Youth suicide is frightening to talk about, which is one reason we need to talk about it carefully. Not loudly, not with easy answers, but in ways that make it more possible for young people to tell the truth when they are struggling.

One of the hardest things about adolescent distress is that it can sit alongside ordinary life. A young person may be talented, funny, doing well at school, loved by family, and still be in pain. Those things are not contradictions. They are part of what makes it so difficult for adults to know what is going on.

On The Nutters Club this week, Christchurch grandfather Jimmy Gifford spoke with Hamish and I about losing his grandson Justin to suicide, and about the conversation Justin had with him two years earlier. Justin had been bullied, was under pressure, and had been self-harming. He was 15 when he asked his grandfather to stop the car and told him he was struggling.

Youth suicide and the first conversation

When a young person discloses self-harm, suicidal thoughts, bullying or intense distress, adults can feel overwhelmed. Panic is understandable. So is the wish to minimise it, especially if what is being said is frightening.

But the first task is usually much simpler, and much harder: take it seriously.

That does not mean assuming the worst, or trying to solve everything in one conversation. It means slowing down enough to show that the young person has been heard. It means being direct and honest, rather than evasive. And it means not leaving the young person alone with the burden of what they have said.

In Justin’s case, Jimmy noticed something was not right before Justin spoke. When Justin did talk, Jimmy sought medical help and involved Justin’s mother, with Justin’s agreement. Those details matter. They show respect for Justin’s trust, while also recognising that adults have a responsibility to act when safety is at stake.

Trusted adults matter

Not every young person can talk to a parent first. That can be painful for parents to hear, but it is also true. Sometimes the safest first conversation is with a grandparent, aunt, uncle, teacher, coach, neighbour or family friend.

Rather than seeing that as a failure, we might see it as part of the wider web young people need around them. Adolescents often need more than one safe adult. They may need someone slightly outside the immediate pressure of home, someone who can listen without reacting too quickly.

Jimmy’s message was that young people who cannot speak to their parents should find another trusted adult. That is a useful and humane idea. It also asks something of adults: to be available enough, calm enough, and curious enough that a young person might risk telling us the truth.

Grief, action and meaning

There is no simple redemption in grief after suicide. Fundraising, advocacy and community work do not remove the loss. They do not answer all the questions, and they do not make tragedy acceptable.

But for some people, action becomes one way of living with grief. Jimmy has raised funds for the youth mental-health support I Am Hope and their “Gumboot Friday” initiative.  He has also used community events to encourage more open conversations about distress and suicide. That kind of work can hold two truths at once: that someone is gone, and that caring for others still matters.

Psychologically, this is not about “moving on”. A better phrase might be continuing a relationship with the person who has died, while also turning towards the living. Hope, in this sense, is not cheerfulness. It is the decision to keep making connection possible.

Small openings to talk

Adults often underestimate the value of ordinary attention. Asking a teenager about their day, pausing long enough for the real answer, noticing when behaviour changes, offering a greeting or a smile: none of these things is a magic protection.

But they can create openings. And openings matter.

The difficult balance is to neither interrogate nor ignore. Teenagers need privacy and autonomy. They also need adults who are willing to notice them. Sometimes the most useful question is not clever at all: “You don’t seem yourself. What’s going on?” Then we have to be prepared to listen.

Listen to the episode

Jimmy Gifford’s conversation on The Nutters Club is a moving account of grief, love and the need for honest talk about young people’s mental health. Listen to the full episode for the wider discussion about Justin’s life, Jimmy’s response, and his ongoing work to support others.

Listen to the full episode here.

Meaning and mental health are closely connected, although not always in ways that are easy to explain. When life is difficult, it is rarely enough to simply feel better. Most of us also need some sense that our lives matter, that we belong somewhere, and that there is a reason to keep going.

For some people, that sense of meaning is found in religious faith. For others it comes through being in nature, making music, helping someone else, family, friendship, work, or simply feeling part of the ordinary rhythms of life.  For rugby tragics like Hamish and myself, it can be found in supporting your team.

