E te rangatira, Koropiko Tumatahi, te auga o te moe ki a koe. Ko Mihingarangi tenei e mihi atu nei, e tangi atu nei. Welcome to The Hui, Maori current affairs for all New Zealanders. E taro ake nei ` To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, a special episode on Maori and the mental health system. They sent me to Mt Eden Prison. And while I was there, they put me in a place called the round room, which is actually right at the bottom of the prison. And... So you were in seclusion? It was worse than being in seclusion. We meet a former patient turned mental health advocate who immersed herself in matauranga Maori to aid her recovery. I threw all my medication away, and I decided that I needed to find a pathway if I was wanting to live. And speak to a Maori psychiatrist trying to change the system from the inside. Feeling like I had to follow this system of going in and secluding young Maori men broke my heart. A special report on Maori mental health through the eyes of Maori. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 Karahuihui mai. Maori mental health advocates are calling for the psychiatric system to change the way it treats Maori patients. This comes as Maori continue to be over-represented in our mental health system. Since 2001 the rates of Maori using mental health services has risen by 72%, more than double the rate for non-Maori. Today we hear from Maori who have survived the system. They believe that it needs to embrace matauranga Maori to help more Maori to wellness. Water is very important. I need to be around it. And when it encompasses you, I see very clearly that I'm in the womb of my tupuna. The placenta is connecting me to the water. And they accept me for who I am. They aren't judgemental. I just know they love me. For Tui Taurua-Peihopa, the natural world is her lifeline to her tupuna. It's a connection which has helped her to heal. From the mid-1970s, she spent more than two decades in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I was in psychiatric lockups because I was self-harming all the time and suicide attempts. And I spent 15 years, a whole 15 years in counselling trying to get my... get this head of mine into some sort of space. It's been almost 20 years since Tui was last in hospital, but she remembers how alone she felt. It was dark. It was very intrusive. It was intimidating. I was scared all the time. I dealt with panic attacks, I dealt with anxiety. I didn't like the staff. I didn't feel I was listened to. I felt like they minimalised my experiences. Petera Reid has also experienced the trauma of the psychiatric system. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and heavily medicated. He thought he was going to get psychiatric care, but instead he was transferred to prison. They sent me to Mt Eden Prison. And while I was there they put me in a place called the round room, which is actually right at the bottom of the prison. So you were in seclusion? It was worse than being in seclusion. You had 24 hour surveillance, you were in a special padded room with a big thick glass door. They gave you a nightie and a quilt. You had no mattress. The quilt was your mattress on a concrete floor. You had a cardboard box in the corner to do your business in, and a roll of toilet paper. So that was you as a mental health patient? That was me as a mental health patient. When they fed you, they pushed the food under the door, and you ate with your hands. What was that like for you? I don't think that actually helped a lot. It didn't help to maintain any sort of wellness for me. If anything, it just made me get even more psychotic because I would just walk around hitting the walls. Did you feel like you had been disconnected from your culture? Definitely, yep. Tui and Petera are among those who make up the country's worst mental health statistics ` those for Maori, who are five times more likely to end up in isolation. But what they also share is a remarkable story of recovery. They've both used matauranga Maori and their connection to the natural world. These days Petera has the support of whanau and community, and he feels well. But he says it wasn't the conventional psychiatric system that helped him. I was doing what everyone else was doing, taking my pills. You know taking my pills staying away from the alcohol, staying away from the drugs and taking my pills. But I wasn't getting better. What was the lowest point for you? I guess the lowest point was when I sat, um... I had chased my wife and children away, and for a whole day I had voices telling me to shoot myself. I had ones, and I recognized the ones that were telling me to not do it. And that, 'No, you can't do this. You have work to do.' The turning point was actually when the tohunga was brought to my house by my cousin. That was the turning point for me. What happened? He actually didn't talk to me. He actually stood by this tree. Cos we'd just moved there, and I was looking at him and I said to my cousin, 'Is he here to help me?' He goes, 'Yes.' I said, 'Why isn't he helping me, then?' He goes, 'He can't. He's waiting for you to go and ask.' He goes, 'He doesn't want to violate you. He wants you to ask, and then he can help you.' So I went over to him and said, 'Matua, can you help me?' He said, 'Ka pai. Go and get a chair.' So I got a chair and sat down. He said, 'I'm standing next to this tree because this is your medicine.' He goes, 'This is a ginkgo tree. In the morning you eat one leaf; in the evening you eat one leaf. 