Some Fear No Amount of Funding will Solve the Mental Health Pipeline

A $3.8 million funding boost for mental health and addiction support is “not the end of that fight,” says an Auckland MP, Chlöe Swarbrick.

An immediate funding boost for mental health and addiction support was given to three Auckland universities including Massey University’s Albany campus at the start of the semester. However, there may be more to stopping mental illness than just funding support.

Massey worked with the Ministry of Health to find the best use of the funding. The Albany campus used the funding for additional counselling services outside of hours and Wellbeing Advisor Roles for Māori and Pasifika students. It has brought on new full-time student health workers, including non-clinical and clinical workers.

Auckland’s Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick as an advocate for mental health and youth, pushed for the funding boost. You may remember her as the viral baddie who said “ok boomer” when she was interrupted in Parliament in 2019. While she felt the funding boost was worth celebrating, Swarbrick said, “I don’t think that we are ever going to deal with the pipeline of the mental health crisis unless we deal with the contributing factors to people experiencing mental distress.” She said the causes of mental illness are “a lack of security, a lack of connection to community as a result a lack of belonging and a lack of a sense of identity”.

“All of that stuff is bound up in the phobias and the isms, but it’s still very much related to somebody’s material security and therefore the knowledge that they can make decisions about their life and not their decisions being made for them, or that they are being totally at the whim of their circumstances.”

“I think it’s really important that we are straight up about the fact that until students are surviving on liveable incomes and warm, dry, secure homes, that we can’t pretend that were not going to see the emergence of mental illness.”

“I promise you this is not the end of that fight. We’ve still got more to do.”

During the 107-day Auckland lockdown last year, an alarm was raised with Swarbrick about student’s living in Auckland student accommodation struggling with mental health. She was told “there was an immensely disproportionate stress on Auckland students. We then saw the full-on effect when Waikato went back into lockdown. It very much was correlated.”

According to the telehealth services who provide virtual support such as 1737 and Healthline, Swarbrick said there wasn’t an overwhelmingly huge number of people calling for support, but there were longer periods of time that returning people wanted to talk. “Some people need a one-off check in, other people it’s a few times, they are getting the tools to work through things, and other people will need ongoing support.”

“The point is, all of those types of people, all of us deserve to have access to the services that we need when we need them.”

She said the universities have been working with their students’ associations to get a feel for what is actually needed. “Having more boots on the ground that are available to help people is one thing, but being able to know from students’ whether this has actually reduced their wait time, whether its culturally appropriate, whether it is helping them.”

Year on year more funding will spread across the country and scale up. “This support for students’ mental health and addiction treatments, should not come at the exclusion” of the broader population, she said.