative or the sad events and less strong memories of
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the happy or the positive events in their lives so it's quite possible that depression may have more to do with memory who were previously recognized
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the World Health Organization has said that depression this one mental illness is the leading cause of disability
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worldwide it accounts for more time off sake and more lost productivity than
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anything else if someone has a heart attack and they survive how long will they probably have off work
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maybe two to twelve weeks depending on sort of the severity of it if someone has depression how long can
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they be off for months or years yeah and I met a police
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officer fairly recently he was in the child protection unit and seemed to be
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okay and then had a massive meltdown I think the last 10 years he just has not been able to work and he hasn't shown
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much sign of giving better so yeah you can see the impact that was going to have on someone
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now have you ever um met someone that you think might have depression and they say something you ask them how are you
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and you can see they're not okay and they say I'm fine and you think well you're just telling
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me what I want to hear are you just making this up there's another part of the brain called the insula and that's one of the parts
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of the brain associated with self-evaluation and self-understanding
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and if the part of the brain doesn't work so well for self-understanding what do you think that means for a lot of
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people with depression they don't know what's going on so some
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people if you ask them how are you and they say I'm fine they genuinely think they are fine they're not lying or
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anything like that they genuinely don't realize they have a problem so unfortunately I'm recognizing this in
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yourself can be difficult and I'll address that a little bit some people obviously do know they have it but other
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people it can take them a long long time to figure it out language
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teaching like how you say hello to somebody yeah yeah sure the answers depending on how
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you actually are yeah if you ask people in the Western World how are you pretty much everyone
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says I'm fine automatically if you go to say African cultures you ask someone how are you you will get a genuine response
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so there's a bit of um
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yeah that's the problem yep
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so we've got three people here we've got Fritz Sarah and Lucy so Fred is happy once for most of the time once every few
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weeks he feels quite low we've got Sarah she just lost to grandmother she's overwhelmed and totally distraught and
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we've got Lucy she has a wonderful life a great and supportive family a great boyfriend and a great job yet most days
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she feels totally worthless doesn't want to get out of bed finds nothing makes her happy and doesn't see the point anymore
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so first of all Fred who thinks that Fred has depression
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okay Fred has a very serious medical condition I'm going to say it now if you can't pronounce that that's okay and
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just try and follow with me the name of the condition that Fred has is called life
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so we need to be incredibly careful when we talk about this we don't want to pathologize or turn into an illness all normal human behavior it is normal to
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have days where you feel good and it's normal to feel days we don't feel so good some people call those days we don't feel so good Mondays and I agree
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entirely at least we've got zero what do you think she's got grief grief is not a
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mental illness that's considered a normal response to a difficult or traumatic situation but there is something called complicated grief where
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people get stuck in that grief and it can go on and on for months or even years and then lastly Lucy
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that's depression so when it starts to fix someone's functioning when they can't eat when they can't sleep when
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they don't want to get out of bed when it starts to thickly functioning that's really when it turns from having a bad day to depression
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look at a couple of other things what are some of the other symptoms that you think of when someone might have depression
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yep it's interesting and sometimes we think people say with depression I don't want to get out of beard often they
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don't actually have the energy to do it and something you could take say a fit 18 year old if you've got depression
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something as simple as getting out of bed and making a bowl of cereal in the morning they might be so exhausted doing
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that they have to lie down for the rest of the day so it can stack all your energy out of you
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anything else yep very much so yeah so some people
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will cry but other people will get angry and upset and like we've all probably been running late for a meeting and the
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idiot in front of us jammed the photocopier and we're running late probably get a little bit annoyed then that is not um a sign of depression but
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if someone's always getting upset or they're always on age and just they seem irritated by everything that can be an
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indicator anything else this is random is having a missing house considered a sign of
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people for some people um there's actually some interesting research that shows some people that are really intelligent they live in a mess
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um for some people it's ages but other people you know if they did keep a clean house and then you see the house in a
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total mess yeah that would absolutely be a warning sign so lack of personal hygiene you have someone usually
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presents themselves very well and they come and unshave and they just look like a mess yeah absolutely things like that
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um so you know you um you don't look after yourself so you um you know you're not
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eating properly yeah very much and not only that um there was
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a fascinating study that looked at childhood depression and Asthma and they found that if a child had asthma and
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depression their asthma symptoms were four times as bad as if they only had asthma
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so it can really affect the whole body I think we've got most of these oh numbness so a lot of people with
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depression we think they'll feel sad and some people do but half of all people with depression experience numbness or
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no emotions so if you ever ask someone how are you and they say I don't know they could
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actually be a sign of numbness if we're just looking for people that feel sad we're going to miss a whole lot of people
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uh you know hypersomnia they want to sleep all the time or they can't get to sleep at all they lose all enjoyment in
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life so people say food doesn't taste good and they've even done studies where they've found that people view the world
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in muted Shades of Gray to actually see the world differently
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so some people lose a lot of weight because they don't eat and other people gain a lot of weight so yeah they can
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absolutely be one now for most people when they go to the supermarket choose a breakfast cereal
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how long does it take them to choose one hopefully 30 seconds not too long
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hopefully it's a hopefully it's a simple decision what do you think happens if someone's got depression
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yeah that's simple decision can become overwhelming for someone and it might literally take them 20 or
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30 minutes to decide in fact some people are so overwhelmed they can't decide and
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actually walk out so what it does to their health and everything else that they can't buy the
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food they need we call this brain fog so difficulty
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thinking difficulty making decisions so if you ever recognize that someone used to be you know really sharp really good at replying to emails they'd be really
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decisive and then you notice that they're taking ages to get back to you they don't seem to be making decisions
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things don't seem to be going well that would be something to look out for
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the other big one is um particularly around suicide risk which I'll get to in a minute um is our distorted thinking I know
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someone that made a suicidal team she woke up in hospital all her friends and family were crying by her bedside and
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she genuinely believed this was all an act for the doctors and secretly all her friends and family wanted her dead
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they're not even get for that badly but just be aware that for some people they think they're a burden to other people
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we often think that people that die by Suicide are selfish and fortunately some people think they're doing the world a
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favor so if you ever recognize any symptoms of burdensome or people say you know I'm just taking up space I'm
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costing people money I'm a real burden to others these are things to look out for
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if you were to meet Robin Williams on the street what would you think he's a ghost
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yeah correct but when he was alive he would have seen like the happiest most energetic and joyful person that you've
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ever met we now know underneath that he suffered from depression for years so what was going on there
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yeah so just be aware of some people um can look happy on the outside and
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they can still have depression underneath so if someone tells you they've got depression and you think oh you look so happy always take it
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seriously yeah see you know Flawless images of people
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going about yeah amazing yeah
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you mean that's not your life I thought that was everyone oh right yes yeah
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um yeah I think there's a huge problem there was a completely analystick expectations a lot of people have yeah
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absolutely one of the other things we found is that
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people with depression they don't just experience physical sorry emotional symptoms they can also experience physical symptoms
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so one of those things we found is a lot of people with depression they experience back pain and this is not imaginary the reason for this is your
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brain is connected to the spinal cord and that makes up the central nervous system so it totally affects the brain
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they can filter down to other parts of the body so this is very real
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depression and workplace excellence why might this occur
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yeah if you've got brain fog say if you're in a busy site or something like that we've got lots of moving vehicles
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and you've got someone that's not thinking clearly and they've got brain fog what's likely to happen
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working to make mistakes so there is a health and safety risk to be aware of and particularly if people have got severe depression
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now the good news is that people can get better from depression it's thought that half of all people that experience
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depression will have one or two episodes about their life and they'll never have it again so already you have a 50 cure
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rate they'll just the people learn to live with us they can actually be cured and their brain change that I talked
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about before with the hippocampus the good news is that it can regrow welcome so there are some really good news with
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it take a seat and we're just going over depression and
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now we'll look at anxiety so again before I talked about the high
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rates of depression and we also think that anxiety is rising and absolutely stunning rate this is a report by Gene
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twin she's a very famous adolescent researcher she believes the average young person today based on historical
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records is more stressed and more anxious than psychiatric patients were
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in the 1950s and 60s does that surprise you
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I mean I talk all over New Zealand just about every industry you can imagine doctors nurses counselors social workers
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Builders Farmers police you know you name it I've probably spoken to them anxiety just seems to be everywhere
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so what is anxiety well if you were to feel fear in one of these three situations is that a bad
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thing not at all in some situations fear is a really good emotion and you want to feel
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it especially if you're being chased by a tiger if you don't feel fear you will become lunch
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so fear can have its uses when you become fearful your body activates What's called the sympathetic nervous
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system your body gets pumped full of adrenaline nor adrenaline and cortisol and all these chemicals prime your body
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for Action so you can fight the thing off or you can run away
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your um hat beats a lot faster your muscles become stronger your pupils dilate all
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these things happen so you're in defense mode this response is brilliant if you're being chased by a tiger
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what do you think anxiety is
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in a better race it's a really false alarm so if we take this classroom here no one is going to die in that classroom
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okay no one has done any physical danger there's no guns or knives or anything like that but if someone had anxiety in
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that classroom their body would um present the emergency response they'd be their heart would start to race some
20:06
people would feel like they're going to die so they have the response of feeling like there's a tiger in the room but
20:12
there's no tiger why do you think people get anxiety in situations that aren't dangerous
20:22
when you're thinking about the body's emergency response it is designed to be blindingly fast it is not particularly