'This will help to strengthen your hinengaro, your mind.' So I was like, 'Oh, what's he on about?' I sorta believed but didn't believe. And then he gave me the korero about choose. Choose. 'You either believe in their world or you believe in ours.' And then I just said, I' believe ours, matua.' (BIRDS TWEET) These are some of the drawings that I did. Petera began to draw, and that became a part of his recovery. You can see the different faces. It's because I was fragmented. Petera also took the big step of becoming a tohunga, guided by the one he'd met. He encouraged Petera to write down what the voices in his head were saying. He said, 'You won't make sense of it, 'but eventually you will understand what's being said to you.' I have books with these writings, and I have a lot of stuff in te reo, and I have to give it to other people to translate so I know what's been said to me. So you don't speak te reo? No. What was it like for that te reo to come through? Um, confusing. Very confusing because I didn't understand what they were asking me to do. (TUI CALLS) Tui Taurua-Peihopa says she also hears voices ` the voices of her tupuna. I used to talk to the psychiatric nurses about what I was seeing, the voices, and they saw it as auditory hallucinations and verbal hallucinations. And I read that on the piece of paper, and I sort of went, 'That's a bit weird for me.' She knew the system wasn't working for her, and it was taking a toll on her tinana. I had been on 18 to 20 medications a day. They put me on psychotic medications and antipsychotic medications and on depression medication, and every time things went not good for me, all they did was just add another pill, and that wasn't OK. Tui started to immerse herself in matauranga Maori, and using Maori psychiatrist and Professor Sir Mason Durie's Te Whare Tapa Wha health model she gained a greater understanding of the voices. For me, when I decided that I needed to look at the Maori side of me, when I got Mason Durie's korero, I said, 'OK, let's look at the wairua.' For me the wairua was really important because that's when I started accepting that the voices, actually, I was able to normalize them. I was able to say, 'Well, as a Maori I have a right to hear voices and it's OK to hear voices, 'and really there's nothing wrong with me.' Dr Diana Kopua is a Maori psychiatrist who says there needs to be more understanding within the mental health system of Maori who hear voices. She works in Te Tairawhiti alongside her husband, Mark, who is a tohunga. Psychiatrists are the first to acknowledge that culture matters and that if it's consistent with your cultural belief, hearing voices, and that that might be a spiritual gift or something that was in your family, whether you see it as a gift or not, that that should be acknowledged. Mason Durie had always told us that a strong Maori identity is really good for positive mental health. And I wasn't seeing that in the Maori mental health services that I was visiting. The problem is in our society, all of our institutions are structured around a Western way of viewing the world. And you look at legislation that was racist. You look at the Tohunga Suppression Act, all of our ways of knowing were taken from us, stolen by these institutions that perpetuate a way of knowing. Can Maori health providers take that back? I believe so. Yeah, I believe so. Coming up ` how Petera went from patient to tohunga and began helping others. E kainamu mai nei ko te wahanga tuarua o tera purongo. Auraki mai ano. Before the break we screened the story of Petera Reid and Tui Taurua-Peihopa, survivors of the psychiatric system who are helping other Maori find their path to wellness. Next, they share how matauranga Maori has helped them to heal. Kei a John Boynton nga korero. This is Te Tii Marae in Waitangi, where Tui Taurua-Peihopa returned after spending two decades in and out of psychiatric care. She reconnected with her culture and learned to live with her mental illness. I always knew being home back in Waitangi was the answer to my recovery. She's followed a pathway back to her marae, where she finds a connection to the whakairo of her tupuna. When she was unwell in the past, she would come to the marae in the middle of the night. I'd be wandering around in the dark and I just came over here where it's dark, no one around, and I know that they hear me. Blood calls blood. That's how it feels. It also provides me a place of safety, and I don't feel alone. She's also taking on the ceremonial call of her ancestors as a kaikaranga, which binds the dead and the living. I knew that that was part of my tools of wellness, was picking up things that Maori do. And our Maori wahine are kaikaranga, and that's why I wanted to pick that up. Haere mai nga manuhiri tuarangi e... So, boom, out I came. I did one kaikaranga call for whanau. Everybody was still asleep. When I kaikaranga, nobody was asleep. (LAUGHS) Everybody jumped up. Petera Reid's embrace of matauranga Maori has also helped him live and work with the voices he hears. Once locked up in a psychiatric hospital, he's become a healer, a tohunga. When we visited him, he performed a cleansing ceremony for his friend Marion. (SPEAKS TE REO MAORI) The energy that comes belongs to my ancestor. But it makes me look like I'm having a seizure. Haramai, haramai... So my eyes flicker, I