On The Nutters Club this week, Hamish Williams and I talked about faith, nature and community, and how experiences of something larger than ourselves can support mental health. The callers made it very clear that there is no single path to meaning.

Meaning and mental health: why “something bigger” helps

One of the traps of distress is that it can shrink our world. Depression, anxiety, grief and stress can all pull attention inward. We become preoccupied with our own thoughts, our own failings, our own fears, our own exhaustion.

That inward pull is understandable. It is also often painful.

Experiences of awe, connection or purpose can interrupt that pattern. Standing in a dramatic landscape, being absorbed in prayer, listening to music, fishing with a mate, or helping someone else can all shift the centre of gravity for a while. The self does not disappear, but it may loosen its grip.

Psychologically, that matters. We are not built to exist only inside our own heads. We need relationship, rhythm, belonging and purpose. Sometimes we need words. Sometimes we need silence. Sometimes we need to be side by side with another person doing something ordinary, where the conversation can arrive in its own time.

Faith, community and belonging

Faith communities can offer people structure, acceptance, friendship and hope. For some, walking into a church, mosque, temple or other spiritual community may be the first time in a long while that they feel welcomed rather than judged.

That should not be dismissed. Loneliness and shame are corrosive. A healthy community can be profoundly protective, especially when it offers practical care as well as belief.

But the word healthy matters. Religious and spiritual communities are human communities, and human communities can help or harm. Some people have been wounded by pressure, fear, exclusion or exploitation in the name of faith. Others have grown up with expectations that left them anxious and exhausted.

So the question is not simply whether religion is good or bad for mental health. That is too blunt. Better questions might be:

• Do I feel more connected, or more afraid?
• Is there room for doubt, difference and ordinary human struggle?
• Are vulnerable people treated with care, or used?
• Can I leave, disagree or set limits without being punished?

Trusting our instincts around any community is not cynicism. It is a form of self-respect.

Nature, ritual and ordinary forms of hope

One caller described fishing as his “little religion”. That phrase has stayed with me. Not because fishing needs to become a spiritual practice for everyone, but because it captures something important.

He was describing fresh air, movement, focus, friendship and time away from work pressure. He was also describing a setting where two men could talk without having to sit face to face and call it a serious conversation. That can be especially important in New Zealand, where many of us still struggle to speak directly about pain.

Nature often helps because it does not demand a performance. The sea, bush, mountains and sky do not require us to explain ourselves. They can place our worries in a wider frame, not by making them trivial, but by reminding us that we are part of something living and ongoing.

Of course, nature is not a replacement for treatment when someone is seriously unwell. Nor is faith, music, family or exercise. But these things can be part of the web that holds a person. Mental health is rarely supported by one thing alone.

Listen to the episode

If this topic resonates, the full Nutters Club discussion is worth hearing. It includes callers speaking about faith, fishing, blindness, recovery, family, music, laughter and the outdoors as different ways people find comfort and purpose.

There may not be one correct answer to where meaning comes from. But it is worth asking what helps us feel less alone, more connected, and more able to keep making something of the life we have.

Listen to the full episode here.

A social media ban for under-16s has an obvious political appeal. It sounds clear, tough, and protective. It also risks being a simple solution to a complex problem, which is precisely why Parliament should be very careful.

New Zealand is now facing the prospect of a bill that would ban young people under 16 from social media. National will not pass it without Labour’s support.

Labour should choose not to give it.

The under-16 social media ban sounds simple

None of this is to pretend that social media is harmless. Any parent, teacher, clinician, or teenager could tell you that online life can intensify bullying, social comparison, cause sleep disruption, create sexual pressure, expose peolpe to self-harm content, and exacerbate loneliness, and anxiety.

That is the appeal of a ban. Out of fear and a desire to protect we can draw a line at 16, tell platforms to keep children out, and claim to have acted.

But online relating can also provide friendship, humour, identity, creativity, support, and community, especially for young people who feel isolated in the offline world.