20:28
accurate so if there's a rustling in a bush and it could be a tiger or it could be a bird your body says it's better to
20:36
set off the emergency response and be wrong than to go over there and find oh this the tiger and by the time you do
20:42
that you'll be dead the emergency response is blindingly fast but it's not accurate and we think
20:48
that lack of accuracy is why people get anxiety around things that aren't really dangerous
20:54
um initially without treatment how much control do you think you have over this not a lot
21:00
yeah if your body thinks you're in danger it's going to set off the emergency response and if someone said
21:06
to you just calm down don't worry it's okay fear of a tiger or someone telling you calm down which one's more important
21:18
now a lot of people with anxiety they complain of tummy upsets and we often think they might be making this up to get out of something they don't want to
21:24
do but when the sympathetic nervous system goes off it switches off the digestive organs and the reason for that
21:31
is if you're under attack by a tiger your body wants to take all the unnecessary energy that it has
21:37
and it wants to put it into survival digestion uses quite a lot of energy and
21:44
if you're about to be eaten by a Target you don't need to digest food so your body switches off the digestive organs
21:51
so this is why people feel physically sick when they have anxiety they're not just making this up they've sometimes
21:57
either feel like they're going to throw up or they actually will
22:04
there's just four things the frightened brain can do faint freeze flee or fight it is important to talk about the freeze
22:11
response it's probably the most common response that people have um this is we just people freeze up and
22:17
they don't do anything and just as a word if you're ever doing training with people um St John has found that if you train
22:24
people in a classroom to attend accidents um when people get out to the real world they don't respond as they did in the
22:30
training but if you have actors in makeup and you have simulated car crashes and things like that people
22:36
respond much better and that's a way to overcome the phrase response
22:41
now where is the think logically solve difficult problems you know playing for future where's that in any of those
22:47
modes unfortunately people having anxiety
22:53
they're in the here and now they don't think about the future or long-term decisions
23:02
there's a strong link between fear and violence this is the fight response so
23:07
it's been found that a lot of say domestic violence happens when people are afraid in the last couple of years
23:13
of the pandemic we think domestic violence then doubled or troubled in New Zealand so just be aware when a lot of people are anxious they can become quite
23:19
aggressive and sometimes people do some really really dumb things about six years ago
23:27
in America there was a man in a petrol station he had a terrible fear of spiders and he saw a spider on his
23:33
petrol tank so we did what all of us would do he took out his lighter and he
23:38
lit the spider on fire and the Petrol in the car and the whole
23:43
town petrol station now sitting here logically we know that was a really dumb thing to do
23:50
what was he thinking yeah this is the problem when you're in
23:55
that anxious mode you don't think about anything like I'm gonna look like a [ __ ] on the news tomorrow you adjust in
24:01
the Here and Now it's unfortunately people make bad decisions down to him
24:07
the worst form of anxiety you can have is what's called a panic attack and this mimics the symptoms of a heart attack when people feel like the chest is
24:14
tightening up looking like their throat's tightening up and they feel like they're going to die now if you're not sure is this a heart
24:20
attack or a panic attack if it's someone younger it's probably a panic attack if
24:25
it's someone middle age and you're not sure it is better to assume it's a heart attack get it checked out by a medical
24:31
professional because you don't want to be wrong on that one any idea how you could stop someone
24:36
having a panic attack
24:43
yep yep yeah yeah it's absolutely one technique
24:49
and the other way is to get people to breathe so if someone's having a painter can take in front of you say I think
24:55
you're having a panic attack I know this is really scary but I want you to
25:00
breathe with me we're going to do it together now if you take a deep breath if
25:06
someone's having a panic attack how much of a deep breath will they be able to take not much at all but um if you take a
25:15
um and if you might have to do this over and over again how long do you think it'll take to calm someone down that's having a panic attack
25:23
well yeah probably a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes because that's how long cortisol can stay in your system for so it's not
25:29
a you know take five minutes go away and come back it's actually quite a long time
25:35
and light depression anxiety is treatable with the right help I'll talk about some options a little bit later
25:42
oh uh what's so one on the slide um a lot of people also get what's called phone anxiety this is where they get
25:47
very nervous talking on the phone how is this a problem for getting help for a lot of people
25:54
at the end of every media article on suicide we have this massive list of helplines
26:01
that if people struggle to talk on the phone they won't access the help they need so for example youth line they have
26:06
a phone number a text number an email line there's multiple ways to get help
26:12
that was anxiety difference of being nudes yeah so I'd say that for a lot of people and if they think about giving a
26:18
talk in public well if they think about a job interview it's probably fairly normal to you know maybe feel a bit nervous that's that's life that is not
26:25
anxiety it's really when you couldn't go to that job interview you were so anxious you threw up you couldn't
26:31
concentrate at all it's probably more into the anxiety category so when it stops you leading a normal happy and
26:36
productive life that's when it turns from just normal life just normal nerves which we all get to probably anxiety
26:46
right post-traumatic stress disorder what do we know about this
26:54
it's very well I'll show you why it's real in a minute um so let's think about a memory most people can remember what they did on
27:00
Christmas day that's usually a feeling we were all day so if you think back to what you did on Christmas day maybe you
27:05
can remember the people you were with the food you had maybe the presents you got but when you think about that you
27:10
think about that as a distant memory right you don't relive it what do you think happens with PTSD
27:19
you re-love the event over and over again as if you are going through it so
27:25
for example if someone was in a bad car crash 20 or 30 years ago and they have PTSD they re-live it as if it's
27:33
happening to them again not only do they relive it in their mind it's like their whole body is being
27:39
taken back to that situation so it's like it can be a bodily flashback for a lot of people is it of a single thing
27:46
if people say the biggest yeah yeah excellent question um so for
27:53
some people it will be one specific event you know if there was say a mortar shell or something that exploded near
27:59
them some people will have a one-off event there's other people that you know it's the whole deployment or something
28:05
like that that could trigger it um in terms of the way they present there's not a lot of difference in terms
28:11
of people have flashbacks um to give you an idea of how debilitating this can be for someone someone I know um she was with her
28:18
brother on a car I think they're about 12 at the time there's a bad car crash her brother was killed and we think her
28:24
face was pushed into the leather seat in front of her every time she smelt leather she had a flashback of that car
28:31
crash so think about how many of the other things you've got on you can you imagine being allergic to life for years she
28:38
didn't understand what was happening she just seemed to have this explosive outbursts for no obvious reason
28:43
so it can be very very difficult and you can obviously have multiple traumas like you know in Christchurch is
28:49
when the earthquakes the mosque shooting so yeah yeah there can be several things
28:54
so what is going on in the brain with PTSD well this is a brain scan by Ruth lenius
29:00
right let me explain this so up here and by the way white orange and yellow means the brain is doing more so up here
29:07
you've got the prefrontal cortex that's the planning logical and part of the brain and we can see
29:13
with someone without PTSD that's showing lots of activation up here you also have the parietal lobes that's where you are
29:20
in space and time what has happened to the PTSD brain
29:29
it's doing something it's very much doing something
29:36
yep any guess that's what that area might be this is yeah the limbo the memory and
29:43
emotional bit the limbic system so what has happened is people with PTSD
29:49
the only parts of their brain that seems to be working
29:54
is the part associated with memory so that this stuck in the past and
30:00
there's no prefrontal cortex to be able to um solve this or move on so it's really really debilitating for
30:06
people how do we tell most people to deal with their PTSD we tell them to
30:13
talk about it there's a sorry just a minute I'll go to this one next sorry I'll come back to
30:19
the previous slide um what we found is there's a bit of a brain called Brokers area this is one of
30:24
the parts of the brain associated with speech and language and we've found that if someone has PTSD this part of the
30:30
brain doesn't show much activation so they can't always talk about what's
30:36
going on for them so I'm sure you've heard you know soldiers coming back from the war people say they never talked about the war
30:43
often they can't talk about the war just go back to that previous slide for
30:48
a second ah so if you want to know more about PTSD there's a fantastic book called the body
30:54
keeps the score by Bissell vanderkolk he's from Harvard Medical School he's probably the world's leading expert on
31:00
hearing trauma and in this book it's got lots more signs and symptoms of PTSD but it's also got a lot about how to heal
31:07
this so I highly highly recommend that okay there's quite a lot of information in a fairly short period of time and
31:13
just with the people um next to you can you discuss some of the things I talked about with depression anxiety and PTSD is there one
31:20
thing you didn't know before or one thing that stood out for you and that Habitat to people around you for a couple of minutes
31:28
so what could cause all this well there's many many factors but one interesting thing that scientists are looking at at the moment is the impact
31:35
of sleep so in the past we used to think if someone had a mental illness like depression or anxiety that would affect
31:41
their sleep what we've now started to realize the last 10 or 15 years is that poor sleep
31:46
can trigger cause or exacerbate some of these things so first of all in terms of suicide most
31:53
suicides happen either in the afternoon after often several nights of really bad sleep or between 12 a.m and 3 A.M I had
32:01
a farmer at one of my public seminars and he came up to me and said he had all these bills on his farm he thought there
32:06
was no way he was ever going to pay them off and he thought suicide was the only way out this happened at about two or
32:12
three in the morning fortunately he gave up on that idea and he got a good night's sleep
32:18
what do you think he thought when he woke up in the morning he thought all his problems were
32:25
solvable and even if we haven't got to the point of suicide I'm sure all of us had a really small problem late at night that
32:32
seems like a disaster so in terms of interventions around suicide one of the things I drum on
32:37
about with all the presentations I give is sleep if you can improve that you can make a big difference quite quickly
32:45
the other thing about sleep is it tends to be a rapidly changeable trait and sometimes in terms of Suicide Prevention
32:51
people talk about things like inequality how long does inequality take to change for people
32:58
decades in some cases like it's not a quick fix often but sleep if you know what you're doing you should be able to
33:03
improve someone's sleep pretty quickly so that's one of the reasons that I suggest really trying to focus on sleep
33:09
as an intervention is because it makes a big difference
33:15
so another example of how a mental illness can be related to sleep there's a bit of your brain called the amygdala
33:20
that's one of the parts of the brain that helps process fear and we've found that if you don't get one good night's
33:26
sleep the amygdala can show 60 percent more activation now normally that's not
33:31
too much of a problem because you have a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that tells the amateur
33:37
just calm down don't worry about it it's okay but we found that if you don't get a
33:43
good night's sleep the link between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala doesn't work as well so you've
33:49
got the Amendola firing on all cylinders and you don't have the break and so it's one of the reasons that poor sleep can
33:55
be directly related to anxiety right teenagers
34:01
what do we know about teenagers and sleep first of all when do you think that teenage brain finishes development
34:12
it could be between age 25 and 30. so most adults they produce melatonin
34:19
through the day but they produce enough to go to sleep at about 9 10 or 11 o'clock at night what do we think happened with teenagers
34:30
well they finished producing melatonin at about 11 12 or 1.
34:36
so their biological clock is two to three hours after an adult now we often tell people well if you're
34:42
tired just go to bed earlier what do you think happens if you put someone to sleep and they don't have a
34:47
buildup of melatonin on this system they just lie there they can't get this
34:53
late so sleep is not something you can do automatically you need this buildup of melatonin so telling people to just
34:59
go to bed earlier doesn't actually work for a lot of people so and this is something we should consider
35:06
right there's a whole heap of sleep problems and we don't have time to go through all of them today but what do you think of sleep problems fixable or
35:13
do you think this is something that some people are stuck with for life yeah almost all sleep problems if you
35:20
know what you're doing can be improved I had a man at one of my seminars and he said
35:26
um I think it was in the 70s or 80s and he knew he had sleep apnea his whole life we had breathing difficulties and
35:31
he thought well it's a bit late to do anything about this now and I said like come on why don't you get this sorted out anyway I talked about talking him
35:38
into it but eventually he did and after one night of getting better sleep what do you think he said
35:46
that yeah he also said I feel like a new man so um you know it's never too late to do
35:52
something about this oh see if you go to a MGP or Pharmacy you can get a test on a machine and then
35:59
you can buy this machine that helps you breathe and it stops you waking up at night so they can yep make a difference
36:05
yeah right it's a couple of other things just want to look at very briefly um brain
36:11
injuries we don't talk about this much do you think it sounds got a high or low rate of brain injuries
36:19
yeah we've got one of the highest rates of brain injuries in the world it's not our rugby culture any idea is
36:26
what it is domestic violence we've got the highest education violence in the world probably
36:31
so well it's the oecd so we've got a very very high rate so there's lots of
36:36
people who've got brain injuries that don't know about it some of the symptoms of a brain injury can be memory loss aggression and fatigue what does that
36:43
look really similar to depression yeah so this is why it's
36:48
importantly to qualified health professional make a diagnosis um just to give you an idea at frontiers of Hope probably half of all the people
36:55
that come to us with so-called treatment resistant depression they actually have a brain injury that no one's ever asked
37:00
and they haven't looked at so um really important we try and identify us and the final thing that I want to go
37:06
through oh sorry um if you want more information about brain injuries brain injury New Zealand's Got
37:12
lots of good fact sheets they've got lots of ways to help people um so it's a great site
37:18
something else that's probably worth mentioning in terms of Suicide Prevention there's something called pmdd or pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder now
37:26
most women when they have their period they might be a bit moody or they might be in a bit of pain
37:31
what do you think happens if you have pmdd
37:38
you have an extreme form of us and some people be very happy and then it comes the time of this cycle and they can
37:44
absolutely crash I've Got a Friend with us and one day she was really happy and the next day she just said life is not
37:51
worth loving I can't see how I'm ever going to be happy again and it was scary to see how happy she was when and then
37:56
just totally totally fresh so a lot of women have this and they don't realize about it they have it so it's important
38:03
to raise some more awareness yeah right on to Suicide Prevention
38:10
now what do you think can we actually prevent suicides or if someone's really determined are they just going to do it
38:16
and there's nothing we can do to stop a lot of people think that if we stop them doing it one way they're just going
38:22
to do it another way there's no point even trying is this very important study conducted
38:27
on the people that were going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge so and between 1937 and 1971 500 people
38:35
stopped off jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge many of these people were physically held back so these were not
38:41
people that had vague thoughts of suicide these were people that had a plan and they were actively carrying it
38:46
out where the researchers followed them up years later they found a staggering 94
38:52
were still alive or had died of natural causes so in other words if you can help
38:58
someone at that time of Crisis there was an exceptionally High chance that they will live
39:05
so we certainly um I've talked about depression and that's certainly a risk factor for our suicide but did you know
