Social Nexus Submission for the Parliamentary Mental Health Bill Review

Social Nexus Submission for the Parliamentary Mental Health Bill Review

There is currently a Submission for Review in Parliament about proposed changes to the Mental Health Act 1992. This is a problem our founders have personal experience and understanding of mental distress in mothering, we also recently asked others to contribute to this understanding for us in a survey here. 

Honestly, its difficult to continue to look at this issue as it isn't great for our own mental health to do so given the state of things! Instead, we continue to look for solutions.

It feels like the world is at least somewhat aware of the many issues we have, what remains unclear is how to address any of them. What is key to successful solutions though, is the perspective of the people experiencing the problems being heard, understood and taken into account, then them accessing support and being empowered to do different things instead. 

The submission calls for insight to the issue and then recommendations for solutions proposed. Please support the review process if possible and visit the link to Parliament.nz and take a few minutes to give your own take if possible.

It's really important that government hear from people they are meant to be representing. Below this video here about the submission process and mental health act overview, you can see our submission to parliament.  

 

 

@bushmagicnz submissions on the outdated and problematic mental health act are open until 20 Dec 2024. this is an area of MASSIVE concern in Aotearoa, please take a second to make your voice heard, the vulnerable people the act is meant to protect really need us all to right now.... #submission #parliment #politics #act #bill #vulnerable #problem #mentalhealth #mentaldistress #wellbeing #depression #anxiety #distress #social #mentalhealthmatters #mentalhealthfoundation #wahine #whanau #tamariki #rangatahi #Aotearoa #nz ♬ original sound - bushmagicnz

 

 

 

Commentary on legislation

 
As mothers, women juggle the mental load of guiding, teaching, caring for and protecting tamariki constantly. The role of taking responsibility for their own health and well-being, while ultimately paramount for the whole household often takes a back seat, often by necessity due to sheer lack of resources. 
There is fundamentally not adequate resourcing or support for modern family life and the responsibility and burden of that load sits on women’s shoulders. For many mothers, their own mental distress is something they do the best to manage, again poorly resourced and responsible for more than their own being, mental distress in one form or another is something one might hypothesise every mother in Aotearoa is familiar with. If not their own, from experiences supporting someone else in their household, whanau or community. 
 
Invisible load, household responsibilities, caretaking, balancing a constant juggle - none of this is new in the motherhood role. Yet the burden and load of each is increasingly taking its toll on the next generation of women underneath it. Mental distress in mothering is an intergenerational, global, sociocultural ticking time bomb, waiting to blow and while it does, it is tamariki, rangatahi, vulnerable dependent people and the mothers themselves that cop the repercussions and continue to be harmed in the process. 
 
For many mothers, the juggle of trying to do all the things alongside the normalised pressure required for full time employment to be undertaken alongside will result in burn out, mental distress, physical illness and or personal injury. For many mothers, there will be times we need to recruit outside support to help us cope and manage the various needs and preferences, conditions and roles that are part of this job. 
 
For many mothers, mental distress is something they are already trying to navigate and struggle to get adequate support with. For even more we will never hear a call for help because they won’t give it. Mental distress in mothering comes with limited options of solutions, the risks are many and the stakes are ridiculously high. The Act has been widely reported to be used as leverage for threats and harm in domestic violence and within family court systems. The current legislation makes no effort to minimise coercion and with the imbalances in resources between the genders and earning potential discrepancies seems beyond unjust. As solo mothers, this discrepancy in available resources and unbalanced distribution of care taking activities is felt even more strongly. 
 
Person centred care seems core to any proposed solutions - fundamentally we need to support people to be able to feel responsible for taking charge of their own physical and mental wellbeing. We don’t achieve this goal taking away autonomy and removing their perspective of best practise solutions decision making. It serves best to support people to improve their wellness and life outlook by providing containers of safe space and time for them to be heard and seen through their struggles. By empowering them with guidance and information of options, we can support them to decide what would be most useful to scaffold issues in their lives. For mums who manage the safety and wellness of more than their own beings body, the process can be even more timely yet the pressure around making time available is even greater. 
 
Realistically, we need not a new Act or Bill but a completely new approach. We know the process of mental distress recovery and building support, skills and resilience for managing life and the stressors it brings most needs more time for individuals. 
 
Time is not money, time is a made up concept we extrapolated from a measure of distance. 
 
