Ensuring #Right2Housing essential to addressing mental health crisis / A.J. Hendry

The first time that I spent the night in hospital with a young person who had tried to take their life was eye opening. As a young, and relatively inexperienced Youth Worker I had this false understanding that once the mental health team got engaged that my young person would be held and cared for. I was frustrated and saddened to find out how wrong I was.

I won’t even go into how hard it was to get the crisis team to come and assess and support this young person, it’s enough to say it took hours of holding the young person in the community, and eventually ringing the police who with a LOT of convincing eventually came and took the young person to the hospital at the ninth hour just as the young person was attempting to take their life.

And then, instead of being treated with care and love, the young person was bustled into a hospital waiting room, asked a range of clinical questions, had those questions repeated over and over, and then after hours of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, was released with the desire for death still fresh on their lips, and with an encouragement that “your young person isn’t really at risk, it’s just a behavioural issue”.

I’ve been through this process more times than I can remember. As a youth worker there is little I can do except be there, hold the hope for our whānau, and advocate for the young person to be taken seriously and receive the care they deserve. The problem is that the system just isn’t set up to care for our rangatahi. And in the space that my team and I operate (youth housing and homelessness) this reality can be deadly.

Time and time again I have seen young people discharged from hospital hours after a serious suicide attempt without any assessment or understanding of their situation. In our context, they are being sent out alone, sometimes back into homelessness, but always with very few social and community supports to hold them after such a traumatic event.

Follow up is marginal and not youth-centric or trauma informed, and the overwhelming feeling I get from rangatahi is that they do not feel cared for or loved through the process.

It is not a system that facilitates healing.

Our mental health system desperately needs transformation. I don’t think anyone would question that.

But, a key factor in any transformation of the mental health system that must be considered is ensuring the Right to Housing.

Let me unpack that a little.

Something we know, but which has been highlighted for me this week, is that any mental health response that is serious about facilitating healing must be holistic.

Te whare tapu wha is a health model that helps us visualize wellbeing by looking at ourselves as a whare with four walls. Taha Tinana (Physical health), Taha Wairua (Spiritual health), Taha Whānau (Social health), Taha Hinengaro (Mental/emotional health). If one wall is weak, it has an impact on all the rest.

For us to be healthy and whole we must look at strengthening all of these walls.

And yet our current mental health system largely does not do this. In many ways it is far to clinical, focusing on the medical response while largely neglecting the other elements that are necessary to enhance someone's wellbeing.

Over the years I have spent hours in hospitals with young people in extreme mental distress.

Every time they have been dragged through a clinical system, and then sent out alone while still experiencing the same mental distress - now often at an elevated level - that they walked in with.

Too often these young people have been expierencing homelessness and housing insecurity. Can you imagine being mentally unwell, having the courage to reach out for help and share this with mental health professionals, only to be sent away with little support back into the very environment that is causing you harm?

This is not a judgement on the professional’s themselves, but on the system that they are forced to operate in.

Which brings me to my initial point. If we want to create a system where we can facilitate healing, focus on building the whare, provide our people with holistic care and support, one of the essential steps we must take is to provide our people with safe, secure, and stable housing for everyone. You can't tell a person that they just need to exercise, eat better, take medication and go to therapy, and then wonder why they aren’t healing when they’ve been sent back into an environment which is causing them harm and been denied the right to a safe and stable home.

There is a lot that needs to be addressed in our mental system, it needs to be more whānau centred and people focused, it needs a lot more aroha, manaaki and awhi embedded into it. But, a solid cornerstone within any transformation that needs to occur in the system is ensuring that people suffering from mental ill health have safe, supported housing.

During this lockdown the youth service I lead has received multiple referrals for young people being pushed out of respite into homelessness. We’ve been able to support some of these young people in our Youth focused Immediate Accommodation space, and yet they are still leaving respite and being moved into homelessness. And the question I have is how do we expect people to heal when even while they are in respite they know they will be transitioning into homelessness? How do we expect people to recover, while still living in the midst of chaos, trauma and instability?

Achieving the right to housing is essential to addressing the mental health crisis within Aoteaora.

At the end of the day homelessness and housing insecurity harms our mental health. Living in emergency accommodation is damaging to a person’s wellbeing. Ending homelessness is suicide prevention.

A.J. Hendry is a Laidlaw College graduate, and now a Youth Development Worker and housing advocate, working in the Youth Housing and Homelessness space. He leads a service supporting rangatahi experiencing homelessness and is also an advocate working collectively to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa. He is also the curator and creator of When Lambs Are Silent.

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