39:12
that a lot of suicides are not the result of mental illness a lot are the results of like a relationship breakout
39:18
getting fired from a job it's a same-day crisis and overall somewhere between a
39:23
third to a half of all suicides as a result of the same day crisis and particularly for men it's not like 80
39:30
percent of suicides are not the result of mental illness
39:35
so this is where um failure has a big role in this I'll talk about that a little bit later
39:45
so we often think that suicides are planned over a really long period of time and some of them are but this study
39:50
asked the team survivors how long was there between you thinking about this and carrying it out 24 said five minutes or less
40:01
so a lot of suicide yeah so I heck of a lot of them are very very spontaneous they are not a
40:07
carefully thought out plan what's something that can make people more spontaneous
40:14
poor sleep so one of the reasons I put sleep as an intervention is it's a very strong way to address some of these
40:19
things so there are some summer signs that are very impulsive and there are others that are planned over a much longer period of
40:26
time the ones that are planned over a longer period of time these are some of the things to look for so if you recognize
40:33
that anyone's talking a lot about death you need to talk to them I'll teach you how to do that in a minute if you hear someone say things like
40:40
there's no point anymore suddenly getting better after long history of depression isn't that a good
40:45
thing uh well unfortunately I found is a lot of people who've been depressed for a
40:51
long period of time they suddenly get better it's because they've made a decision to end it and that's why their mood seems to increase so start asking
40:58
questions with that and what we call ruminant of thoughts so this is where if someone say had a relationship break up
41:04
10 years ago if they're always going on about that and they can't get that out of their mind they ruminate on this
41:09
that's possibly a risk factor for suicide and giving away prized positions I'm not talking about someone on the
41:16
wedding day getting a family heirloom this would be out of the blue signpost all the positions for sale on Facebook
41:21
start asking questions writing goodbye notes significant negative changes or events talking about
41:28
wanting to die by Suicide or feeling hopeless how do you think people might convey
41:34
that they feel hopeless
41:39
if someone's lost a job and they say something like I'm never going to find another job again that could be a
41:45
hopeless statement so we need to look out for things like that
41:51
so if you recognize any of those warning signs that I've just talked about you should always ask the person now some
41:58
people think hold on this is not my job I'm not trying to do this do we have psychiatrists patrolling the
42:04
streets looking for people that are suicidal so who do you think is the first person
42:10
that's most likely to pick this up yeah or colleague someone like that so
42:16
this is something that anyone can ask what I'm about to teach in our describe as mental health first aid so we teach
42:23
um physical first aid we're not teaching someone how to be a surgeon in a couple of hours you're teaching someone some
42:28
basic life-saving techniques that can help them till more help arrives
42:34
so if you recognize any of those warning signs that I talked about or you're concerned about someone you need to
42:39
explicitly ask them you say you just said to me you don't think you're ever going to find a job or
42:45
you said there's no point anymore I know this might be a really tough question
42:51
but does this mean you're thinking about ending your life or suicide you must use the word suicide or end your life if you
42:58
just say are you going to do something stupid people they could mean are you going to get drunk now we don't mind if they say no that's
43:05
okay we can breathe a sigh of relief but what do we do if they say yes
43:13
well a really good thing to say if someone says yes is I am so glad you told me that
43:19
how do you think it would feel to admit that you're suicidal to someone else what have I done if I told the right
43:25
person but if you hear the words I am so glad you told me that you'll probably
43:30
think I told the right person I'm somebody worried that if the person's not suicidal could ask and be
43:37
dangerous research is Crystal Clear if someone is not suicidal asking them does
43:42
not give them ideas so we need to be really clear on that one
43:48
foreign do you think people will tell you the truth
43:53
I've asked the hundreds if not literally thousands of people this in my lifetime um the overwhelmed majority have told me
43:59
the truth so if you ask this in a genuine way most people give you a good answer what do you think you should do if you
44:05
think they're joking still take it seriously one bad woman
44:13
said to me I'm gonna go kill myself now and she was laughing and she was smiling I was 99 sure she was joking but I
44:20
stopped and I said sorry you just said to me you want to kill yourself do you really mean that and
44:26
then suddenly her face turned solemn and she noddled so even if you think someone's joking about it do take it
44:32
seriously right now the next bit is if someone's
44:38
suicidal you need to make some sort of safety plan in proportion to the risk they are in so if you ask someone when
44:44
are you going to do it and they say next year sometime you need to get that person less not no help if someone says
44:50
they're going to do it this afternoon what do you do
44:57
yeah drop whatever you're doing whatever you're doing is not as important as saving someone's life okay so filling
45:04
out that risk management survey or something like that not as important as saving someone's life so someone's about
45:10
to die in the very near future don't leave them alone and get them to more
45:15
help so you've got your check plans you've got people like nurses if it's outside of the base
45:21
um I recommend taking people to a GP you should be able to see a GP fairly quickly what's the danger was saying to
45:27
put someone on a long counseling wait list
45:32
yeah it's uh it's devastating for someone to be in crisis and then to be told it'll be nine months before we can
45:39
see you and by the way the Mental Health Service I run frontiers of Hope if someone think crisis we will see them you know we will
45:46
make time for them um we won't say oh yeah we can't see you for nine months or something like that we're really trying to make um help us
45:53
instantaneous as possible
46:00
yeah if you believe someone's about to die in front of you ring one one one
46:05
I've only ever had to call the place on three people in my life how do you think all three of them reacted
46:12
they were not happy you you think I'm gonna okay however one of the things at night one of the things we had a week later
46:18
one I think a couple of months later so even if you have to really upset someone in the short term their life is more
46:24
important than that now I hear some of you say yes but what about the Privacy Act
46:30
some people think the Privacy Act says you can never reveal confidential information is that correct
46:36
no so there is Rule 11. rule 11 says that if you believe that someone is in
46:42
danger of death or serious harm you have an absolute right and I would say obligation to break the confidentiality
46:48
and keep them alive I mean this literally people New Zealand have died because people don't understand the
46:54
Privacy Act they've kept confidential information away from other people so
47:00
we've we're simply had this misunderstanding we've seen her privacy as the highest good human life is always
47:06
more important than someone's privacy so we have to be crystal clear on what the Privacy Act does and does not say
47:13
any questions on yeah
47:18
yeah and worryingly I talked to you about doctors nurses psychologists and people don't know this unfortunately
47:23
because they've had it drilled into them the Privacy Act says oh you can never break confidential information that is
47:29
not what the hex is just one other thing to be aware of so
47:35
I've talked about um depression anxiety and PTSD they're the most common things you'll come across there is something
47:40
else called psychosis what is psychosis
47:47
yeah where people have delusional or irrational thoughts they might climb to the top of a building thinking they can
47:52
fly or they might hear voices The psychosis is something you can manage yourself can you talk someone out
47:59
of us psychosis is a medical emergency your only option is to call 111 you can't
48:06
talk someone out of a psychotic episode they're going to need to be restrained so it's really important unfortunately
48:11
I've seen people teach mental health first aid courses where they imply you can talk anyone out of us and you can
48:16
help anyone if they've got psychosis you really really can't
48:22
foreign after this you can go around diagnosing
48:29
all your friends and family with mental illnesses as I mentioned before some of the
48:34
symptoms of a brain injury can be very similar to those of depression so it's
48:40
too important to let a qualified medical professional make the diagnosis
48:46
right so I've talked about what to do if you think someone's suicidal what do you think you should do if maybe you're concerned that someone's depressed or a
48:52
bit anxious but you don't think they're quite at the point of suicide as we've said before if you ask someone how are you
48:58
you're probably going to get the response I'm fine even if they're not so you need to ask it in a different way
49:04
a really good way to go up to someone is to say what you've observed so for example if you know that someone used to
49:10
be a really happy person they used to come to lots of social events and they used to seem to have a likeness about
49:16
them but now you've noticed well they seem to have the weight of the world on their shoulders they've stopped coming
49:21
to social events you should go up to that person privately and say lately I
49:27
have noticed you don't seem to be yourself I've noticed that you don't seem to have
49:32
the same happiness you used to and I've noticed that you haven't been coming out to as many social events
49:38
if you say I have noticed and list concrete things how do most people react to that
49:47
some will be surprised because they won't know but you can't just brush that off if you just ask someone how are you
49:53
you can brush that off really easily but if you say something along the lines of I have noticed in this concrete examples
49:58
it's much harder to brush that off
50:04
there's something called the bystander effect and this happens when someone's lying injured on the road lots of people
50:10
walk past because they all think everyone else will do something about this and unfortunately I've given talks to
50:16
workplaces where there might be a hundred people in the workplace and everyone knows that someone's not coping
50:21
and unfortunately no one does anything because they all think someone else will do something if you notice that
50:28
someone's not coping make it your personal responsibility to do something about it
50:33
and honestly I've written a book um on suicide prevention if I became unwell I would far rather 10 people came up to me
50:40
and said Michael I've noticed Michael I'm concerned about you and for everyone to think well he wrote a book on suicide
50:45
prevention he must know what he's doing he must be okay so if you notice it do something about
50:50
it and if for some reason like it's a senior officer and you don't feel um comfortable talking to them you know
50:55
tell their manager tell someone but make sure you do something about it any questions on that
51:04
okay so if it's all too confusing if um as I
51:10
said before a lot of people say with depression they get overwhelmed making decisions so if you Google something like counselor in your area usually a
51:17
whole lot of responses come up and then you've got things like would you like a CBT counselor a DBT counselor a person
51:23
seems a therapist an acceptance and commitment therapist a Gestalt therapist a nature therapist what do you want
51:29
and it's really overwhelming for some people so it's all too overwhelming I say go see your GP because it's one
51:36
place to go to there's something called The Family
51:41
Services directory has anyone come across this has a complete list of all the support agencies throughout New
51:47
Zealand there's about 5 000 Nationwide I recommend you go on there and just find out about some of the services that are
51:53
there in your area because you never know when you might need this I host a local radio show and planes FM
52:00
in Christchurch and I've asked person after person if you had one bit of advice for someone going through this
52:05
what would it be any idea what person after person has said to me
52:13
they said I wished I knew I could change counselors or doctors so in other words the help you're
52:19
getting is not helping you you can change
52:24
okay and the last how are we doing for time I'll be about three minutes over uh I
52:30
just want to talk about one thing that can actually help um get you better so this was a group of mainly retired
52:36
men in Christchurch and they thought look we're not the kind of men that want to sit around in group therapy and
52:41
unfortunately a lot of them were quite depressed they thought our career is over and often in the Western World when
52:47
we meet someone we ask them what do you do and if you don't have something to say a lot of people don't feel that
52:52
great about themselves so these people got together and they thought look we don't want to sit down in group therapy but we're quite
52:58
practical we're quite good with our hands so they got together in groups of two or three and they went around door knocking and they said to people if
53:05
you've had any odd jobs around the house like putting up a shelf fixing a washer we'll do that for free
53:10
what impact do you think this had on people massive so when they made a good group
53:16
of friends during this they got out of the house they weren't sitting around feeling sorry for themselves and they felt they were doing something positive
53:22
for society so volunteering can be a great way to address some of the things I've talked about
53:28
I think we're really bad yeah really bad yeah yeah
53:37
I'm interested enough for most people actually the happiest after age 70. so unfortunately other people when they
53:43
retire they really go downhill if you can just get through that bit you're probably going to have the best time of your life
53:48
so yeah um not only does volunteering make you feel better the study of over five and a
53:53
half thousand elderly people found that those that volunteered for one or two hours a week they had a 73 sorry a 63
54:00
lower chance of dying it's not only can volunteering make you feel better it could actually save your life
54:10
one of the things that unfortunately I see a lot of people talk about mental health treatment and they say things
54:15
like you know take time for yourself practice self-care and all these sorts of things and it's all about you
54:23
what we know about well-being all has to do with relationships and
54:29
unfortunately many of the treatments that we offer today they're all in isolation you know they're all people being on their own when actually we need
54:36
to connect people together the largest ever study of longevity or how to live a long life it found that I
54:43
believe not the biggest predictor of living a long life they had nothing to do with smoking eating well anything like that the biggest predictor was
54:49
whether you had deep stable positive connections and I feel there's so many bits of
54:55
mental health advice out there most of them about you know you look after yourself take time for yourself
55:00
practice self-care and we forget about other people and really if we want to cure to some of the
55:06
stuff connections that is what really really will help I think danger because people think the
55:13
number of friends that were on Facebook and around the context yeah a deep connection so yeah just any couple of
55:18
people on Facebook unfortunately doesn't quite yeah let's go yeah um the way I describe a deep connection is if you
55:23
were having a really tough time who could you go to those are the people that are your real friends
55:30
okay so um last but now I said before that's like a third to a half of all suicides with a result of a same-day
55:37
crisis such as getting fired from a job or a relationship breakup how do we deal with those
55:43
well a few years ago I was living in the UK and I'd always wanted to do a magic trick in front of a large audience I saw
55:49
the addition to Britain's Got Talent I thought this is my chance so I applied I got through I came to the day of
55:56
filming and I said only 20 minutes backstage to set this up and they all said to me that's fine that's not a
56:01
problem unfortunately someone came to me at 4 30 in the afternoon and they said we need
56:08
you on the stage now so nothing was set up correctly
56:14
everything that could possibly have gone wrong did go wrong but everything that could not possibly
56:19
have gone wrong also somehow managed to go wrong I had 3 000 people in the audience
56:25
yelling off off off to the worst moments of my entire life
56:32
but actually got worse than that because Amanda Holden was absolutely horrible about my teeth and this was going to be
56:37
broadcast in front of 12 million people so if you had a fail fail big right
56:44
yeah so when this happened I thought my life was ruined I thought every time I applied for a job someone's going to
56:50
Google my name and say no way and every time I want to get into a relationship with someone they're going to Google my
56:55
name and say it's not going to happen I was running School camps to the UK and the day after the show aired a new group
57:01
came in I was really hoping they had not seen the most popular show on TV
57:07
they had and they wanted to know what happened well first of all I asked them what their talents were and he came to me and
57:13
I said my towns is failing and they all laughed at me but then I said no no I'm serious anyone can fail once that
57:21
requires no effort and no skill but to have the talent of failing you need to fall off the horse get back up and try
57:26
again then this was a group of teenagers they didn't give me a lot of feedback at the time but afterwards some of them came up
57:32
to me and they said we think you're one of the most inspiring people we've ever met and I said hold on hold on I made a
57:39
turkey of myself on national TV and they were calling me inspiring
57:45