The research reflects this complexity. A range of studies have repeatedly pointed to a more complicated picture than the popular debate allows. Some young people are harmed by aspects of online life. Some appear largely unaffected. Some may even benefit, depending on what they are using, why they are using it, and what else is happening in their lives.

Some studies do find associations between heavy or problematic use and poorer wellbeing. Others point out that the effects are often small, and vary between individuals.  Effects are difficult to separate from existing distress, family stress, bullying, poverty, sleep, gendered pressures, and wider social conditions.

This complexity should be no surprise because adolescent development does not work in clean legislative lines. Nor does mental health. Social media can intensify anxiety, and social issues.  It can also be where young people maintain friendships, find information, explore identity, and seek support they may not have elsewhere.

These things can be true at the same time.  The technology matters, but it rarely creates the whole problem. It merely changes the setting in which ordinary human longings, conflicts and vulnerabilities play out.

That does not mean we do nothing. It means we should resist pretending that a blunt age ban is the same as a mental health strategy.

Why a social media ban is politically tempting

Politicians love policies that create the feeling of action. Parents are understandably frightened. Schools are exhausted. Mental health services are stretched. Young people are distressed, and adults are looking for somewhere to put the anxiety.

It’s also an election year.

Social media companies make an easy villain, and frankly, a deserving one. Their business models are not designed around the emotional development of children. They are designed around attention, data, advertising, and growth. Regulation is absolutely needed.

But banning teenagers from platforms is a different proposition from regulating the companies that profit from them. One places responsibility on children and families to comply with a prohibition that will be difficult to enforce. The other asks powerful corporations to make their products less harmful.

When we reach for a neat answer, we can also miss the wider system that created the problem in the first place: under-resourced schools, threadbare mental health services, poverty, family stress, bullying, reduced community connections and less safe accessible public spaces for young people.

What young people may hear

There is also a psychological question here. What do young people hear when adults say, in effect, that their online world is so dangerous they must be removed from it?

Some may feel protected. Many others may feel misunderstood, punished, or driven further underground. For many adolescents, social media is not separate from “real life”. It is where friendships are maintained, identities are tried on, jokes are shared, conflicts escalate, and belonging is negotiated. That may or may not make it healthy. It does make it socially real.

A ban may also be least effective for those most at risk. Young people in distress are often highly motivated to find connection, distraction, secrecy, or relief. If a platform is banned, they may move elsewhere, to less visible and less moderated spaces. That possibility should give lawmakers pause.

This is not an argument for leaving children alone with Silicon Valley. Quite the opposite. It is an argument for taking the problem seriously enough not to turn it into a slogan.

What would a serious response look like?

A more serious response would start with platform accountability: privacy protections, limits on addictive design, stronger moderation of harmful content, transparent algorithms, and real consequences for companies that fail to protect children.

It would also mean properly funding school counselling, youth mental health services, family support, digital literacy, and research that asks which young people are harmed, in what ways, and under what conditions. It would include parents and schools, but not dump the whole problem on them.

Labour should not help pass a bill because it sounds protective. It should ask whether it is likely to protect. Young people deserve policy that is curious, evidence-informed and honest about complexity.

A ban may very well be popular. That does not make it good mental health policy.

By the time a young person is deeply caught up in drugs, offending, or exclusion from school, the story has usually been unfolding for years. The signs may have been there early: disconnection, anger, shame, poverty, family stress, or the simple absence of someone steady enough to keep showing up.

That does not mean the path is fixed. Nor does it mean we can explain offending or addiction with one neat cause. People make choices, and those choices have consequences. But choices are also shaped by pain, opportunity, belonging, and what a young person comes to believe is possible for them.

On The Nutters Club this week, Joel Nicholson and Richard Heke spoke about moving from prison to prevention through Reconex NZ, the charitable trust they have set up in Tokoroa to support young people who may not fit easily in traditional education settings. Their work is informed by hard experience: addiction, offending, prison, and the long process of changing direction.