shake a bit, funny noises happen within here, but I'm OK. Karanga mai, karanga mai, karanga mai. Petera says he's clearing energy pathways. When that mahi's happening, you're pulling all those things that have blocked it out, and it comes inside me. And then I go outside and I've gotta let it go. (BREATHES HEAVILY, SIGHS) What was that experience like for you? The whole thing? Mm. Beautiful. Really, um, peaceful. For the last 20 years Petera Reid's worked in the mental health system and is now the psychiatric coordinator at a six-bed unit in Kaikohe. We're trying to do a more whanau-based approach. So that our when our whanau come in to the whare, it doesn't matter what nationality you are, you're still gonna get treated like whanau. I must make sure they're having their medications, the sleep hygiene, all of that stuff. But then we do this other thing where it's like... we're just human. We're just having our normal korero. We're not judging you. If you want to share what's happening with your voices, then share it. And I'm not gonna say that that's not real. What we've seen is we've actually had some successes. Because they're no longer coming through our doors. Tui has worked in mental health support and says it's vital those who've been through the psychiatric system lead the way in supporting their communities. I really believe in this peer support, Maori working with Maori who have lived experience. I believe in that wholeheartedly. But she says Maori are not listened to enough, with Western ideas of psychiatry dominating while Maori ideas are being ignored. So for me, matauranga Maori is... matauranga Maori is good as long as we don't challenge too much. And if we do challenge too much, 'Be careful, cos I'll take your money away from you.' That's how I see it. If we don't change it, we're gonna lose more Maori. Our system is continuing to grow with more and more Maori who don't have a pathway, who their pathway is being silenced. We are silenced. We are silenced all the time. Maori psychiatrist Diana Kopua and her husband, Mark Kopua, travel the world sharing their matauranga. Recently, they were invited to Ihumatao for a wananga or well-being workshop. What I really want to say is that when I watch pictures of you guys around the fire having korero and waiata and standing the line, I think, 'I couldn't prescribe something better.' I couldn't. While people at Ihumatao are looking after each other, it's something Diana is not seeing for Maori in mental health services. That's despite the number of Maori in psychiatric care increasing. It's gone up 70% in the last 20 years. She says Maori in Gisborne are three times more likely to be placed under compulsory treatment orders, or a CTO. What we found is that being under a CTO was synonymous with being forced to have medication. And many of our people didn't want medication. So the inequity in coercive treatment. So the idea that you might want to change, but then all of a sudden that power and the right to make decisions is taken from you. That's a huge inequity. Another inequity was seclusion. Maori were more likely to be secluded. As a psychiatrist, as a Maori psychiatrist coming into mental health to try and make a difference, feeling like I had to follow the system of secluding young Maori men broke my heart. Diana and Mark now spend their time working together outside the system. Their programme Mahi-a-Atua uses Maori creation stories to connect people back to their culture and whakapapa, with the concept of the marae forming the foundation for their mahi. The services that we're part of have tikanga based on Maori culture that will govern the behaviour that occurs there. And you see that, because people come in not expecting to be, almost, walking into a marae setting. So it changes behaviour. So the environment is indigenised enough to be welcoming for our whanau, so it's fantastic. I think families will feel listened to, not labelled, not discriminated against,... And respected. ...and respected. And they will learn how to engage in a partnership when you are trying to find the meaning behind the distress. Diana says she'll continue her fight to have more Maori voices in mental health services. If we truly want reform, it has to be driven by Maori voices. We don't just have that worse statistics in health, but we also have the greatest solutions when you look at our culture. If you're not in this job to challenge the system, then you're in the wrong job. That's how I see it. Cos this job is about challenging. This job is about making a difference for Maori. We have to challenge the status quo. They all say it's time for matauranga Maori to be more widely used in the psychiatric system to bring more Maori patients out of the dark and into the light. Maori have been waiting for a long time to be acknowledged and for certain traditional practices to be utilized to help support our whanau back to wellness. Na John Boynton tera ripoata. And it was produced by Richard Langston and made possible by the Frozen Funds Charitable Trust - Like Minds, Like Mine - and the Mental Health Foundation. Ka hoki mai Te Hui akuanei. Auraki mai ano. Maori Mental Health Awareness week begins tomorrow. So to discuss its significance, I'm joined now by advocate Paul Whatuira and the Mental Health Foundation's Michael Naera. Tena korua. Tena koe. Kia ora. Diana Kopua talks about institutions based on Western ideologies. I guess the