and just yeah don't need to point that out um
57:51
and I thought they'd just be nice about it and just trying to make me feel better but then another group came in they'd
57:56
seen the show I told the story and I got the same reaction from them since I got a good reaction from a couple of groups I figured there might
58:02
be something to this what I've actually started to realize was that we have a massive problem with
58:07
how we deal with failure in this country I was working as a youth worker in an organization in Christchurch we had a
58:14
young Olympian come in to see us she had spent her whole life trying to go to the Olympics and she wanted to win a gold
58:19
medal for New Zealand the day before she came to see us she got a rejection letter in the mail
58:25
without saying she wasn't going to the Olympic team without thinking she immediately tried to end her life
58:32
because when I heard that story I started to understand why Australia could have such an impact on people the problem was in this country we are
58:40
allergic to failure when everyone went to race in school we like to give them a certificate of participation so that no
58:46
one feels bad the problem is in real life if you experience a relationship breakup you do not get a certificate of participation
58:53
divorce proceedings may be but not a certificate of participation and so tragically a lot of people don't
58:59
know how to fail and I mean this literally it is killing people we have too many young men that get fired from a
59:05
job and the first thing they think about is suicide but it doesn't have to be that way what
59:11
if we change the culture what if we had a culture where instead of hiding our failures we openly talked
59:17
about them there's a story about a man that owned a business it didn't do too well in fact
59:23
the business failed so badly this man was left with a debt that took him 20 years to pay off you might have heard of this man his
59:30
name is Abraham Lincoln one of the greatest presidents of the United States now many people know that Lincoln played
59:36
a big role in ending slavery but they don't know about his business failure why we erase this from the history books
59:43
I say we should write this backhand it is not to bring these people down because I think if we know about their
59:48
failures it makes them even greater now it's all very well for me to share
59:53
my biggest failure but if you want to do something about that third to a half of some of all suicides
59:59
I dare to share your big failures with people I don't mean the little ones I don't mean the time not the coffee cup off the
1:00:04
workbench we'll had a good laugh about it no no I mean the time you desperately want to give them that course and they
1:00:09
rejected you on that soul-crushing relationship break up your hand you never know what impact hearing
1:00:16
someone's failure could have because if there's a young man that thinks about suicide if they lose a job if they live in a world where we don't
1:00:22
talk about our failures we hide them and we pretend they don't happen maybe suicide seems like a good option
1:00:29
that if we live in a world where we openly discuss our failures he knows oh yes I know this person they got fired they went on to recover and I know this
1:00:35
other person they also got fired and they went on to recover then suicide may not seem like such a
1:00:40
good idea but we can only do that if we're willing to be open and honest about our failures
1:00:47
right that's everything that I have for you today uh if you do have any questions please you're more than welcome to come up and talk to me at the
1:00:52
end um if anyone's got any specific situations they want to discuss really happy to do that uh there is my email
1:00:59
address um if you want to know about the Mental Health Service I run frontiers of Hope and we can see people online from all
1:01:05
over the country uh so that's the uh if you do have any questions you want to email me about please feel free there's
1:01:11
my email other than that thank you very much for listening and I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon
1:01:17
[Applause]
what was the author of the book being a true hero encourage you to get a
0:05
copy if you haven't got one or sort it sort them appearing you'll be outlining about today uh so he's the water of the
0:13
book being a true hero understanding and preventing suicide in your community
0:18
the book has been used by the New Zealand Police Army Medics fire and emergency New Zealand uh GPS councilors
0:26
as well as many parents and teachers so Michael gained an honors degree of
0:31
Psychology from the University of Canterbury in 2008. in 2016 he spoke at
0:38
tedx on overcoming failure which led to him becoming a Sorter and proficient
0:43
speaker in the last two years Martin was delivered more than 300 seminars on
0:51
topics such as overcoming failure mental illness and suicide being changes
0:57
so this presentation has been filmed and will be available on the IOP page
1:04
once it is uploaded great thank you very much
1:11
good afternoon everyone so uh yes I'm Michael hempseed now there's one thing
1:16
that everyone wants to know about me and the first question everyone always has is what is the deal with your last name
1:23
for those of you that don't know hemp seed is someone associated with marijuana um this really is my last name it is not
1:30
a joke so my first little advice today is if you have children please do not give them the last name hemp seed it has
1:36
made my life rather difficult over the years if you want to know where the name came from it came from hemproven Scotland
1:43
they used to use it on ships not the stuff you smoke I don't know why people always jump to that conclusion
1:50
so I traveled all over New Zealand giving talks something about suicide prevention and understanding PTSD
1:56
before I got into this line of work I had a different goal in life I wanted to run my own read-alone company and I was
2:02
going to call it hemp seeds grass right so these are the things that we
2:09
are going to cover today for those who have just joined us is there anything in particular that you want to know today about mental health Suicide Prevention
2:16
the meaning of life anything like that anything you're welcome to join us okie
2:24
dokie so there we go okay when we don't have a global
2:30
pandemic on I love traveling I've been all over the world uh so from top left to bottom right China Morocco Pisa Rome
2:36
and the bottom left there that is the Chernobyl nuclear reactor so I have been
2:41
to Ukraine and yes in case you're wondering I now glow in the dark we've got Brazil and Cambodia
2:48
and I've done some interesting things a part of the robotic plane jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at 13 000 feet
2:54
doing a Lamborghini around a racetrack in Las Vegas it's a little bit hard to see but my legs are actually bent over
3:00
that is not a joke they did not design sports cars for six foot three tall people
3:05
and I've been hang gliding right so what are we seeing at the
3:11
moment in terms of mental health uh unfortunately it's not good so this was
3:16
a study from the US we don't have any decent New Zealand data yet but hopefully it's coming shortly
3:21
before the pandemic eight and a half percent of the U.S population reported clinical levels of depression
3:28
in the first couple of years the pandemic that jumped to 27.8
3:34
the really disturbing number there though is severe from 0.7 which is almost nothing to 5.1 as far as I'm
3:42
aware that is the sharpest rise in mental illness that has ever been recorded in human history
3:50
does that surprise you is that what you're seeing
3:58
yeah so it's one of the big questions is um is this just we're recognizing this more
4:04
now or is this actually more common I don't think I've got another slide deck there's a study called the
4:09
epidemiological catchment area study a bit of a mouthful they interviewed people that were born in 1905 and they
4:16
found that people that were born in 1905 they had a one percent lifetime chance of having depression they carefully
4:23
interviewed them it was Anonymous reporting so there wasn't a reporting bias and it seemed like mental illness
4:28
was fairly rare then they interviewed people that were born um in later and today we think something
4:36
like one in four people in any given year will have clinical levels of depression
4:41
so it's not just that we're recognizing it more we think there has been a staggering increase in this
4:48
why do you think there's been such a massive increase in this
4:53
we've got time yeah
4:58
um you just say um yeah I think some of the laws that have made probably don't actually help build resilience in people
5:04
yeah uh cost of living that's a massive stress for people and I work with a lot of people on really good salaries and
5:11
some of them are struggling to live so you can imagine how much worse off it is for other people
5:17
like 100 years ago was pretty simple there's no technology yeah
5:24
quite a simple yeah it's estimated we've used somewhere between seven and a half and ten
5:29
thousand ads on social media each day and we interact with more people in one day than someone in the Middle Ages
5:35
interacted with probably in their entire lifetime so there's a lot more complexity yes
5:45
yeah yeah and one of the other things is and before smartphones came along you used
5:50
to be able to leave your work at work now what happens a lot of people take their work home with them and they never get a break
5:56
there's a couple of other things to look at as well it's not just depression also just a
6:02
second before you get that one um now people are wondering well what is depression and is it real so there's this interesting study uh
6:09
they took a scan of people's brains and they found there's a bit of the brain called the hippocampus that's one of the
6:15
parts of the brain's brain associated with memory and emotion and they found that people that have depression this
6:21
part of the brain can shrink by up to 17 so they're a very real and very
6:27
significant changes that have within the brain does that surprise you that I see that
6:33
this part of the brain could be associated with memory we don't really think of depression as being affected by memory do we
6:41
but if you listen carefully to what a lot of people with depression say sometimes they say things like I can't
6:46
remember the last time that I was happy I can't even remember what happiness is
6:51
and people with depression often have stronger memories of the negative or the sad events and less strong memories of
6:57
the happy or the positive events in their lives so it's quite possible that depression may have more to do with memory who were previously recognized
7:07
the World Health Organization has said that depression this one mental illness is the leading cause of disability
7:13
worldwide it accounts for more time off sake and more lost productivity than
7:18
anything else if someone has a heart attack and they survive how long will they probably have off work
7:26
maybe two to twelve weeks depending on sort of the severity of it if someone has depression how long can
7:32
they be off for months or years yeah and I met a police
7:38
officer fairly recently he was in the child protection unit and seemed to be
7:44
okay and then had a massive meltdown I think the last 10 years he just has not been able to work and he hasn't shown
7:51
much sign of giving better so yeah you can see the impact that was going to have on someone
7:59
now have you ever um met someone that you think might have depression and they say something you ask them how are you
8:05
and you can see they're not okay and they say I'm fine and you think well you're just telling
8:11
me what I want to hear are you just making this up there's another part of the brain called the insula and that's one of the parts
8:17
of the brain associated with self-evaluation and self-understanding
8:22
and if the part of the brain doesn't work so well for self-understanding what do you think that means for a lot of
8:27
people with depression they don't know what's going on so some
8:33
people if you ask them how are you and they say I'm fine they genuinely think they are fine they're not lying or
8:40
anything like that they genuinely don't realize they have a problem so unfortunately I'm recognizing this in
8:46
yourself can be difficult and I'll address that a little bit some people obviously do know they have it but other
8:52
people it can take them a long long time to figure it out language
9:03
teaching like how you say hello to somebody yeah yeah sure the answers depending on how
9:10
you actually are yeah if you ask people in the Western World how are you pretty much everyone
9:15
says I'm fine automatically if you go to say African cultures you ask someone how are you you will get a genuine response
9:21
so there's a bit of um
9:27
yeah that's the problem yep
9:32
so we've got three people here we've got Fritz Sarah and Lucy so Fred is happy once for most of the time once every few
9:38
weeks he feels quite low we've got Sarah she just lost to grandmother she's overwhelmed and totally distraught and
9:44
we've got Lucy she has a wonderful life a great and supportive family a great boyfriend and a great job yet most days
9:50
she feels totally worthless doesn't want to get out of bed finds nothing makes her happy and doesn't see the point anymore
9:56
so first of all Fred who thinks that Fred has depression
10:02
okay Fred has a very serious medical condition I'm going to say it now if you can't pronounce that that's okay and
10:08
just try and follow with me the name of the condition that Fred has is called life
10:15
so we need to be incredibly careful when we talk about this we don't want to pathologize or turn into an illness all normal human behavior it is normal to
10:22
have days where you feel good and it's normal to feel days we don't feel so good some people call those days we don't feel so good Mondays and I agree
10:30
entirely at least we've got zero what do you think she's got grief grief is not a
10:36
mental illness that's considered a normal response to a difficult or traumatic situation but there is something called complicated grief where
10:43
people get stuck in that grief and it can go on and on for months or even years and then lastly Lucy
10:51
that's depression so when it starts to fix someone's functioning when they can't eat when they can't sleep when
10:56
they don't want to get out of bed when it starts to thickly functioning that's really when it turns from having a bad day to depression
11:03
look at a couple of other things what are some of the other symptoms that you think of when someone might have depression
11:11
yep it's interesting and sometimes we think people say with depression I don't want to get out of beard often they
11:18
don't actually have the energy to do it and something you could take say a fit 18 year old if you've got depression
11:24
something as simple as getting out of bed and making a bowl of cereal in the morning they might be so exhausted doing
11:30
that they have to lie down for the rest of the day so it can stack all your energy out of you
11:37
anything else yep very much so yeah so some people
11:43
will cry but other people will get angry and upset and like we've all probably been running late for a meeting and the
11:48
idiot in front of us jammed the photocopier and we're running late probably get a little bit annoyed then that is not um a sign of depression but
11:55
if someone's always getting upset or they're always on age and just they seem irritated by everything that can be an
12:00
indicator anything else this is random is having a missing house considered a sign of
12:08
people for some people um there's actually some interesting research that shows some people that are really intelligent they live in a mess
12:15
um for some people it's ages but other people you know if they did keep a clean house and then you see the house in a
12:21
total mess yeah that would absolutely be a warning sign so lack of personal hygiene you have someone usually
12:27
presents themselves very well and they come and unshave and they just look like a mess yeah absolutely things like that
12:36
um so you know you um you don't look after yourself so you um you know you're not
12:42
eating properly yeah very much and not only that um there was
12:48
a fascinating study that looked at childhood depression and Asthma and they found that if a child had asthma and
12:54
depression their asthma symptoms were four times as bad as if they only had asthma
13:00
so it can really affect the whole body I think we've got most of these oh numbness so a lot of people with
13:06
depression we think they'll feel sad and some people do but half of all people with depression experience numbness or
13:12
no emotions so if you ever ask someone how are you and they say I don't know they could
13:18
actually be a sign of numbness if we're just looking for people that feel sad we're going to miss a whole lot of people
13:24
uh you know hypersomnia they want to sleep all the time or they can't get to sleep at all they lose all enjoyment in
13:31
life so people say food doesn't taste good and they've even done studies where they've found that people view the world
13:36
in muted Shades of Gray to actually see the world differently
13:46
so some people lose a lot of weight because they don't eat and other people gain a lot of weight so yeah they can
13:51
absolutely be one now for most people when they go to the supermarket choose a breakfast cereal
13:57
how long does it take them to choose one hopefully 30 seconds not too long
14:03
hopefully it's a hopefully it's a simple decision what do you think happens if someone's got depression
14:10
yeah that's simple decision can become overwhelming for someone and it might literally take them 20 or
14:17
30 minutes to decide in fact some people are so overwhelmed they can't decide and
14:22
actually walk out so what it does to their health and everything else that they can't buy the
14:28
food they need we call this brain fog so difficulty
14:34
thinking difficulty making decisions so if you ever recognize that someone used to be you know really sharp really good at replying to emails they'd be really
14:40
decisive and then you notice that they're taking ages to get back to you they don't seem to be making decisions
14:46
things don't seem to be going well that would be something to look out for
14:52
the other big one is um particularly around suicide risk which I'll get to in a minute um is our distorted thinking I know
14:59
someone that made a suicidal team she woke up in hospital all her friends and family were crying by her bedside and
15:05
she genuinely believed this was all an act for the doctors and secretly all her friends and family wanted her dead
15:12