Prison to prevention starts before the crisis

One of the most useful ideas in their story is “pre-habilitation”. It’s a word they coined, and a great concept. Rather than waiting until someone has spent years in the justice system, it asks what support might help before patterns become entrenched.

In mental health, we often see this same problem. Help arrives once things are already severe. A young person has been suspended, arrested, using substances for years, or has burnt through most of the adults who once tried to help. By then, support is still possible, but trust is harder to build and the losses are greater.

Prevention is not about pretending risk is simple. It is about noticing the environments and behaviours that make harm more likely, and building relationships strong enough to offer another option.

Why lived experience can reach young people

Peer support is not magic. Having lived through something does not automatically make someone able to help others. Training, boundaries, accountability and good supervision matter.

But lived experience can do something valuable. It can lower shame. It can make it easier for a young person to believe, “This person gets it.” For young people who have felt judged, written off, or talked at by adults, that can be the beginning of a different kind of conversation.

I have written previously about resilience as something that can be developed, rather than a trait some people simply have or do not have. In practice, resilience often grows through relationships: someone notices, someone listens, someone holds a boundary without giving up.

Belonging, anger, trust and identity

The topics Reconex NZ teaches are telling: goal-setting, cultural identity, empowerment, anger management, rebuilding trust, and recognising high-risk situations. These are not just “life skills” in the narrow sense. They are about helping a young person develop a more coherent sense of who they are and where they might belong.

Anger, for example, is often treated as the problem. Sometimes it is dangerous and needs firm limits. But anger can also be a signal: of humiliation, fear, grief, or feeling powerless. If we only punish the behaviour without understanding what drives it, we may miss the chance to help a young person find safer ways to respond.

Trust is similar. Adults often expect young people to trust them quickly. But for someone who has experienced rejection, abandonment or instability, mistrust may be protective. Rebuilding trust takes time, consistency, and a willingness to keep doing what you said you would do.

This is why relationships matter so much. As I’ve explored before in relation to attachment and resilience, our capacity to cope is deeply shaped by whether we have had reliable people around us. That does not remove personal responsibility. It gives us a clearer picture of what real change often requires.

Listen to the episode

Joel Nicholson and Richard Heke’s conversation is worth hearing in full. It is not a simple redemption story, and it is not a policy paper. It is a discussion about addiction, prison, family, responsibility, and what can happen when people who know the road try to meet young people earlier on it.

Listen to the full episode here.

For a limited time, if you buy a signed copy of my book, Sh*t Happens: Lessons for Dealing with Life’s Ups & Downs, directly from me, I’ll include a free copy of Mike King’s The Nutters Club.  Click here to order your copy.

You can also request a personalised message if you’re buying Sh*t Happens as a gift — just let me know what you’d like written inside.

Buy Sh*t Happens direct

You can now order Sh*t Happens directly through psychotherapy.nz. Copies are $39.95, signed by me, with the option of adding a short personalised message.

I wrote the book because there is no shortage of advice about how we should be happier, calmer, more resilient or better at managing our lives. Some of that advice is useful. Some of it can make things worse by suggesting that if we’re struggling, we must be doing something wrong.

The title is deliberately blunt because, well, it’s true. Sh*t happens.

Difficult things don’t happen because we have failed to think positively enough, haven’t found the right technique, or aren’t sufficiently resilient. Life is unpredictable, relationships are complicated, and much of what affects us is beyond our control.

A book about life’s ups and downs

One of the traps in conversations about mental health is the idea that distress is always a problem to be fixed as quickly as possible.

Sometimes people absolutely do need treatment, therapy, medication, practical support or urgent help. But distress can also tell us something important about what is happening in our lives — loss, pressure, loneliness, grief, fear, shame, exhaustion, or the gap between how we are living and what we need.

A book isn’t therapy and it can’t solve those things. But a good one can give us some language for what we’re experiencing, offer another way of thinking about it, and sometimes help us feel a little less alone in it.

