Connection, community and flourishing in a gay man's world

By Ivan Yeo, Mental Health Promoter, Mental Health Foundation
 

Connecting with others is one of the five ways to wellbeing, and when done right, it’s guaranteed to help you flourish.
 

As a gay man living in New Zealand in 2011, you might think that making connections with other gay men is easy.  It’s no longer illegal to be gay, couples can enter into civil unions, and there are human rights laws which protect against discrimination.

 

None of this changes the fact that as a gay man, you are born into a heterosexual world.  You discover who you are in stages, and much of this discovery can be negatives rather than positives – how you don’t feel like you fit in, how you don’t feel you can relate to the male/female images around you.

 

Your feelings and identity are your own, and to not see those reflected around you can make you feel invisible, ashamed and isolated.

 

Coming to New Zealand from Malaysia, where you can be put in jail for up to 20 years for being gay, was a whole new world for me. Having the support of people who know about the coming out process can be extremely helpful to those who are finding their own identity and sharing it with the world.

Lucky to connect in the rainbow community

 

When I first stepped into the rainbow community, I was lucky to connect with some friends who guided me through the process of coming out to my parents and accepting my own sexual orientation. The importance of this guidance and support is immeasurable. They provided me with so much wisdom, and a shoulder to cry on when everything seemed to be too much.

 

Sometimes all you need is some reassurance, especially when you’re still finding your own feet.  It wasn’t easy at first, but nowadays I am very comfortable about my sexual orientation, and realised through meeting other gay men, and gay couples, that it was possible for me to live a happy, open life with a man I loved.

 

These men were like mentors to me, and not everyone is lucky enough to have them.

 

Up until 1985, it was illegal to be gay in New Zealand as well.  Many of the gay men I have met lived through that time, and I wondered what it was that helped them stay connected with each other and flourish with the constant threat of discrimination, harassment or imprisonment.

 

In late 2010, I attended OUTLine’s Rainbow Conference and throughout the three day conference, one of the ideas that was discussed, and of particular interest to me, was mentorship.

 

While I was there, I met Ian MacEwan, who first came out in the 1970s.  Now executive director of of DAPAANZ (Drugs and Alcohol Practitioners’ Association of Aotearoa), Ian gave me an insight into what it was like in those pre-law reform days.

 

Ian says that social circles flourished among gay men and helped to forge connections.  These provided men with a ready-made family for socialising and socialisation, in times when they may have been rejected by families of their own.

These groups were based around a variety of sectors including university, parliamentary service, politics, drag and liberal trades like social work, nursing, and medicine.

Theatre group brings solace

 

Ian’s solace was in a theatre group. Each Friday night, the group would meet at the Lounge Bar of the Royal Oak and on Sundays at Bruce Tidswell's in Mt Victoria for lunch. Consisting of up to 20 people at any one time, the group ranged in age from 16 to 66, encompassed all classes and was predominantly Maori and Pakeha.

 

Ian explained that the older you were, the more mana you held within the group and the older members were expected to look after the younger, newer ones. They taught them, comforted them, reconciled them to the unfaithfulness of lovers, protected them from the law, themselves and each other.

 

It was a family, mostly functional, occasionally not, hugely hilarious, amazingly protective and genuinely supportive.  Like any family, there could be jealousy, competition, and conflict, but the family remained united.  In a way it had to be this way – as homosexuality was still illegal, where else did you have to go?

 

The meaning of mentoring

 

Ian and I spoke at length about the meaning and purpose of mentoring and the role it plays in the formation of positive relationships and building resilience.

 

Forty years have now passed since Ian first came out and he feels that the mentoring he experienced is now a thing of the past because most new connections are made via the internet and are focussed on the individual and not on building and being part of a community.

 

What is/was community?  A loyal group of men that met regularly, loved and lost, supported each other, and taught its apprentices how to respect, how to behave, how to love and be loved.

 

For many people, especially young people, having a role model who they can look up to and learn from is an essential part of creating a flourishing life. It is through these types of meaningful and purposeful relationships that positive emotions are cultivated.

 

While laws may have changed and society’s acceptance become greater, gay men are still at high risk of suicide and mental illness.  Meaningful connections build resilience against these.  How can we help recreate and reinforce that sense of family and community?

Why do I garden? Let me count the reasons...

By Steve Carter, Mental Health Promoter, Mental Health Foundation

We love gardening at the Mental Health Foundation. Even those without green thumbs can comprehend the value in a hands-on connection with our own little piece of nature.  

Last year we sold Go Potty seedlings as a fundraiser and we also supported the TV show Get Growing with NZ Gardener.  We support community gardening, gardens in schools, vege growing and all the associated spin-offs including farmers’ markets and food barter systems. Gardening is fun, healthy and, let’s face it, pretty zeitgeisty in these transition times. 

Why? 

Well, I’ll tell you what it means for me and I’ll use the Five Ways to Wellbeing framework (more info here) to describe it. 

Let me put my cards on the table (or onto the garden furniture):  I love my garden.  In fact, outside of music, gardening is possibly the single thing I would rather be doing above all else. I work on organic and no-dig principles, so it’s barely an effort, it costs very little and the returns are many-fold.   