they're not even get for that badly but just be aware that for some people they think they're a burden to other people
15:18
we often think that people that die by Suicide are selfish and fortunately some people think they're doing the world a
15:24
favor so if you ever recognize any symptoms of burdensome or people say you know I'm just taking up space I'm
15:30
costing people money I'm a real burden to others these are things to look out for
15:36
if you were to meet Robin Williams on the street what would you think he's a ghost
15:43
yeah correct but when he was alive he would have seen like the happiest most energetic and joyful person that you've
15:49
ever met we now know underneath that he suffered from depression for years so what was going on there
15:56
yeah so just be aware of some people um can look happy on the outside and
16:02
they can still have depression underneath so if someone tells you they've got depression and you think oh you look so happy always take it
16:09
seriously yeah see you know Flawless images of people
16:17
going about yeah amazing yeah
16:23
you mean that's not your life I thought that was everyone oh right yes yeah
16:28
um yeah I think there's a huge problem there was a completely analystick expectations a lot of people have yeah
16:33
absolutely one of the other things we found is that
16:38
people with depression they don't just experience physical sorry emotional symptoms they can also experience physical symptoms
16:44
so one of those things we found is a lot of people with depression they experience back pain and this is not imaginary the reason for this is your
16:51
brain is connected to the spinal cord and that makes up the central nervous system so it totally affects the brain
16:57
they can filter down to other parts of the body so this is very real
17:05
depression and workplace excellence why might this occur
17:11
yeah if you've got brain fog say if you're in a busy site or something like that we've got lots of moving vehicles
17:17
and you've got someone that's not thinking clearly and they've got brain fog what's likely to happen
17:23
working to make mistakes so there is a health and safety risk to be aware of and particularly if people have got severe depression
17:33
now the good news is that people can get better from depression it's thought that half of all people that experience
17:38
depression will have one or two episodes about their life and they'll never have it again so already you have a 50 cure
17:45
rate they'll just the people learn to live with us they can actually be cured and their brain change that I talked
17:51
about before with the hippocampus the good news is that it can regrow welcome so there are some really good news with
17:58
it take a seat and we're just going over depression and
18:03
now we'll look at anxiety so again before I talked about the high
18:09
rates of depression and we also think that anxiety is rising and absolutely stunning rate this is a report by Gene
18:16
twin she's a very famous adolescent researcher she believes the average young person today based on historical
18:22
records is more stressed and more anxious than psychiatric patients were
18:27
in the 1950s and 60s does that surprise you
18:35
I mean I talk all over New Zealand just about every industry you can imagine doctors nurses counselors social workers
18:41
Builders Farmers police you know you name it I've probably spoken to them anxiety just seems to be everywhere
18:48
so what is anxiety well if you were to feel fear in one of these three situations is that a bad
18:54
thing not at all in some situations fear is a really good emotion and you want to feel
19:00
it especially if you're being chased by a tiger if you don't feel fear you will become lunch
19:06
so fear can have its uses when you become fearful your body activates What's called the sympathetic nervous
19:12
system your body gets pumped full of adrenaline nor adrenaline and cortisol and all these chemicals prime your body
19:18
for Action so you can fight the thing off or you can run away
19:25
your um hat beats a lot faster your muscles become stronger your pupils dilate all
19:31
these things happen so you're in defense mode this response is brilliant if you're being chased by a tiger
19:38
what do you think anxiety is
19:48
in a better race it's a really false alarm so if we take this classroom here no one is going to die in that classroom
19:54
okay no one has done any physical danger there's no guns or knives or anything like that but if someone had anxiety in
20:00
that classroom their body would um present the emergency response they'd be their heart would start to race some
20:06
people would feel like they're going to die so they have the response of feeling like there's a tiger in the room but
20:12
there's no tiger why do you think people get anxiety in situations that aren't dangerous
20:22
when you're thinking about the body's emergency response it is designed to be blindingly fast it is not particularly
20:28
accurate so if there's a rustling in a bush and it could be a tiger or it could be a bird your body says it's better to
20:36
set off the emergency response and be wrong than to go over there and find oh this the tiger and by the time you do
20:42
that you'll be dead the emergency response is blindingly fast but it's not accurate and we think
20:48
that lack of accuracy is why people get anxiety around things that aren't really dangerous
20:54
um initially without treatment how much control do you think you have over this not a lot
21:00
yeah if your body thinks you're in danger it's going to set off the emergency response and if someone said
21:06
to you just calm down don't worry it's okay fear of a tiger or someone telling you calm down which one's more important
21:18
now a lot of people with anxiety they complain of tummy upsets and we often think they might be making this up to get out of something they don't want to
21:24
do but when the sympathetic nervous system goes off it switches off the digestive organs and the reason for that
21:31
is if you're under attack by a tiger your body wants to take all the unnecessary energy that it has
21:37
and it wants to put it into survival digestion uses quite a lot of energy and
21:44
if you're about to be eaten by a Target you don't need to digest food so your body switches off the digestive organs
21:51
so this is why people feel physically sick when they have anxiety they're not just making this up they've sometimes
21:57
either feel like they're going to throw up or they actually will
22:04
there's just four things the frightened brain can do faint freeze flee or fight it is important to talk about the freeze
22:11
response it's probably the most common response that people have um this is we just people freeze up and
22:17
they don't do anything and just as a word if you're ever doing training with people um St John has found that if you train
22:24
people in a classroom to attend accidents um when people get out to the real world they don't respond as they did in the
22:30
training but if you have actors in makeup and you have simulated car crashes and things like that people
22:36
respond much better and that's a way to overcome the phrase response
22:41
now where is the think logically solve difficult problems you know playing for future where's that in any of those
22:47
modes unfortunately people having anxiety
22:53
they're in the here and now they don't think about the future or long-term decisions
23:02
there's a strong link between fear and violence this is the fight response so
23:07
it's been found that a lot of say domestic violence happens when people are afraid in the last couple of years
23:13
of the pandemic we think domestic violence then doubled or troubled in New Zealand so just be aware when a lot of people are anxious they can become quite
23:19
aggressive and sometimes people do some really really dumb things about six years ago
23:27
in America there was a man in a petrol station he had a terrible fear of spiders and he saw a spider on his
23:33
petrol tank so we did what all of us would do he took out his lighter and he
23:38
lit the spider on fire and the Petrol in the car and the whole
23:43
town petrol station now sitting here logically we know that was a really dumb thing to do
23:50
what was he thinking yeah this is the problem when you're in
23:55
that anxious mode you don't think about anything like I'm gonna look like a [ __ ] on the news tomorrow you adjust in
24:01
the Here and Now it's unfortunately people make bad decisions down to him
24:07
the worst form of anxiety you can have is what's called a panic attack and this mimics the symptoms of a heart attack when people feel like the chest is
24:14
tightening up looking like their throat's tightening up and they feel like they're going to die now if you're not sure is this a heart
24:20
attack or a panic attack if it's someone younger it's probably a panic attack if
24:25
it's someone middle age and you're not sure it is better to assume it's a heart attack get it checked out by a medical
24:31
professional because you don't want to be wrong on that one any idea how you could stop someone
24:36
having a panic attack
24:43
yep yep yeah yeah it's absolutely one technique
24:49
and the other way is to get people to breathe so if someone's having a painter can take in front of you say I think
24:55
you're having a panic attack I know this is really scary but I want you to
25:00
breathe with me we're going to do it together now if you take a deep breath if
25:06
someone's having a panic attack how much of a deep breath will they be able to take not much at all but um if you take a
25:15
um and if you might have to do this over and over again how long do you think it'll take to calm someone down that's having a panic attack
25:23
well yeah probably a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes because that's how long cortisol can stay in your system for so it's not
25:29
a you know take five minutes go away and come back it's actually quite a long time
25:35
and light depression anxiety is treatable with the right help I'll talk about some options a little bit later
25:42
oh uh what's so one on the slide um a lot of people also get what's called phone anxiety this is where they get
25:47
very nervous talking on the phone how is this a problem for getting help for a lot of people
25:54
at the end of every media article on suicide we have this massive list of helplines
26:01
that if people struggle to talk on the phone they won't access the help they need so for example youth line they have
26:06
a phone number a text number an email line there's multiple ways to get help
26:12
that was anxiety difference of being nudes yeah so I'd say that for a lot of people and if they think about giving a
26:18
talk in public well if they think about a job interview it's probably fairly normal to you know maybe feel a bit nervous that's that's life that is not
26:25
anxiety it's really when you couldn't go to that job interview you were so anxious you threw up you couldn't
26:31
concentrate at all it's probably more into the anxiety category so when it stops you leading a normal happy and
26:36
productive life that's when it turns from just normal life just normal nerves which we all get to probably anxiety
26:46
right post-traumatic stress disorder what do we know about this
26:54
it's very well I'll show you why it's real in a minute um so let's think about a memory most people can remember what they did on
27:00
Christmas day that's usually a feeling we were all day so if you think back to what you did on Christmas day maybe you
27:05
can remember the people you were with the food you had maybe the presents you got but when you think about that you
27:10
think about that as a distant memory right you don't relive it what do you think happens with PTSD
27:19
you re-love the event over and over again as if you are going through it so
27:25
for example if someone was in a bad car crash 20 or 30 years ago and they have PTSD they re-live it as if it's
27:33
happening to them again not only do they relive it in their mind it's like their whole body is being
27:39
taken back to that situation so it's like it can be a bodily flashback for a lot of people is it of a single thing
27:46
if people say the biggest yeah yeah excellent question um so for
27:53
some people it will be one specific event you know if there was say a mortar shell or something that exploded near
27:59
them some people will have a one-off event there's other people that you know it's the whole deployment or something
28:05
like that that could trigger it um in terms of the way they present there's not a lot of difference in terms
28:11
of people have flashbacks um to give you an idea of how debilitating this can be for someone someone I know um she was with her
28:18
brother on a car I think they're about 12 at the time there's a bad car crash her brother was killed and we think her
28:24
face was pushed into the leather seat in front of her every time she smelt leather she had a flashback of that car
28:31
crash so think about how many of the other things you've got on you can you imagine being allergic to life for years she
28:38
didn't understand what was happening she just seemed to have this explosive outbursts for no obvious reason
28:43
so it can be very very difficult and you can obviously have multiple traumas like you know in Christchurch is
28:49
when the earthquakes the mosque shooting so yeah yeah there can be several things
28:54
so what is going on in the brain with PTSD well this is a brain scan by Ruth lenius
29:00
right let me explain this so up here and by the way white orange and yellow means the brain is doing more so up here
29:07
you've got the prefrontal cortex that's the planning logical and part of the brain and we can see
29:13
with someone without PTSD that's showing lots of activation up here you also have the parietal lobes that's where you are
29:20
in space and time what has happened to the PTSD brain
29:29
it's doing something it's very much doing something
29:36
yep any guess that's what that area might be this is yeah the limbo the memory and
29:43
emotional bit the limbic system so what has happened is people with PTSD
29:49
the only parts of their brain that seems to be working
29:54
is the part associated with memory so that this stuck in the past and
30:00
there's no prefrontal cortex to be able to um solve this or move on so it's really really debilitating for
30:06
people how do we tell most people to deal with their PTSD we tell them to
30:13
talk about it there's a sorry just a minute I'll go to this one next sorry I'll come back to
30:19
the previous slide um what we found is there's a bit of a brain called Brokers area this is one of
30:24
the parts of the brain associated with speech and language and we've found that if someone has PTSD this part of the
30:30
brain doesn't show much activation so they can't always talk about what's
30:36
going on for them so I'm sure you've heard you know soldiers coming back from the war people say they never talked about the war
30:43
often they can't talk about the war just go back to that previous slide for
30:48
a second ah so if you want to know more about PTSD there's a fantastic book called the body
30:54
keeps the score by Bissell vanderkolk he's from Harvard Medical School he's probably the world's leading expert on
31:00
hearing trauma and in this book it's got lots more signs and symptoms of PTSD but it's also got a lot about how to heal
31:07
this so I highly highly recommend that okay there's quite a lot of information in a fairly short period of time and
31:13
just with the people um next to you can you discuss some of the things I talked about with depression anxiety and PTSD is there one
31:20
thing you didn't know before or one thing that stood out for you and that Habitat to people around you for a couple of minutes
31:28
so what could cause all this well there's many many factors but one interesting thing that scientists are looking at at the moment is the impact
31:35
of sleep so in the past we used to think if someone had a mental illness like depression or anxiety that would affect
31:41
their sleep what we've now started to realize the last 10 or 15 years is that poor sleep
31:46
can trigger cause or exacerbate some of these things so first of all in terms of suicide most
31:53
suicides happen either in the afternoon after often several nights of really bad sleep or between 12 a.m and 3 A.M I had
32:01
a farmer at one of my public seminars and he came up to me and said he had all these bills on his farm he thought there
32:06
was no way he was ever going to pay them off and he thought suicide was the only way out this happened at about two or
32:12
three in the morning fortunately he gave up on that idea and he got a good night's sleep
32:18
what do you think he thought when he woke up in the morning he thought all his problems were
32:25
solvable and even if we haven't got to the point of suicide I'm sure all of us had a really small problem late at night that
32:32
seems like a disaster so in terms of interventions around suicide one of the things I drum on
32:37
about with all the presentations I give is sleep if you can improve that you can make a big difference quite quickly
32:45
the other thing about sleep is it tends to be a rapidly changeable trait and sometimes in terms of Suicide Prevention
32:51
people talk about things like inequality how long does inequality take to change for people
32:58
decades in some cases like it's not a quick fix often but sleep if you know what you're doing you should be able to
33:03
improve someone's sleep pretty quickly so that's one of the reasons that I suggest really trying to focus on sleep
33:09
as an intervention is because it makes a big difference
33:15
so another example of how a mental illness can be related to sleep there's a bit of your brain called the amygdala
33:20
that's one of the parts of the brain that helps process fear and we've found that if you don't get one good night's
33:26
sleep the amygdala can show 60 percent more activation now normally that's not
33:31
too much of a problem because you have a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that tells the amateur
33:37
just calm down don't worry about it it's okay but we found that if you don't get a
33:43
good night's sleep the link between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala doesn't work as well so you've
33:49
got the Amendola firing on all cylinders and you don't have the break and so it's one of the reasons that poor sleep can
33:55
be directly related to anxiety right teenagers
34:01
what do we know about teenagers and sleep first of all when do you think that teenage brain finishes development
34:12
it could be between age 25 and 30. so most adults they produce melatonin
34:19
through the day but they produce enough to go to sleep at about 9 10 or 11 o'clock at night what do we think happened with teenagers
34:30
well they finished producing melatonin at about 11 12 or 1.
