Mental Health Promotion and the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand: A personal view
By Marie Hull-Brown, Project Manager for Older People, Mental Health Foundation
Marie
has worked for the Mental Health Foundation for almost 20 years.
The Telethon of 1977 was my introduction to the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand (MHF), when my employers, Feltex, asked me to hand over a cheque at the Auckland television studios where this fundraising phenomenon was being enacted.
The passion and enthusiasm of the thousands who took part in that Telethon remained in my memory for the next ten years, though my understanding of the MHF's main objective - the promotion of the mental health and wellbeing of all New Zealanders - was very limited.
The First International Conference on Health Promotion in November 1986 and its culmination in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion made little impact on me and the majority of the New Zealand public. It was not until I joined the MHF staff in June 1988 that I began what has become a late life dedication to promoting mental health.
Working in the resource centre provided an opportunity to read publications and meet people who asked the questions, and sometimes gave the answers, that fuelled my interest in all those different parts of the jigsaw that is mental health promotion.
In the late 1980s through consultations with a wide range of organisations, the MHF set priorities for its work over the following 15 years.
The top ten priorities were:
- Community education regarding mental health matters
- Breaking down the stigma of mental illness
- Mental health of older people
- Maori and Pacific Islander (sic) mental health
- Encouragement/support of local mental health associations
- Mental health of those caring for dependent adults
- Health education in schools
- Positive coping skills project
- Violence (in a number of settings)
- Needs of discharged psychiatric patients
One might look at these and wonder what has changed in the years between.
Here is my personal view:
When I first joined, there was mention of the World Congress for Mental Health, which was to be hosted by the MHF in Auckland in August 1989. This provided me with an opportunity to see mental health promotion from a global perspective and also engaged all the MHF staff in a variety of ways.
More than 1000 people from 45 countries attended the congress and there were eight seminar streams, with titles ranging from mental health services to legal and consumer issues, BUT not one under the banner of mental health promotion.
The new public health stream looked at aspects of prevention and mental health in society and it was in this stream that John Raeburn spoke about the viability of mental health promotion in New Zealand. He later joined the Board of the MHF, bringing his experience and passion for mental health promotion and strengthening our leadership in that arena.
At the same time I joined the MHF's mental health promotion team. We were a small but dedicated group of people who ran workshops, wrote articles, and spoke at conferences in New Zealand and overseas. We were always looking at mental health through a health promotion lens and using the working methods set out in the Ottawa Charter. I also became a member of Age Concern Auckland's Elder Abuse Resource Team, giving me more insight into the lives and mental health of older people who are subjected to abuse and neglect by families and others in whom they place their trust.
The third priority set by the MHF in 1986 was the mental health of older people but there was no funding for mental health promotion for that age group. The workshops I facilitated were for those who cared for them in rest homes and hospitals and my first opportunity to work with older people themselves arose through funding from a philanthropic trust I had approached during the course of my fundraising activities for the MHF.
The Prime Minister's Task Force on Ageing (under Jim Bolger) brought the ageing of the population into the public arena and this was further highlighted during the International Year of Older Persons in 1999. Throughout the world, activities took place to celebrate ageing. In that same year a memorandum of understanding was drawn up between the MHF and the seven Age Concern councils in the Northland and Auckland regions, enabling us to work cooperatively to develop and provide mental health promotion programmes for older people.
The catch cry for that extraordinary year was 'towards a society for all ages'.
Older people were encouraged to take a positive approach to ageing through programmes such as in Age Concern's Positive Ageing. The programme's title has since become a slogan that is so well known and overused, that a new one is now being sought to convey the message that life can be good in one's later years.
Over the last ten years, mental health promotion in New Zealand has grown to encompass the interest and energy of many organisations, groups and individuals.
To be a mental health promoter is a calling to which young people have begun to aspire. Academics have embraced it. The media have given it the thumbs up. The public has begun to understand the messages we have been conveying for the past 30 years.
I know few people who shy away from the words, "mental health promotion" though the first two words on their own may still mean mental illness to many.
I have already acknowledged that this is a very personal account and, as I have been writing it, I have come to realise that it may omit more than it reveals about mental health promotion. But it has helped me to understand why, 30 years later, I am still seeking more understanding of the meaning of mental health in its broadest sense.
In his address to the 1989 Congress (mentioned above), the then Governor General, Sir Paul Reeves said: "If Maori spirituality supports a relationship with the environment which guarantees the provision of food and shelter, it also buttresses an effective social structure characterised by whanau, whenua, te reo and the marae."
He also said: "My point is that the way to God is a journey shared by travellers who may approach from different directions. And my further point is that the way to mental health may also be a journey shared by the patient and the healer, both of whom have needs."
I recall those words often and wonder about their meaning for others. For me, they help to explain why, at the age of 80, I continue to work in this exciting, frustrating, but always worthwhile profession of mental health promotion.