That was what I wanted Sh*t Happens to do.

Free copy of The Nutters Club

While stocks last, every copy of Sh*t Happens bought directly from me will also come with a free copy of Mike King’s book, The Nutters Club.

Mike has played an important part in changing the way we talk about mental health in New Zealand, particularly around depression, suicide, addiction and the shame that can prevent people from asking for help.

The Nutters Club approaches those subjects through people’s stories. That makes it a good companion to Sh*t Happens: two quite different books, but both interested in talking plainly about the difficult parts of being human.

Signed and personalised

Buying directly also means I can sign your copy and, if you’d like, personalise it for you or for someone you’re giving it to.

So, for a limited time:

Signed copy of Sh*t Happens — $39.95
+ FREE copy of Mike King’s The Nutters Club
+ optional personalised inscription

You can order directly through psychotherapy.nz while the offer lasts.

The Government’s new mental health strategy was announced last week and if you missed it click here for a link to the full document.

In many respects, it is saying the right things. There is no question that a system that relies less on crisis, less on coercion, and ultimately eliminates seclusion is something we should all want.

But it is hard to greet yet another mental health strategy with uncomplicated optimism. Not because the goals are wrong. Quite the opposite. The problem is that these goals arrive in a system already stretched past what is reasonable, with too little money, too few staff, and too many people waiting too long for help.

A mental health strategy is not care

Strategies matter. They can set direction, create accountability, and remind large systems what they are meant to be for. But a strategy is not a therapy session, a hospital bed, a community support worker, a crisis team, or a safe place for someone to be when they are terrified, suicidal, psychotic, withdrawing, overwhelmed, or alone.

That distinction matters because mental health policy in New Zealand has too often been very good at producing aspiration, and much less good at producing access. We have become used to worthy language about wellbeing, early intervention, lived experience, integration, prevention and recovery. None of these words are wrong. In fact, they are often exactly right.

Yet if the person who needs help cannot get an appointment, or the family trying to keep someone safe is told there is no service available unless things get worse, the language starts to feel hollow.

Eliminating seclusion is the right goal

The commitment to eliminate seclusion is important. Seclusion is not a neutral clinical tool. It can be frightening, humiliating and traumatic, particularly for people who have already experienced violence, neglect, racism, institutional harm or loss of control over their own lives.

At the same time, simply declaring an end to seclusion does not make the conditions that lead to it disappear. Seclusion often happens at the sharpest edge of an under-resourced system: acute distress, fear, staff trying to manage risk, too few options, too much pressure, and not enough time or support to do the careful relational work that prevents escalation.

To be clear, this is not an argument for keeping seclusion. It is an argument for being honest about what it takes to stop using it. Services need enough trained staff, decent environments, strong clinical leadership, community alternatives, culturally safe care, and the time to build trust with people who may have every reason not to trust the system.

If those things are not funded and staffed, the risk is that coercion changes shape rather than disappears.

Trying to do too much with too little

One of the difficulties with broad mental health strategies is that they can become a container for almost every hope we have for society. Better prevention. Better addiction treatment. Better crisis care. Better workforce planning. Better support for children and young people. Better support for Māori, Pacific peoples, rural communities, rainbow communities, older people, families and whānau.

Again, none of these priorities are wrong. The problem is that when everything is a priority, the hardest choices can be avoided. And when those choices are avoided, frontline services are left to absorb the contradiction.

Clinicians and support workers are then asked to provide more responsive, more humane, more culturally appropriate and more accessible care while also carrying impossible caseloads, covering vacancies, managing risk, and coping with the moral distress of knowing what people need but being unable to provide it.

I have written before about the way institutions can fail without needing to imagine bad intent from every person inside them. The issue is often the culture and incentives of the system itself, something I explored in this earlier piece on institutional denial. Mental health services are full of people doing their best. That does not make the system adequate.

Good policy needs enough people to carry it

Workforce is not a side issue. It is the service. Without psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, nurses, peer workers, addiction practitioners, social workers, cultural workers, support workers and community organisations, a strategy remains a document.