34:36
so their biological clock is two to three hours after an adult now we often tell people well if you're
34:42
tired just go to bed earlier what do you think happens if you put someone to sleep and they don't have a
34:47
buildup of melatonin on this system they just lie there they can't get this
34:53
late so sleep is not something you can do automatically you need this buildup of melatonin so telling people to just
34:59
go to bed earlier doesn't actually work for a lot of people so and this is something we should consider
35:06
right there's a whole heap of sleep problems and we don't have time to go through all of them today but what do you think of sleep problems fixable or
35:13
do you think this is something that some people are stuck with for life yeah almost all sleep problems if you
35:20
know what you're doing can be improved I had a man at one of my seminars and he said
35:26
um I think it was in the 70s or 80s and he knew he had sleep apnea his whole life we had breathing difficulties and
35:31
he thought well it's a bit late to do anything about this now and I said like come on why don't you get this sorted out anyway I talked about talking him
35:38
into it but eventually he did and after one night of getting better sleep what do you think he said
35:46
that yeah he also said I feel like a new man so um you know it's never too late to do
35:52
something about this oh see if you go to a MGP or Pharmacy you can get a test on a machine and then
35:59
you can buy this machine that helps you breathe and it stops you waking up at night so they can yep make a difference
36:05
yeah right it's a couple of other things just want to look at very briefly um brain
36:11
injuries we don't talk about this much do you think it sounds got a high or low rate of brain injuries
36:19
yeah we've got one of the highest rates of brain injuries in the world it's not our rugby culture any idea is
36:26
what it is domestic violence we've got the highest education violence in the world probably
36:31
so well it's the oecd so we've got a very very high rate so there's lots of
36:36
people who've got brain injuries that don't know about it some of the symptoms of a brain injury can be memory loss aggression and fatigue what does that
36:43
look really similar to depression yeah so this is why it's
36:48
importantly to qualified health professional make a diagnosis um just to give you an idea at frontiers of Hope probably half of all the people
36:55
that come to us with so-called treatment resistant depression they actually have a brain injury that no one's ever asked
37:00
and they haven't looked at so um really important we try and identify us and the final thing that I want to go
37:06
through oh sorry um if you want more information about brain injuries brain injury New Zealand's Got
37:12
lots of good fact sheets they've got lots of ways to help people um so it's a great site
37:18
something else that's probably worth mentioning in terms of Suicide Prevention there's something called pmdd or pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder now
37:26
most women when they have their period they might be a bit moody or they might be in a bit of pain
37:31
what do you think happens if you have pmdd
37:38
you have an extreme form of us and some people be very happy and then it comes the time of this cycle and they can
37:44
absolutely crash I've Got a Friend with us and one day she was really happy and the next day she just said life is not
37:51
worth loving I can't see how I'm ever going to be happy again and it was scary to see how happy she was when and then
37:56
just totally totally fresh so a lot of women have this and they don't realize about it they have it so it's important
38:03
to raise some more awareness yeah right on to Suicide Prevention
38:10
now what do you think can we actually prevent suicides or if someone's really determined are they just going to do it
38:16
and there's nothing we can do to stop a lot of people think that if we stop them doing it one way they're just going
38:22
to do it another way there's no point even trying is this very important study conducted
38:27
on the people that were going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge so and between 1937 and 1971 500 people
38:35
stopped off jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge many of these people were physically held back so these were not
38:41
people that had vague thoughts of suicide these were people that had a plan and they were actively carrying it
38:46
out where the researchers followed them up years later they found a staggering 94
38:52
were still alive or had died of natural causes so in other words if you can help
38:58
someone at that time of Crisis there was an exceptionally High chance that they will live
39:05
so we certainly um I've talked about depression and that's certainly a risk factor for our suicide but did you know
39:12
that a lot of suicides are not the result of mental illness a lot are the results of like a relationship breakout
39:18
getting fired from a job it's a same-day crisis and overall somewhere between a
39:23
third to a half of all suicides as a result of the same day crisis and particularly for men it's not like 80
39:30
percent of suicides are not the result of mental illness
39:35
so this is where um failure has a big role in this I'll talk about that a little bit later
39:45
so we often think that suicides are planned over a really long period of time and some of them are but this study
39:50
asked the team survivors how long was there between you thinking about this and carrying it out 24 said five minutes or less
40:01
so a lot of suicide yeah so I heck of a lot of them are very very spontaneous they are not a
40:07
carefully thought out plan what's something that can make people more spontaneous
40:14
poor sleep so one of the reasons I put sleep as an intervention is it's a very strong way to address some of these
40:19
things so there are some summer signs that are very impulsive and there are others that are planned over a much longer period of
40:26
time the ones that are planned over a longer period of time these are some of the things to look for so if you recognize
40:33
that anyone's talking a lot about death you need to talk to them I'll teach you how to do that in a minute if you hear someone say things like
40:40
there's no point anymore suddenly getting better after long history of depression isn't that a good
40:45
thing uh well unfortunately I found is a lot of people who've been depressed for a
40:51
long period of time they suddenly get better it's because they've made a decision to end it and that's why their mood seems to increase so start asking
40:58
questions with that and what we call ruminant of thoughts so this is where if someone say had a relationship break up
41:04
10 years ago if they're always going on about that and they can't get that out of their mind they ruminate on this
41:09
that's possibly a risk factor for suicide and giving away prized positions I'm not talking about someone on the
41:16
wedding day getting a family heirloom this would be out of the blue signpost all the positions for sale on Facebook
41:21
start asking questions writing goodbye notes significant negative changes or events talking about
41:28
wanting to die by Suicide or feeling hopeless how do you think people might convey
41:34
that they feel hopeless
41:39
if someone's lost a job and they say something like I'm never going to find another job again that could be a
41:45
hopeless statement so we need to look out for things like that
41:51
so if you recognize any of those warning signs that I've just talked about you should always ask the person now some
41:58
people think hold on this is not my job I'm not trying to do this do we have psychiatrists patrolling the
42:04
streets looking for people that are suicidal so who do you think is the first person
42:10
that's most likely to pick this up yeah or colleague someone like that so
42:16
this is something that anyone can ask what I'm about to teach in our describe as mental health first aid so we teach
42:23
um physical first aid we're not teaching someone how to be a surgeon in a couple of hours you're teaching someone some
42:28
basic life-saving techniques that can help them till more help arrives
42:34
so if you recognize any of those warning signs that I talked about or you're concerned about someone you need to
42:39
explicitly ask them you say you just said to me you don't think you're ever going to find a job or
42:45
you said there's no point anymore I know this might be a really tough question
42:51
but does this mean you're thinking about ending your life or suicide you must use the word suicide or end your life if you
42:58
just say are you going to do something stupid people they could mean are you going to get drunk now we don't mind if they say no that's
43:05
okay we can breathe a sigh of relief but what do we do if they say yes
43:13
well a really good thing to say if someone says yes is I am so glad you told me that
43:19
how do you think it would feel to admit that you're suicidal to someone else what have I done if I told the right
43:25
person but if you hear the words I am so glad you told me that you'll probably
43:30
think I told the right person I'm somebody worried that if the person's not suicidal could ask and be
43:37
dangerous research is Crystal Clear if someone is not suicidal asking them does
43:42
not give them ideas so we need to be really clear on that one
43:48
foreign do you think people will tell you the truth
43:53
I've asked the hundreds if not literally thousands of people this in my lifetime um the overwhelmed majority have told me
43:59
the truth so if you ask this in a genuine way most people give you a good answer what do you think you should do if you
44:05
think they're joking still take it seriously one bad woman
44:13
said to me I'm gonna go kill myself now and she was laughing and she was smiling I was 99 sure she was joking but I
44:20
stopped and I said sorry you just said to me you want to kill yourself do you really mean that and
44:26
then suddenly her face turned solemn and she noddled so even if you think someone's joking about it do take it
44:32
seriously right now the next bit is if someone's
44:38
suicidal you need to make some sort of safety plan in proportion to the risk they are in so if you ask someone when
44:44
are you going to do it and they say next year sometime you need to get that person less not no help if someone says
44:50
they're going to do it this afternoon what do you do
44:57
yeah drop whatever you're doing whatever you're doing is not as important as saving someone's life okay so filling
45:04
out that risk management survey or something like that not as important as saving someone's life so someone's about
45:10
to die in the very near future don't leave them alone and get them to more
45:15
help so you've got your check plans you've got people like nurses if it's outside of the base
45:21
um I recommend taking people to a GP you should be able to see a GP fairly quickly what's the danger was saying to
45:27
put someone on a long counseling wait list
45:32
yeah it's uh it's devastating for someone to be in crisis and then to be told it'll be nine months before we can
45:39
see you and by the way the Mental Health Service I run frontiers of Hope if someone think crisis we will see them you know we will
45:46
make time for them um we won't say oh yeah we can't see you for nine months or something like that we're really trying to make um help us
45:53
instantaneous as possible
46:00
yeah if you believe someone's about to die in front of you ring one one one
46:05
I've only ever had to call the place on three people in my life how do you think all three of them reacted
46:12
they were not happy you you think I'm gonna okay however one of the things at night one of the things we had a week later
46:18
one I think a couple of months later so even if you have to really upset someone in the short term their life is more
46:24
important than that now I hear some of you say yes but what about the Privacy Act
46:30
some people think the Privacy Act says you can never reveal confidential information is that correct
46:36
no so there is Rule 11. rule 11 says that if you believe that someone is in
46:42
danger of death or serious harm you have an absolute right and I would say obligation to break the confidentiality
46:48
and keep them alive I mean this literally people New Zealand have died because people don't understand the
46:54
Privacy Act they've kept confidential information away from other people so
47:00
we've we're simply had this misunderstanding we've seen her privacy as the highest good human life is always
47:06
more important than someone's privacy so we have to be crystal clear on what the Privacy Act does and does not say
47:13
any questions on yeah
47:18
yeah and worryingly I talked to you about doctors nurses psychologists and people don't know this unfortunately
47:23
because they've had it drilled into them the Privacy Act says oh you can never break confidential information that is
47:29
not what the hex is just one other thing to be aware of so
47:35
I've talked about um depression anxiety and PTSD they're the most common things you'll come across there is something
47:40
else called psychosis what is psychosis
47:47
yeah where people have delusional or irrational thoughts they might climb to the top of a building thinking they can
47:52
fly or they might hear voices The psychosis is something you can manage yourself can you talk someone out
47:59
of us psychosis is a medical emergency your only option is to call 111 you can't
48:06
talk someone out of a psychotic episode they're going to need to be restrained so it's really important unfortunately
48:11
I've seen people teach mental health first aid courses where they imply you can talk anyone out of us and you can
48:16
help anyone if they've got psychosis you really really can't
48:22
foreign after this you can go around diagnosing
48:29
all your friends and family with mental illnesses as I mentioned before some of the
48:34
symptoms of a brain injury can be very similar to those of depression so it's
48:40
too important to let a qualified medical professional make the diagnosis
48:46
right so I've talked about what to do if you think someone's suicidal what do you think you should do if maybe you're concerned that someone's depressed or a
48:52
bit anxious but you don't think they're quite at the point of suicide as we've said before if you ask someone how are you
48:58
you're probably going to get the response I'm fine even if they're not so you need to ask it in a different way
49:04
a really good way to go up to someone is to say what you've observed so for example if you know that someone used to
49:10
be a really happy person they used to come to lots of social events and they used to seem to have a likeness about
49:16
them but now you've noticed well they seem to have the weight of the world on their shoulders they've stopped coming
49:21
to social events you should go up to that person privately and say lately I
49:27
have noticed you don't seem to be yourself I've noticed that you don't seem to have
49:32
the same happiness you used to and I've noticed that you haven't been coming out to as many social events
49:38
if you say I have noticed and list concrete things how do most people react to that
49:47
some will be surprised because they won't know but you can't just brush that off if you just ask someone how are you
49:53
you can brush that off really easily but if you say something along the lines of I have noticed in this concrete examples
