Katie Kenny and Laura Walters
“If you were to be crass, you could say there is a bit of a flavour of the month about it,” former Health Minister David Caygill says about mental health, during a conversation in a Christchurch cafe. It does sound crass, but it’s true. The shortfalls of our mental health system are a constant topic of discussion at the dinner table, in Parliament and in the media. Headlines claiming the system is “broken” or “on a knife edge” are frequent, and hard to ignore. You don’t have to look far to find a story about a mental health advocate calling for an independent review, or a grieving family member whose child killed themselves while in the care of services.
It is part of the media’s role to expose failings and hold those responsible to account. It’s relatively easy to point fingers and blame people in power. But, for us as journalists, it’s harder to look in the mirror and ask if we’re holding up our end of the bargain.
[Read more…] about Mental health media coverage: looking past ‘spectacular and notorious’
I trained as a physiotherapist nearly thirty years ago, and worked in acute medicine and neuro rehabilitation in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. I ended my clinical practice about seven years back, and strangely I don’t miss it terribly; one moves onto other things.
By their involvement in the arts, whether poetry, painting, or writing novels, nurses and other health professionals have the opportunity to express a side of themselves which is not always possible in their day-to-day work. It is a creative way of reflecting and thinking about what they see and do and feel in their daily contact with patients.” – Lorraine Ritchie, editor of Listening with my Heart
Most of us experience the death of a parent or grandparent and the loss of the past it brings. The death of an elderly family member, however, does not threaten the family’s reason to exist, and its future hopes and dreams remain. The death of a child, however, brings with it the death of part of the parents, and the psychological death of the family. In bereavement literature there is agreement that the death of a child is almost beyond the parents’ endurance. The parent-child bond is arguably the strongest bond there is. The concept of the child as an integral part of the parent’s self is logical in that the survival of the child depends on altruistic parenting. If mother and baby did not become strongly attached the baby would die. The purpose of attachment, therefore, is the survival of the species. Thus, parenthood is deeply challenged by the death of a child.