And workforce cannot be conjured quickly. People need to be trained, supervised, retained and paid properly. Services need to be workplaces people can survive in, not just places sustained by goodwill and exhaustion.

So yes, we need a national mental health strategy. We need the ambition to end seclusion. We need a system that is more humane, more accessible and less dependent on crisis. But we also need the honesty to say that ambition without investment is not reform. It is another way of asking already stretched people to make the impossible look manageable.

That is why my response is not cynicism, exactly. It is concern, and disappointment. The direction may be right. But for the people waiting, the families frightened, and the workers exhausted, the question is not whether the strategy says the right things. It is whether anyone will give the system what it needs to actually do them.

Money is never just money. It is food, rent, power, transport, children, safety, independence, status, and sometimes the difference between coping and not coping.

So when people talk about money and mental health, it is worth being careful. If someone genuinely cannot afford essentials, the problem is not that they need a better attitude. Rising costs, debt, job loss and insecure work create real pressure. That pressure has real psychological effects.

On a recent episode of The Nutters Club, the discussion turned to the way financial stress can narrow our thinking, increase shame, and make it harder to ask for help. That is a very familiar pattern. When money becomes frightening, our mind often moves into immediate survival: what has to be paid today, what can be delayed, what can be avoided, and what might make the feeling go away for a while.

Money and mental health are tied to meaning

The amount of money we have matters. But the meaning money has for us also matters.

For some people, money means security. For others it means success, freedom, being a good parent, being respectable, or not having to depend on anyone. Sometimes it becomes a way of soothing stress, buying connection, or avoiding difficult feelings.

These meanings do not come from nowhere. We often inherit them. The way our families talked about money, fought about it, hid it, spent it, saved it, or feared it can stay with us for a long time.

That does not mean our money habits are fixed. But it does mean that telling ourselves to “just be sensible” may not be enough. If a purchase briefly softens loneliness, shame or fear, then the behaviour has an emotional logic, even if it causes more trouble later.

When stress pushes us into survival mode

Financial hardship can push people into what is often called survival mode. This is not a diagnosis. It is a useful way of describing what happens when stress becomes immediate and relentless.

In survival mode, attention narrows. The future becomes harder to think about. Planning can feel impossible, not because someone is lazy or irresponsible, but because their mind is busy dealing with threat.

That is also why shame is so corrosive. Shame says, “This is my fault. I should be able to sort this out alone.” But isolation usually makes financial stress heavier, not lighter.

Some signs that money stress is becoming emotionally loaded include:

• avoiding opening bills, bank apps or messages
• spending impulsively to feel better, then feeling worse afterwards
• feeling unable to talk honestly with family or friends about money
• linking financial difficulty with being a failure
• feeling panicky, trapped or unable to think beyond the next payment

Planning is not the same as pretending

Having a plan helps when there is enough room to make one. It does not magically solve poverty, unemployment, debt, or the cost of living. We should not confuse planning with blaming people for circumstances they did not create.

But where there is some capacity to make choices, a plan can reduce the number of decisions that have to be made emotionally. Automatically paying essential bills when money comes in, getting help with budgeting, or talking through decisions before making them can all create a bit more space.

One of the most useful ideas from the episode was the need to “utilise another mind”. That might be a trusted friend, a family member, a financial mentor, a counsellor, a GP, or Citizens Advice Bureau. The point is not that someone else takes over. It is that another person can help us think when stress has made thinking harder.

Some useful questions are simple, but not always easy:

• What did I learn about money growing up?
• What feeling am I trying to manage when I spend?
• What am I most ashamed of saying out loud?
• Who could sit with me while I take the next practical step?

Listen to the episode

The full Nutters Club episode explores money worries, shame, hardship, compulsive spending, budgeting support and the value of asking for help. If money has become a source of stress or isolation, it is well worth listening to the whole discussion.

Listen to the full episode here.