49:58
it's much harder to brush that off
50:04
there's something called the bystander effect and this happens when someone's lying injured on the road lots of people
50:10
walk past because they all think everyone else will do something about this and unfortunately I've given talks to
50:16
workplaces where there might be a hundred people in the workplace and everyone knows that someone's not coping
50:21
and unfortunately no one does anything because they all think someone else will do something if you notice that
50:28
someone's not coping make it your personal responsibility to do something about it
50:33
and honestly I've written a book um on suicide prevention if I became unwell I would far rather 10 people came up to me
50:40
and said Michael I've noticed Michael I'm concerned about you and for everyone to think well he wrote a book on suicide
50:45
prevention he must know what he's doing he must be okay so if you notice it do something about
50:50
it and if for some reason like it's a senior officer and you don't feel um comfortable talking to them you know
50:55
tell their manager tell someone but make sure you do something about it any questions on that
51:04
okay so if it's all too confusing if um as I
51:10
said before a lot of people say with depression they get overwhelmed making decisions so if you Google something like counselor in your area usually a
51:17
whole lot of responses come up and then you've got things like would you like a CBT counselor a DBT counselor a person
51:23
seems a therapist an acceptance and commitment therapist a Gestalt therapist a nature therapist what do you want
51:29
and it's really overwhelming for some people so it's all too overwhelming I say go see your GP because it's one
51:36
place to go to there's something called The Family
51:41
Services directory has anyone come across this has a complete list of all the support agencies throughout New
51:47
Zealand there's about 5 000 Nationwide I recommend you go on there and just find out about some of the services that are
51:53
there in your area because you never know when you might need this I host a local radio show and planes FM
52:00
in Christchurch and I've asked person after person if you had one bit of advice for someone going through this
52:05
what would it be any idea what person after person has said to me
52:13
they said I wished I knew I could change counselors or doctors so in other words the help you're
52:19
getting is not helping you you can change
52:24
okay and the last how are we doing for time I'll be about three minutes over uh I
52:30
just want to talk about one thing that can actually help um get you better so this was a group of mainly retired
52:36
men in Christchurch and they thought look we're not the kind of men that want to sit around in group therapy and
52:41
unfortunately a lot of them were quite depressed they thought our career is over and often in the Western World when
52:47
we meet someone we ask them what do you do and if you don't have something to say a lot of people don't feel that
52:52
great about themselves so these people got together and they thought look we don't want to sit down in group therapy but we're quite
52:58
practical we're quite good with our hands so they got together in groups of two or three and they went around door knocking and they said to people if
53:05
you've had any odd jobs around the house like putting up a shelf fixing a washer we'll do that for free
53:10
what impact do you think this had on people massive so when they made a good group
53:16
of friends during this they got out of the house they weren't sitting around feeling sorry for themselves and they felt they were doing something positive
53:22
for society so volunteering can be a great way to address some of the things I've talked about
53:28
I think we're really bad yeah really bad yeah yeah
53:37
I'm interested enough for most people actually the happiest after age 70. so unfortunately other people when they
53:43
retire they really go downhill if you can just get through that bit you're probably going to have the best time of your life
53:48
so yeah um not only does volunteering make you feel better the study of over five and a
53:53
half thousand elderly people found that those that volunteered for one or two hours a week they had a 73 sorry a 63
54:00
lower chance of dying it's not only can volunteering make you feel better it could actually save your life
54:10
one of the things that unfortunately I see a lot of people talk about mental health treatment and they say things
54:15
like you know take time for yourself practice self-care and all these sorts of things and it's all about you
54:23
what we know about well-being all has to do with relationships and
54:29
unfortunately many of the treatments that we offer today they're all in isolation you know they're all people being on their own when actually we need
54:36
to connect people together the largest ever study of longevity or how to live a long life it found that I
54:43
believe not the biggest predictor of living a long life they had nothing to do with smoking eating well anything like that the biggest predictor was
54:49
whether you had deep stable positive connections and I feel there's so many bits of
54:55
mental health advice out there most of them about you know you look after yourself take time for yourself
55:00
practice self-care and we forget about other people and really if we want to cure to some of the
55:06
stuff connections that is what really really will help I think danger because people think the
55:13
number of friends that were on Facebook and around the context yeah a deep connection so yeah just any couple of
55:18
people on Facebook unfortunately doesn't quite yeah let's go yeah um the way I describe a deep connection is if you
55:23
were having a really tough time who could you go to those are the people that are your real friends
55:30
okay so um last but now I said before that's like a third to a half of all suicides with a result of a same-day
55:37
crisis such as getting fired from a job or a relationship breakup how do we deal with those
55:43
well a few years ago I was living in the UK and I'd always wanted to do a magic trick in front of a large audience I saw
55:49
the addition to Britain's Got Talent I thought this is my chance so I applied I got through I came to the day of
55:56
filming and I said only 20 minutes backstage to set this up and they all said to me that's fine that's not a
56:01
problem unfortunately someone came to me at 4 30 in the afternoon and they said we need
56:08
you on the stage now so nothing was set up correctly
56:14
everything that could possibly have gone wrong did go wrong but everything that could not possibly
56:19
have gone wrong also somehow managed to go wrong I had 3 000 people in the audience
56:25
yelling off off off to the worst moments of my entire life
56:32
but actually got worse than that because Amanda Holden was absolutely horrible about my teeth and this was going to be
56:37
broadcast in front of 12 million people so if you had a fail fail big right
56:44
yeah so when this happened I thought my life was ruined I thought every time I applied for a job someone's going to
56:50
Google my name and say no way and every time I want to get into a relationship with someone they're going to Google my
56:55
name and say it's not going to happen I was running School camps to the UK and the day after the show aired a new group
57:01
came in I was really hoping they had not seen the most popular show on TV
57:07
they had and they wanted to know what happened well first of all I asked them what their talents were and he came to me and
57:13
I said my towns is failing and they all laughed at me but then I said no no I'm serious anyone can fail once that
57:21
requires no effort and no skill but to have the talent of failing you need to fall off the horse get back up and try
57:26
again then this was a group of teenagers they didn't give me a lot of feedback at the time but afterwards some of them came up
57:32
to me and they said we think you're one of the most inspiring people we've ever met and I said hold on hold on I made a
57:39
turkey of myself on national TV and they were calling me inspiring
57:45
and just yeah don't need to point that out um
57:51
and I thought they'd just be nice about it and just trying to make me feel better but then another group came in they'd
57:56
seen the show I told the story and I got the same reaction from them since I got a good reaction from a couple of groups I figured there might
58:02
be something to this what I've actually started to realize was that we have a massive problem with
58:07
how we deal with failure in this country I was working as a youth worker in an organization in Christchurch we had a
58:14
young Olympian come in to see us she had spent her whole life trying to go to the Olympics and she wanted to win a gold
58:19
medal for New Zealand the day before she came to see us she got a rejection letter in the mail
58:25
without saying she wasn't going to the Olympic team without thinking she immediately tried to end her life
58:32
because when I heard that story I started to understand why Australia could have such an impact on people the problem was in this country we are
58:40
allergic to failure when everyone went to race in school we like to give them a certificate of participation so that no
58:46
one feels bad the problem is in real life if you experience a relationship breakup you do not get a certificate of participation
58:53
divorce proceedings may be but not a certificate of participation and so tragically a lot of people don't
58:59
know how to fail and I mean this literally it is killing people we have too many young men that get fired from a
59:05
job and the first thing they think about is suicide but it doesn't have to be that way what
59:11
if we change the culture what if we had a culture where instead of hiding our failures we openly talked
59:17
about them there's a story about a man that owned a business it didn't do too well in fact
59:23
the business failed so badly this man was left with a debt that took him 20 years to pay off you might have heard of this man his
59:30
name is Abraham Lincoln one of the greatest presidents of the United States now many people know that Lincoln played
59:36
a big role in ending slavery but they don't know about his business failure why we erase this from the history books
59:43
I say we should write this backhand it is not to bring these people down because I think if we know about their
59:48
failures it makes them even greater now it's all very well for me to share
59:53
my biggest failure but if you want to do something about that third to a half of some of all suicides
59:59
I dare to share your big failures with people I don't mean the little ones I don't mean the time not the coffee cup off the
1:00:04
workbench we'll had a good laugh about it no no I mean the time you desperately want to give them that course and they
1:00:09
rejected you on that soul-crushing relationship break up your hand you never know what impact hearing
1:00:16
someone's failure could have because if there's a young man that thinks about suicide if they lose a job if they live in a world where we don't
1:00:22
talk about our failures we hide them and we pretend they don't happen maybe suicide seems like a good option
1:00:29
that if we live in a world where we openly discuss our failures he knows oh yes I know this person they got fired they went on to recover and I know this
1:00:35
other person they also got fired and they went on to recover then suicide may not seem like such a
1:00:40
good idea but we can only do that if we're willing to be open and honest about our failures
1:00:47
right that's everything that I have for you today uh if you do have any questions please you're more than welcome to come up and talk to me at the
1:00:52
end um if anyone's got any specific situations they want to discuss really happy to do that uh there is my email
1:00:59
address um if you want to know about the Mental Health Service I run frontiers of Hope and we can see people online from all
1:01:05
over the country uh so that's the uh if you do have any questions you want to email me about please feel free there's
1:01:11
my email other than that thank you very much for listening and I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon
1:01:17
[Applause]
Recognise the triggers
- What activities, times, places, people and thoughts make you want to hurt yourself? And when do you not feel like it?
- Understanding more about the things that trigger thoughts of self-harm can help you deal with those situations, or avoid them altogether.
- Postpone it.
- When you feel the urge to hurt yourself, try to distract yourself for 15 minutes or so. The intense and immediate urge to self-harm passes may pass quickly. Postponing it through another activity may be all you need in the short term to get over thoughts of self-harm.
- Focus on other things like going for a walk, ringing a friend, reading a book, or having something to eat or drink. Choose things that take your mind off negative thoughts and keep you busy in a positive way.
Take action
- Distract yourself from thoughts of self-harm or suicide.
- If you are thinking about harming yourself, get involved in a distracting activity and allow the urge to pass.
- It’s best if you choose these tools when you are feeling relatively well and have them handy if you feel the urge to harm yourself.
- You can also use the notes app on your phone to build a list of reminders of the things that make your life worth living.
- Connect to your current surroundings and manage unpleasant feelings.
- Feeling overwhelmed by strong emotions can put you at risk of harming yourself.
- Resilience Coach app helps you centre yourself and ride the moment out when you're feeling overwhelmed. It also helps you identify your triggering thoughts, regain your composure, think about your situation and decide on a helpful course of action before you are feeling overwhelmed.
- When you’re starting out, practice using the tool/s when you're feeling calm. Once you’ve learned the strategies you can use them whenever you feel yourself becoming upset or overwhelmed.
Manage your unpleasant feelings
- When you feel the urge to hurt yourself, try using strategies like controlling your breathing, relaxation and helpful self-talk to manage the feelings that you are experiencing.
- Even simple activities like controlled breathing can take your mind away from thoughts of self-harm and get you through the immediate crisis.
Build connections
- Spending time with other people helps you feel better and reduces thoughts of harming yourself.
- Identify the people in your life who can offer you support and the different kinds of support they can offer.
- When you’re starting out, focus on strengthening relationships with people you trust most and can talk about personal things with. Over time, you can work on building a wider support network by reaching out to people that you don't see as often or have lost contact with.
- You can also use the notes or contacts app on your phone to create a list of people to call when you need support. Add some key people to your favourites so you can find them easily when things are tough.
- If you don’t have people you can talk to easily, writing your feelings down can help you understand your emotions and stop distressing thoughts from going around and around in your head. Getting those thoughts on paper can also help you to come up with more helpful thoughts that will get you moving again.