question is how do we change that? How do we start to move that into matauranga Maori? I think it's very important to reconnect to our culture going through similar issues. And by the way, those two stories are powerful. It's important that we share and empower each other. It is definitely important to reconnect to our culture and make sure that we get the right tools, and we need to speak up and share each other's stories. Did you think of your own story when you were watching those two stories? I did. I understood when you're on medication, living in numbness, it is hard. You lose a lot of confidence, especially with the Western... psychologists and doctors that are telling you to do pills. It does wreck your confidence a bit, but they showed a lot of mana to be able to step out of their numbness. But what they did do is put their positive reconnection to matauranga into action, and I felt very empowered by that. Ka pai. I just want to touch on something that Petera talks about. He talks about being in the round room. I guess, you know, someone who's working in the health space, is that common? It's absolutely common. It's common in prisons, it's common where our people are taken into seclusion blocks because they're at risk to themselves and they're at risk to the inmates and the wardens. The thing is is that it's prolonged. It's prolonged, so it actually ends up venturing on to being torture. And so when you look at the report that was released by the ombudsman a couple of years ago, he said that we needed to look at supporting those with mental illness who are incarcerated, who are in state care. We were talking about how we're always told if we're feeling down or depressed or whatever to call these numbers and things like that, but in that story what we found is that it's actually your kahui or your wider family that's reaching in to pull you up. What do you think about the messages that we tell our people? Yes, I do believe in the power of connection and going back to your whakapapa, matauranga. And part of my journey was to reconnect with our culture. Living in Sydney, you are surrounded by the Western philosophies. And it is, like I said, through going through similar journeys, it's important to speak up. Being around your whanau and making sure that you get the right advice and help. You're working in the mental health system. And you recognise those kinds of matauranga Maori and how helpful they've been to people like Tui and Petera and many more that you know. I guess the challenge for you is being able to tell the funders how important this is. Yeah, that's right. And I guess after watching the video and seeing everything play out, that's my story, that's your story, that's Paul's story, that's everyone's story. And so it's quite clear to say to the funders, 'There is another way of doing things, and that's our way. 'That's being a Maori for Maori and having kaupapa Maori services that treat us as people, 'treat us as having whakapapa and treat us as having the reo.' And that's what it's all about. And that's what's missing in the current system today. As somebody who's dedicated to helping young Maori, other Maori, other people to overcome what they're dealing with, what have the barriers been for you in terms of getting funding? It's been challenging. I moved home to Aotearoa eight months ago. It has been a grind, and it's still a grind today. And being in this area, I was very fortunate to work in Mt Eden Corrections for three months. Seen a lot of our young rangatahi going through pain and going through those issues which you mentioned. It is a very big challenge. But there's a billion dollars in the budget for mental health. How are you, who are dedicated and committed to helping Maori, get a piece of it? Will Maori actually have a piece of that billion dollars, given that it's been directed into government agencies already? There's only $60 million going to kaupapa Maori services, and yet we are at the top of every statistic going out. So there's inequities there. There's huge mental health inequities in the system. Paul, just to end, what can we do as individuals to help our whanau that we know are struggling? It's important to give our whanau that unconditional support and love. And we may not have all the answers, but it's important to listen and make sure that you care for them, and just give them that confidence that you're gonna be there unconditionally. I truly believe love is the answer to all pain. I was really empowered by what Petera mentioned ` we always get those negative thoughts. And what the bro did, which I'm very proud of him, he acknowledges his negative thoughts and he's using his craft, he's using his skill, he's using his mana to help empower and inspire others. I think it's really awesome. Ka pai. A message to anyone who's watching that might need help? A message to you out there ` ask for help. Go see your kuia, your koroua, your whanau. Because the messages are from them, are from our tupuna, and we need to go back to that, we ned to go back to the source like what was mentioned in the video. We have the mana, we have the power to look after our own people. Tena korua. Thank you for your korero this morning. Ka pai. Kua hikina Te Hui mo tenei ra. Noho ora mai. Captions by Tracey Dawson. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 ALL: He mea tautoko na Te Mangai Paho. The Hui is made with support from New Zealand On Air.