To truly reduce suicide rates in Aotearoa, we need to think beyond rehashed policies and one-size-fits-all prevention tactics, writes counsellor Anna Sophia.
This post contains discussion of suicide: please take care. For a list of resources that can help if you or someone you know is feeling suicidal, see below.
When someone close to you dies by suicide, the space-time continuum cracks open. One moment, you’re living your ordinary life; the next, you’ve been sucked into a vortex.
You replay the graphic details of their death over and over. You tell yourself that if you cycle through it one more time you might discover a glitch in the chaotic world system that could bring them back.
Soon enough the painful reality sinks in. They made a choice and they are not returning. In Aotearoa, a dark cloud descends and takes away more people each year than car accidents.
Psychiatrist and author Kay Redfield Jamison, in Night Falls Fast (1999), describes suicidal despair as a complete loss of hope accompanied by overwhelming psychological pain. People in this state believe that nothing will ever improve. They feel trapped, alone and unable to see any other options.
The aftermath of losing someone by suicide is fraught with flashbacks and self-questioning. It blows apart the layered veneers of your life. While you do eventually rebuild, one fragile piece at a time, you always carry with you two unanswerable questions:
1) Why did they do it?
2) Was there anything I could have done to stop it?
Over the course of my six decades of life, I have experienced more than my share of this aftermath personally and professionally.
In 1990, when my father was 56 years old, he killed himself. It was a cold, wet night in early June. He didn’t leave a note, just a couple of TAB tickets with “good tickets” scrawled on the back. (Yes we checked them. They were not winners.)
My father was a heavy drinker and a gambling man, a New Zealand Navy veteran who had joined up as a teenager just in time for dispatch to the Korean War. When he wasn’t drinking, even on blue sky days he lay morosely on the couch in a darkened room, chain smoking Pall Mall filters and not speaking. Thirty-five years ago, men like my father did not talk about their feelings, let alone seek counselling. In many parts of Aotearoa, not much has changed.
When I was nine years old we lived in Te Awamutu and I attended the Catholic school there. (The Finn brothers did too but they are older than me.) That year two of my class mates lost their fathers to suicide.
In the 1990s a university friend died in a mental health ward shortly after her baby was born. Later that decade my former university lecturer, a person of immense talent took her own life, and two years ago my long-time friend Paula died in a suspected suicide.
As a counsellor, I have listened to many stories from people who have lost loved ones to suicide and from others who had either attempted to take their own life or seriously considered it.
Last week, the latest suicide prevention action plan was published. It looks similar to its predecessors with a few extra embellishments.
My father loved horse racing so I’ll use his language: it’s a rank outsider, the odds of winning are slim to none, and I’m not betting my money on it.
In 2008, MP Jim Anderton, whose daughter died by suicide, said: “We are already fortunate in New Zealand to have people with a range of expertise who are committed to suicide prevention. And we have a variety of initiatives happening right now and contributing to suicide prevention across the country.”
Seventeen years later nothing has changed and suicide remains one of our most complex health and social issues.
Suicide is an emotive subject and it remains difficult to have open and transparent conversations about it. Media restrictions, a historical residue of whakama and sheer discomfort means bereaved people are often met with silence. I think the silence is the inability of many people to hold the horror and complexity of this kind of death. Alongside shock, grief and overwhelming sadness, there can also be anger and sometimes feelings of relief.
In the year ended June 30, 2024, just over 600 people died by suicide. If each had 50 people in their circle – whānau, friends, colleagues, classmates – then 30,000 people this year are carrying that loss and asking the same questions I did.
Why did they do it?
Was there anything I could have done to stop it?
If we want to reduce suicide rates in Aotearoa, we need to think beyond rehashed policies that paper over the cracks in our socioeconomic system. Community initiatives often flicker into life then burn out due to underfunding or exhaustion. In the 2000s, Rick Stevenson biked around the country as a part of his organisation Project Hope, launched after his son Mike’s suicide. He wanted mental health education to be mandatory in all secondary schools.
I knew Mike. When I dropped out of high school and worked as a cook in a weed-spraying gang, Mike was part of the crew. He and I stayed up late drinking and dreaming up future selves. He was contemplative and intelligent, and his death cut short a future filled with possibilities.