Guardian angel
How the power of compassion and listening has led Kevin Briggs to talk down over 200 people from taking their lives.
00:00
I'm 220 feet in the air and I have
00:02
somebody trying to get my attention God
00:05
keep yelling there I say if you give me
00:06
closer that's it
00:07
because all I gotta do is nudge back and
00:09
what happens because somebody is four
00:12
five minutes late getting home they roll
00:14
down their window as they come by and
00:16
they yell out jump you sob what could I
00:21
have done different I was tired of
00:24
living his life I was tired of lying to
00:26
everybody I was exhausted at who I
00:29
become I thought about the Golden Gate
00:32
Bridge
00:33
ask for directions so I got to the Bay
00:36
Bridge
00:37
and I asked him for directions I said
00:39
how do you get to the goin Gate Bridge
00:40
but I was telling myself ok whoever I
00:42
asked I hope that I when I asked him
00:44
they looked me in my face and they'll
00:46
see something inside of me and asked me
00:48
well why are you going to the bridge
00:50
because part of me on the inside was
00:53
ready to say why I wanted to go I mean I
00:55
was really looking for a reason to to
00:58
continue to live I couldn't find
01:00
anything the ladies just looked at me in
01:03
my face and gave me a plain look she
01:07
gave me directions I knew it wasn't
01:10
gonna be all right no more park my car
01:12
left the keys in the ignition and grab
01:14
my prepaid phone and I got there on that
01:15
bridge and I started walking I looked
01:18
over the railing saw it was that the
01:19
devil's going to stop me I saw there was
01:22
nothing there water but when I looked in
01:24
that water I just didn't see water I saw
01:25
a piece I saw no more nights of crying I
01:29
saw no more living a lie I saw no more
01:31
being a burden all the things that I
01:34
needed in life I saw in that water I
01:36
took a couple steps back in a moment as
01:38
I'm heading towards the railing and
01:41
about to jump over I hear whoops
01:43
hey is everything all right
01:46
and in that moment it was enough of a
01:48
distraction to where I grabbed the
01:49
railing and turned myself on his court
01:51
i'm 220 feet in the air and i have
01:54
somebody trying to get my attention I'm
01:57
upset I'm yelling back and forth for him
01:59
stay back I'm trying to keep myself warm
02:01
I'm bundled up so I keep yelling in I
02:03
said if you give me closer that's it all
02:05
right cuz all I gotta do is nudge back
02:06
like that's all I got even a big nose
02:08
just a small nudge and that's it finally
02:11
in my heart starts feeling like why
02:13
doesn't you even care because he's not
02:17
he's not yelling at me he's not he's not
02:19
he's not making me feel like I'm stupid
02:21
for being here because everything inside
02:22
of me is like man you're stupid you
02:24
didn't put yourself in this position you
02:25
did not come here to talk I came here
02:28
because I was in pain and I was trying
02:29
to get out of it but here after 15
02:31
minutes this this voice starts to
02:33
penetrate me him him I put my soul in it
02:35
and he gets a little closer and I start
02:37
to hear him I never look up
02:39
in that same position on that bridge
02:42
with my feet hanging off the cord and at
02:45
any moment I could do this and it could
02:47
be over and for 92 minutes this
02:50
individual is human just listen to me
02:54
now think about that when I say that for
02:58
92 minutes
03:00
he said he stood there and just listened
03:04
to me
03:07
so after this time he decided on his own
03:12
to come back over the rail and I said
03:15
what did I do
03:16
that helped this situation all he told
03:19
me was you listened you let me speak and
03:23
you listened that's all this guy was
03:26
looking for and I think that's what so
03:27
many people are looking for
03:28
shortly after this incident I received a
03:32
letter from Kevin's mother dear mr.
03:35
breaks I adopted Kevin when he was only
03:38
six months old but you are one of the
03:40
reasons Kevin is still with us
03:42
I truly believe Kevin was crying out for
03:46
help we truly thank God for you
03:49
sincerely indebted to you NAR Vela
03:53
orthia
03:54
[Music]
03:57
it's really good we have a choice are we
04:02
gonna take the path of none of my
04:04
business they should handle it are we
04:06
gonna confront them head on and say hey
04:08
I'm seeing these things what's going on
04:11
let's talk listen to understand that's
04:16
the key listen to understand
04:18
Kevin Briggs is known as the guardian of
04:20
the Golden Gate Bridge he spent more
04:22
than two decades talking people down
04:24
from committing suicide I want to know
04:27
that there is hope and we want help we
04:30
want to know about it don't feel that
04:32
you're alone in this
04:33
Briggs talked roughly 200 people out of
04:35
suicide we don't have to be doctors
04:37
psychiatrists and all that we can do
04:39
this right here right now to be able to
04:43
have that courageous conversation with
04:44
someone I just focus on going this way
04:46
I don't worry about going back I don't
04:48
worry about left I don't worry about why
04:49
I was worried about forward
04:50
I just think I was alone and nobody in
04:52
the world felt like me now that I know
04:53
is people know what I feel like me it's
04:55
my job to help them out to encourage
04:57
them let them know hey I've been where
04:58
you been the darkest point did you ever
05:00
thought you can ever be in I came out of
05:02
it you can come out of it too
05:03
I can't honestly believe that it would
05:05
almost 8 billion people on this planet
05:06
that people still feel alone and that's
05:09
why we all got to come together two ears
05:12
and one heart that's what saved my life
05:14
and that's what all of us in this room
05:15
possess challenge yourself today and in
05:19
the future to look out for each other
05:21
the moment the moment people feel heard
05:24
they get healed the moment but they have
05:28
to be heard listening can saves people's
05:31
lives and we all can do it
05:33
[Music]
I'm 220 feet in the air and I have
00:02
somebody trying to get my attention God
00:05
keep yelling there I say if you give me
00:06
closer that's it
00:07
because all I gotta do is nudge back and
00:09
what happens because somebody is four
00:12
five minutes late getting home they roll
00:14
down their window as they come by and
00:16
they yell out jump you sob what could I
00:21
have done different I was tired of
00:24
living his life I was tired of lying to
00:26
everybody I was exhausted at who I
00:29
become I thought about the Golden Gate
00:32
Bridge
00:33
ask for directions so I got to the Bay
00:36
Bridge
00:37
and I asked him for directions I said
00:39
how do you get to the goin Gate Bridge
00:40
but I was telling myself ok whoever I
00:42
asked I hope that I when I asked him
00:44
they looked me in my face and they'll
00:46
see something inside of me and asked me
00:48
well why are you going to the bridge
00:50
because part of me on the inside was
00:53
ready to say why I wanted to go I mean I
00:55
was really looking for a reason to to
00:58
continue to live I couldn't find
01:00
anything the ladies just looked at me in
01:03
my face and gave me a plain look she
01:07
gave me directions I knew it wasn't
01:10
gonna be all right no more park my car
01:12
left the keys in the ignition and grab
01:14
my prepaid phone and I got there on that
01:15
bridge and I started walking I looked
01:18
over the railing saw it was that the
01:19
devil's going to stop me I saw there was
01:22
nothing there water but when I looked in
01:24
that water I just didn't see water I saw
01:25
a piece I saw no more nights of crying I
01:29
saw no more living a lie I saw no more
01:31
being a burden all the things that I
01:34
needed in life I saw in that water I
01:36
took a couple steps back in a moment as
01:38
I'm heading towards the railing and
01:41
about to jump over I hear whoops
01:43
hey is everything all right
01:46
and in that moment it was enough of a
01:48
distraction to where I grabbed the
01:49
railing and turned myself on his court
01:51
i'm 220 feet in the air and i have
01:54
somebody trying to get my attention I'm
01:57
upset I'm yelling back and forth for him
01:59
stay back I'm trying to keep myself warm
02:01
I'm bundled up so I keep yelling in I
02:03
said if you give me closer that's it all
02:05
right cuz all I gotta do is nudge back
02:06
like that's all I got even a big nose
02:08
just a small nudge and that's it finally
02:11
in my heart starts feeling like why
02:13
doesn't you even care because he's not
02:17
he's not yelling at me he's not he's not
02:19
he's not making me feel like I'm stupid
02:21
for being here because everything inside
02:22
of me is like man you're stupid you
02:24
didn't put yourself in this position you
02:25
did not come here to talk I came here
02:28
because I was in pain and I was trying
02:29
to get out of it but here after 15
02:31
minutes this this voice starts to
02:33
penetrate me him him I put my soul in it
02:35
and he gets a little closer and I start
02:37
to hear him I never look up
02:39
in that same position on that bridge
02:42
with my feet hanging off the cord and at
02:45
any moment I could do this and it could
02:47
be over and for 92 minutes this
02:50
individual is human just listen to me
02:54
now think about that when I say that for
02:58
92 minutes
03:00
he said he stood there and just listened
03:04
to me
03:07
so after this time he decided on his own
03:12
to come back over the rail and I said
03:15
what did I do
03:16
that helped this situation all he told
03:19
me was you listened you let me speak and
03:23
you listened that's all this guy was
03:26
looking for and I think that's what so
03:27
many people are looking for
03:28
shortly after this incident I received a
03:32
letter from Kevin's mother dear mr.
03:35
breaks I adopted Kevin when he was only
03:38
six months old but you are one of the
03:40
reasons Kevin is still with us
03:42
I truly believe Kevin was crying out for
03:46
help we truly thank God for you
03:49
sincerely indebted to you NAR Vela
03:53
orthia
03:54
[Music]
03:57
it's really good we have a choice are we
04:02
gonna take the path of none of my
04:04
business they should handle it are we
04:06
gonna confront them head on and say hey
04:08
I'm seeing these things what's going on
04:11
let's talk listen to understand that's
04:16
the key listen to understand
04:18
Kevin Briggs is known as the guardian of
04:20
the Golden Gate Bridge he spent more
04:22
than two decades talking people down
04:24
from committing suicide I want to know
04:27
that there is hope and we want help we
04:30
want to know about it don't feel that
04:32
you're alone in this
04:33
Briggs talked roughly 200 people out of
04:35
suicide we don't have to be doctors
04:37
psychiatrists and all that we can do
04:39
this right here right now to be able to
04:43
have that courageous conversation with
04:44
someone I just focus on going this way
04:46
I don't worry about going back I don't
04:48
worry about left I don't worry about why
04:49
I was worried about forward
04:50
I just think I was alone and nobody in
04:52
the world felt like me now that I know
04:53
is people know what I feel like me it's
04:55
my job to help them out to encourage
04:57
them let them know hey I've been where
04:58
you been the darkest point did you ever
05:00
thought you can ever be in I came out of
05:02
it you can come out of it too
05:03
I can't honestly believe that it would
05:05
almost 8 billion people on this planet
05:06
that people still feel alone and that's
05:09
why we all got to come together two ears
05:12
and one heart that's what saved my life
05:14
and that's what all of us in this room
05:15
possess challenge yourself today and in
05:19
the future to look out for each other
05:21
the moment the moment people feel heard
05:24
they get healed the moment but they have
05:28
to be heard listening can saves people's
05:31
lives and we all can do it
05:33
[Music]
Getting help
If your life (or someone else’s life) is in immediate danger – call 111 or go to your nearest hospital emergency department.
If you are having thoughts of hurting yourself or suicide, get in touch with someone that can help, it could be a Medical officer, chaplain, psychologist, social worker or your GP. If you are feeling this way outside of working hours, you can call one of the numbers below;
- 0800 NZDF4U - Your NZDF support available 24/7.
- Lifeline NZ - 0800 543 354 or text 'Help' to 4357.
- Text 1737 - When someone texts or calls 1737 a trained counsellor will work with the person to develop a care plan. This takes on average between 10 - 20 minutes and could include referral to another service, additional counselling or providing information and support.
- Youthline - Call 0800 376 633 or text 234, webchat also available.
Additional Resources
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Helping a friend
Watch this ted talk on Recovery by Bianca Mikahn:
From Scars to Strength:The Poetry of Recovery
Read this article on how one person can make a difference:
Suicide Prevention Month: How one person can make a difference
Use the link below to see a poster on how to recognise warning signs and risk factors in soldiers:
Warning Signs and Risk Factor Poster
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Kids
For access to a teen worry and sadness program:
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Effects on family
Watch this video on suicide prevention:
Get help and information from the Department of the Air Force Resilience:
Further information and guidence from the Air Force Suicide Prevention Program:
Suicide Prevention Program- Department of the Air Force Resilience
Access these open discussion forum for parents, family and friends:
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Suicide forum
For access to an online suicidal thoughts and self harm forum:
For some further information of self harm, how to recognise it and actions on:
Reach Out Australia: Self Harm
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Self-help
Department if the Air Force resilience
Wingman Toolkit- Suicide prevention information and resources for Air Force reservists and their families
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What is it
- Why do we self harm (Video)
- Understanding Non-suicidal self-injury (video)
- "I'm Fine" Learning to live with depression (video)
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Apps
- Calm harm- help when fighting the urge to self harm
- The feel app- share your emotions with trusted friends and family