Stuff just grows. Abundantly.  Indeed, you might say my garden is flourishing. 

So, five ways to a flourishing garden? 

CONNECT

It might be true that I spend a lot of my time alone in my own garden, but gardening implies community. Exchanges of ideas and advice, working bees, harvest parties and other nature-cycle celebrations – I might have only two green thumbs myself, but I am surrounded by a community of people who love to get their hands dirty and reap the rewards of a relationship with nature, with themselves and, most importantly, with others.   

All this before you even think to venture out to the local community garden, or the farmers’ market, or the edible gardening group (yes, we have such a thing in Brighton).  

Guerrilla gardeners, urban foragers – there’s a whole network out there if you choose to connect to it.  And, hey, gardeners here in Otautahi have even been ‘Greening the Rubble’, bringing colour and life to otherwise crumbling earthquake-stricken gaps in the community. 

KEEP LEARNING

Refining your skills as a gardener is a constant and ongoing process.  New techniques, new ideas, different perspectives all contribute to better and better seasons. For example, have you ever wondered why you seem to spend so much time weeding?  It’s almost as if the weeds want to be there, again and again drawing you into a battle for supremacy.   

But grab a book on organic gardening and you might find that they offer more benefit than harm. Taproots draw nutrients from deep within the ground, so leave the dock; nettles make a fine tonic used as tea and contain more iron than spinach; chickweed is one of the best compost activators your garden will grow for you.   

There are so many things to learn, it’s a lifetime’s journey.  What is mulch and how should I use it?  How do I make compost? Could I maximise my water usage from house to garden or even from the sky?  How can I give nature a helping hand? 

BE ACTIVE

Now this one is something of a no-brainer, even for a lazy, no-dig gardener like me.  Sure, I don’t spend heaps of time breaking my back breaking ground any more – and to a lot of people that’s the essence of gardening: mammoth, boring effort and drudgery. It needn’t be.  

But I’m always moving stuff around. I can walk miles just ambling around my garden (see TAKE NOTICE below), shifting mulch and compost, building raised beds, erecting a new chicken run.  And, rather than hosepipe fresh Canterbury artesian water on the garden, I have a complex rainwater collection system, an outside bath and a watering can and buckets. Lord knows how far I walk and how much weight the train of buckets and watering cans add up to, but I can tell you an hour watering the garden is as good a workout as you can get. Not to mention heading to the beach to collect driftwood and seaweed to bolster the resources of my patch. 

It’s an active, outdoor lifestyle with a healthy eating payoff at the end of it.  The bath under the stars is a pretty cool wind-down too. 

GIVE

Like I say, stuff just grows in my garden. Right now, lemons are literally throwing themselves off the tree faster than I can make marmalade, cordial or preserve them in salt and spices. Last year I had so much parsley I thought I might suffocate under the onslaught, and this year the patch has doubled in size.  My broccolini and spinach have become triffid-like to the point where I get tired of eating them. But “waste not, want not” right? 

The answer? Give it away.  Who doesn’t love free, fresh, organic veges and fruit? 

Not just that. I now save seeds from my best crops and they are yours if you want them. You want some advice on how to plan for a thriving garden?  I’m happy to give you as many tips as you need. It feels so good to share. 

TAKE NOTICE

It has been pointed out to me that I can spend hours in my garden doing nothing, but in truth I’m rarely doing nothing. What I enjoy most is a very conscious presence in the natural environment I have helped to flourish around me.   

I am fascinated by the life teeming just beneath the surface of my soil. I love to watch the bees buzzing around my flowers, doing their pollinating work for me. Is that a new patch of silverbeet that has established itself in a hitherto bare patch of ground? Is that little family of coriander emerging from the ground once more, ready to burst into tasty life? Is it time to feed my berries and fruit trees so that the tiny buds can explode into flower for a new season’s yield?   

The birds are singing, winter is cycling into spring and what seemed lifeless and still is flushing into the hope of life and colour. Nature is a dynamic, endless process of change and it is a wonderful thing to engage fully with a very mindful appreciation of its diversity and energy. 

So, that’s why I garden. What other activity can you think of that offers such an array of benefits to mind, body and spirit? You get to work at it, develop new skills and refine the ones you have. You get to share it with others and build a community of like-minded people around you. You even get to appreciate the days when the rain comes. And best of all, you will relish all the many returns for your (not very hard) labours. 

You don’t have to hug any trees or talk to the flowers (but you can if you want to).  

Be good to your garden and it will be good to you.  

Mental Health on a Plate

Back in May we were awarded a RETHiNK Grant from Like Minds, Like Mine and Mind and Body Consultants for our What’s On Your Plate project. It’s now August and we have been running around Auckland city for the past two months, asking community members far and wide, “What’s on your plate?”

The final responses are flying in from all quarters. So far all we have told anyone is that the responses will be worked into an installation, which may involve the use of plates and other items of Kiwiana.

The final artwork will be driven by what we get after all the responses are collected.