Yet time is a very real resource that all mothers, in fact maybe, all people globally at this point in the piece, feel pressured in and lack of. We don’t budget it in our resource allocation, there is no measure for it. In fact, our time isn’t even valued equally at all. And most of the jobs that take the forefront of the load within the job of mothering aren’t even counted. They are apparently invisible. 
 
In reality, no one can do it all. And mothers of today seem to be missing magical powers that lets us fit it all in like our mothers did. It is actually no longer a discussion of invisible labour, in reality, what we have is dependents with gaps in the care they should be receiving. 
 
And the people feeling guilty about that are the same as the ones who we don’t really want to hear talking about ‘their problems’. They are the mothers, and in this way of forming the equation, it is their children who are the problems. Their precious tamariki, whom so often seem to be the same group that people making decisions that don’t affect them claim to be protecting in making said decisions - “think of the kids”. 
 
That’s a weird mind fuck to focus on. 
 
Turns out, its a puzzle one of our co-founders, Jess, seems to have been trying to ‘solve’ her whole life. She herself was privy to being held under the Mental Health Act process prior to becoming a mother, trying to convince policy makers and corporate representatives in the digital rights space of the issues exacerbating mental distress in youth and the areas of human rights and legacy law during the early 2010’s and very literally driving herself crazy with it. Online for good measure and with a great dose of learning that came as a result. 
 
As a mother and woman who has just entered her 40’s freshly divorced and looking forward to adventures with her own tamariki as her focus, Jess decided she could finally put down ‘the problem’. After much support from and discussion with Kelsey, together they decided to focus on where they could see solutions so they didn’t grow to become apathetic. They know they both want to be brave and alternative enough to not hand this world to their own tamariki without at least trying to do something about the state it is in first.   



 

Recommendations

 

Mental Health is an area we desperately need to improve our understanding, focus and priorities on as a nation and globe. The systems we currently utilise do not adequately support and look out for the needs and well being of the most vulnerable of our communities. We are collectively well aware of this, some of us more than others. 

 

Mental health in mothering is one of the most desperate areas for consideration, whilst this Bill looks at the Compulsory Assessment and Treatment, it fundamentally underpins our nations approach to mental distress. Getting the implications of its impact in perspective is important to ensuring the solutions developed are adequate and effective. In doing so, we create an opportunity for longevity of the solution as well. 

 

Compulsory Assessment and Treatment is not backed up to be an effective solution, nor is there even a proved need beyond legal process where the moral and ethical application of said law is beyond questionable. It is an area that is a real mindfield of discussion which is hugely emotive and where there are dispropriate imbalances in concepts like power, opportunity, cultural and socioeconomic factors, honestly a whole bunch of shit that there isn’t adequate time or space for in this document or process at all.  Beyond that, those with lived experience of being subject to this bills implications widely and repeatedly share stories of the trauma induced by the Act and tell us this is not the best solution for people. 

 

The bill wasn’t even able to consider anything close to the reality of the world we live in today, let alone the issues and struggles we face as a result. It was developed long before things like the changes to digital communications technologies which fundamentally underpin some of this stuff in modern worlds, kids were still going to Blockbuster with their parents as prep for home movie nights and everyone had only house phones. That’s an entirely different world to the one today’s tamariki exist in. 

 

There are some considerable limitations of the legal reality of this context, well understood to be very different to the real world of many mothers, particularly those who have to seek Work & Income support and/or be part of the Family Courts processes. If law is the ‘real world’ then many of us have long been living in a glitchy alternate reality simulation of life, because it's not the same here. 

 

With it extremely clear that this approach is not a great solution, we also absolutely do not want to give up an opportunity to give policy makers some input from the ground level. It’s fucking tough down here team. Even those of us well resourced, courageous and ‘getting out there and doing it’ in terms of making solutions available are struggling. With that in mind, we list some points below to leave you with as recommendations to consider under the submission review and thank you for the opportunity to share them. 

 

Person centered care 

Person centred care seems core to any proposed solutions - fundamentally we need to support people to be able to feel responsible for taking charge of their own physical and mental wellbeing. We don’t achieve this goal taking away autonomy and removing their perspective of best practise solutions decision making. It serves best to support people to improve their wellness and life outlook by providing containers of safe space and time for them to be heard and seen through their struggles. By empowering them with guidance and information of options, we can support them to decide what would be most useful to scaffold issues in their lives. 