If I gathered everyone I know who has died by suicide into a room, the only thing they’d have in common would be their self-inflicted death. One-size-fits-all prevention tactics won’t work. A deeper, more nuanced approach is required.
Late last year I wrote about the community counselling centre in Marton, in the Southern Rangitīkei district where I work as a manager and counsellor. Oranga Tamariki, with which we had previously enjoyed a long relationship, responded to a mandate from government to cut its spending, and our funding – along with that of similar organisations – was slashed.
While the Counselling Centre is unlikely to be on the receiving end of funding from the new suicide prevention initiatives, there is no doubt that in our corner of rural Aotearoa we are stopping people taking their own lives.
We’ve been keeping accurate statistics for 26 years. Most of our clients are depressed. Over 50% are referred from local GP clinics and often the referral notes will say, “Has suicidal thoughts but no plan to action.” We have on hand evaluations stating the counselling they received made a difference to their lives.
Although our organisation is small, it reflects the broader population of Aotearoa. Similar community-based initiatives exist across the country, doing critical preventative work in the mental health realm.
After my article was published, local National MP Suze Redmayne visited the centre. We drank coffee and talked and she appeared impressed by our service. She said she would chat with mental health minister Matt Doocey and maybe organise for him to visit us.
To date, I haven’t heard from either of them. Repeated emails to Oranga Tamariki asking them to restore our funding have also gone unanswered. Our service is still running thanks to philanthropic community support but we have had to reduce our availability from five days a week to four.
The Auditor General’s report released last month sharply criticised Oranga Tamariki’s cuts, noting poor documentation, late decisions and inadequate understanding of the impact of the cuts on children and whanau. How can we have faith in a government that on one hand takes away proven preventative mental healthcare funding and on the other claims it can reduce something as complex as suicide rates?
While I strongly back therapeutic support, especially free counselling, I also take a broader sociological view of improving overall mental health and wellbeing. Suicide prevention isn’t just a matter of services or slogans. It demands that we reckon with how we live – as individuals and as a society.
John Weaver’s Sorrows of a Century: Interpreting Suicide in New Zealand (2014) is a powerful exploration of 12,000 coroners’ reports from 1900–2000. He concludes that suicide must be understood within wider social forces: economic insecurity, war, illness, trauma. He advocates for “deep prevention”: long-term investment in meaningful employment, cradle-to-grave healthcare, and far-reaching education. He describes these ideas as “utopian” but necessary, and emphasises extensive social action to improve lives before they slump into despair about the future.
Since the book’s publication, new stressors have emerged: a devastating pandemic, runaway technology, climate crises, and the psychological burden of constant global violence. In Aotearoa, the cost of living has risen dramatically. The cost of renting even substandard accommodation is taking a huge portion of household income. Every day I walk past long lines of hungry people queueing for food at a local food rescue.
The government’s suicide prevention plan also doesn’t reflect on deeper holistic considerations – like our relationship to Papatūānuku.
Contemporary capitalist society has severed us from the whenua and desensitised us from knowing the deeper parts of ourselves which then impacts our relationships with each other. Many people I meet – not just clients – struggle to name what they are truly feeling or to even locate that feeling within their own body.
Capitalism demands our compliance and silence.
Even our bereavement policy – three days’ leave – suggests a culture that minimises death and grief. How can you return to your workplace bereaved by any death, and especially suicide, after just three days?
To work with solutions for just an individual is pointless, and no plan, however well-meaning, will reduce suicide numbers if we are blind to the stresses of the socioeconomic and ecological environments where despair festers. As sociologist Alison Pugh writes, “we are living through a crisis not just of loneliness but of human invisibility”.
I haven’t lost hope. Not because of any single plan, but because of the people I meet each day doing their best to heal and create fulfilling lives for themselves and their whanau.
This is where suicide prevention truly lives – not in glossy plans, policies and shallow governmental rhetoric, but in community, care and the slow, quiet work of rebuilding what we’ve lost.
If you or someone you know is in need of support, get in touch:
TAUTOKO Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865
1737 – Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor
Lifeline – 0800 543 354 – Free text 4357 (HELP)
Samaritans – 0800 726 666
Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234 or email [email protected] or online chat. Open 24/7.