Why this question?
It is all in honour of our latest ‘respond-response’ community arts project RETHiNK: What’s On Your Plate, which aims to reduce mental ‘illness’ related stigma and discrimination in Auckland. 

We sought responses to the question in any format, so long as they were hand-scribed. We did this because we liked the added textures of different papers and the uniqueness of the individual’s handwriting style. Reponses could be words or images, a list, a paragraph, a poem, a sentence or anything the mind could imagine. The intention was to leave the mode of responding as wide open as possible, to allow for a greater variety of responses and more interesting material.

It is our hope participants will find a sense of achievement, belonging and confidence through the act of sharing. The sharing and reading of personal stories may also work to address some of the self-stigma that people experience when they are diagnosed or experiencing difficulties.

We are not often asked what is affecting our mental health and this project wants to counteract that and get people talking. When members of the public read the stories in the final exhibition, we hope they will develop more understanding for mental health difficulties and people who experience them. 

It’s a big thing to ask someone to trust you with their private thoughts, especially when you can’t tell them exactly how those thoughts will be presented to the public.

We are always so grateful to people for taking the time to reflect upon our question and provide us with raw content for our artworks. We try to let people know we always treat responses with integrity and respect, to help them feel safer about taking part. 
 

Auckland artists Colleen Altagracia and Carolyn Milbank, Guest Bloggers

Moving beyond Rambo and the Terminator - The way forward for men's wellbeing

When I was asked to attend the Men’s Wellbeing Symposium in Masterton last week, I agreed, but with some reservations as to what I was letting myself in for.

Controversy had preceded this symposium regarding its ‘men only’ status, but as the day proceeded it became evident this was a good decision by the organisers, and also essential if the symposium was to grapple with the question of men’s wellbeing. Women have been leading the way in this area for many years and now we men are trying to step up and catch up.

The symposium started off posing the question, “why are men over represented in poor mental health stats?” and we were challenged to go beyond the usual answers such as ‘men don’t ask for help’ or ‘men don’t talk about their feelings’ and to dig deeper, asking ourselves why?

Sydney-based keynote speaker Professor John MacDonald spoke about the work that’s been done in Australia on men’s health and the need to respond to men differently from women. For example, help lines where often the response to a caller is “How are you feeling?” simply doesn’t work, according to Professor MacDonald. He says that by changing one word in this opening sentence to “How are you doing?”, men stayed on the phone longer and were also more likely to call back.

The lack of male role models in the lives of young boys was also discussed in a session with Freerk Ykema from the Gadaku Institute in the Netherlands. Ykema says around the world, education, for example, had become female-dominated. Those who were male were often the principal or deputy principal and were seen as authoritarian figures, not mentors. With a significant number of young boys having no male presence in their home, male role models were often fictional characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo!

Freerk Ykema also talked about boys’ need for physical activity and how our education system of sitting behind desks is not conducive to a young boy’s learning. So the inevitable result is that the ‘disruptive’ boy who really just needs some physical activity is labelled the ‘problem’ child in class when the reality is, he’s not getting his basic learning needs met.

So, what was the outcome of all our male bonding?

Men need to redefine for themselves what they need to enhance their wellbeing, while services need to adapt and acknowledge the different male and female responses to the same issue or service. Men are not from Venus and women are not from Mars, we are all from Earth, but we do have innate differences and a ‘one glove fits all’ approach to both sexes does not work.

In New Zealand, we quite rightly prioritise our cultural response to Maori and Pacific peoples, especially as these groups feature disproportionately highly in negative socio-economic and health indicators. But we also need to start asking ourselves, in the health and education sectors in-particular, what are we doing to support men and young boys? This is not to ignore the needs of women and girls, but to acknowledge that these services have often developed to meet the needs of women, leaving men unable to identify or connect with them. What we need now is to incorporate both a female and a male response. When this happens, the question put by the symposium, “why are men over represented in poor mental health statistics?” may eventually become superfluous.

Rob Berg, Development Manager, Suicide Prevention Information New Zealand


Men’s Wellbeing Symposium programme

Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne’s opening speech at the Men’s Wellbeing Symposium.

Mensline suspension

As someone who often receives requests for help from men in distress who are seeking information on where to go for help and support, I was very disheartened to hear the recent announcement of the suspension of Lifeline's Mensline, a national service that has been there for men for over 15 years.

We know that men in trouble are vulnerable and not good at reaching out for help, and Mensline was one of the few services there specifically for them.
 
You can hear more on this subject from Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon programme with Kathryn Ryan who interviews world suicide prevention expert Annette Beautrais, and Mensline founder Warwick Pudney http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/20100304

In Australia this service is funded by Government but this is not the case in New Zealand, with Mensline being funded through charitable grants and public donations, and staffed by volunteer counsellors.

As Annette Beautrais says, there needs to be a commitment to on-going suicide prevention funding and the loss of this service is a set back to both the suicide prevention and mental health sectors.

I think it is essential that Mensline is restored and hope that Lifeline will be able to do so sooner rather than later.

Russell Tuffery, Information Officer, MHF Resource & Information Service