Community solutions 

Ground level solutions and community approaches are the most practical and effective way to support ongoing and effective support for mental distress recovery. Grassroots initiatives and projects like community hubs help support communities in a way that goes beyond mental wellbeing. Social Nexus have developed a Rest & Restore private midweek mama retreat space in an attempt to make use of the gap provided by school hours to minimise requirements for care support. We also have events such as the Tired Mums Weekend retreat, a space for mama to reset their cup before getting to the very bottom of it and needing emergency support such as that afforded by Compulsory Assessment and Treatment. At these events we utilise the opportunity to empower women with tools and resources for managing their own mental and physical wellbeing. We have been long working on producing a workbook to assist this support but like other community organisations, particularly as one cofounded by two solo mama with seven kids between them, we lack resources (time and people) to support our efforts with things like seeking funding opportunities. 

Mental distress is going to be accommodated and supported differently for different social groups because the needs are different, so the solutions must also be varied and many to be effective. Creating a structure that suggests that the approach to feeling incapable of managing mental distress in your household is to outsource decision making feels like it undermines the effort of those trying to make a difference through building community. Therapy and the model of mental health treatment itself suggests an extended externalised solution focus, essentially saying people need someone else to tell them what to do. Yet the psychology and therapy models widely accept and support the concept of their role being to hold and support the individual to make the changes for themselves. Having some kind of tiered approach to streams of suggested support, so community organisations, peer support groups etc can be more widely known to those in distress would minimise load on the system and utilise the bill as what it actually is, more than just a rulebook for the worst cases. 

 

Integrated whanau solutions

Mothers can’t exist separate from our tamariki quite like fathers or other caregivers seem to be able to quite in the same way. That is very literally just a fact for many of us, with that in mind, the solutions can’t take us away from our children and work when we are with our children again like some magic spell that goes above and beyond them as sovereign beings. If they are part of the objective problem, then shouldn’t they be part of the solutions too? After all, they are actually the ones that are inheriting the world as we create it with policy and law and processes like these submissions.  

 

At Social Nexus we have been creating opportunities and space for things like Create & Connect events for all ages in the school holidays, a space for tamariki to be able to have fun with peers as well as mothers having an enjoyable and connecting time and space with other mums and alongside their tamariki. Creating opportunities for mutual sites of fulfillment provide low pressure opportunities for connection within whanau, connection fosters resilience within parent child relationships which is key in this role. 

 

Also, over three quarters of the over 60 mums who recently completed a survey for us on mental distress support in mothering said they lacked adequate childcare support across the board. For solo mama, we often simply cannot make it to things unless we can drag our kids along and make that work. We have rotating Create & Connect events, one with whanau focus and one with an adult focus and space for children nearby with child care support available. Whanau camps with focus on whanau experiencing mental distress and neurodiversity in their whare is on the cards for us in the future. These kinds of events not only provide time and space at the event itself but connections are formed and fostered which go beyond that space across the age groups. This is the richness of integrated whanau solutions. 



Consideration of dependents care in mental health crisis law

Mothers can’t access support the same way for a variety of reasons, the risks associated with engaging with support services are high, the implications can be long term and the stakes of things are too high to be accessible to most. It is commonplace that mothers will actually choose not to address mental distress than they will try to if there is increased risk for tamariki as a result. Furthermore, the Act is silent on the implication for children who have parents detained for treatment, given the context of extrapolating abuse situations and the applications in Family Court, this is an important consideration to address. 

 

The wellbeing of dependents who have caregivers in mental distress should be cause for concern enough, but given some of the shocking statistics around mental health in Aotearoa, it is essential. The mental wellbeing of Kiwis has continued to go down across the age brackets, at least half of new mums are struggling officially with postnatal depression or other mental distress and the top cause of death in pregnant women is suicide. This is beyond crisis levels and no one is actually thinking about what that means in those cases for the dependents.

 

 

 

@bushmagicnz the mental health crisis, particularly in mothering, is to me one of the biggest fuck ups we keep perpetuating through this stupid system... it's a global, intergenerational, sociocultural ticking time bomb if you ask me! and we have a rare chance to make submissions on an act written in 1992 at the moment to influence that. we have until Friday to have a say. please try to make a submission. thanks in advance, on behalf of those caring for vulnerable, dependent people all over Aotearoa and the world ✌️ #mentalhealth #mentaldistress #wellness #mothering #vulnerable #dependent #overwhelmed #parliament #review #ASAP #mama #tamariki #rangatahi #Aotearoa #nz ♬ original sound - bushmagicnz
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