Suicide Prevention Presentation by Michael Hempseed

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what was the author of the book being a true hero encourage you to get a
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copy if you haven't got one or sort it sort them appearing you'll be outlining about today uh so he's the water of the
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book being a true hero understanding and preventing suicide in your community
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the book has been used by the New Zealand Police Army Medics fire and emergency New Zealand uh GPS councilors
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as well as many parents and teachers so Michael gained an honors degree of
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Psychology from the University of Canterbury in 2008. in 2016 he spoke at
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tedx on overcoming failure which led to him becoming a Sorter and proficient
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speaker in the last two years Martin was delivered more than 300 seminars on
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topics such as overcoming failure mental illness and suicide being changes
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so this presentation has been filmed and will be available on the IOP page
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once it is uploaded great thank you very much
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good afternoon everyone so uh yes I'm Michael hempseed now there's one thing
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that everyone wants to know about me and the first question everyone always has is what is the deal with your last name
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for those of you that don't know hemp seed is someone associated with marijuana um this really is my last name it is not
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a joke so my first little advice today is if you have children please do not give them the last name hemp seed it has
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made my life rather difficult over the years if you want to know where the name came from it came from hemproven Scotland
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they used to use it on ships not the stuff you smoke I don't know why people always jump to that conclusion
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so I traveled all over New Zealand giving talks something about suicide prevention and understanding PTSD
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before I got into this line of work I had a different goal in life I wanted to run my own read-alone company and I was
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going to call it hemp seeds grass right so these are the things that we
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are going to cover today for those who have just joined us is there anything in particular that you want to know today about mental health Suicide Prevention
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the meaning of life anything like that anything you're welcome to join us okie
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dokie so there we go okay when we don't have a global
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pandemic on I love traveling I've been all over the world uh so from top left to bottom right China Morocco Pisa Rome
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and the bottom left there that is the Chernobyl nuclear reactor so I have been
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to Ukraine and yes in case you're wondering I now glow in the dark we've got Brazil and Cambodia
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and I've done some interesting things a part of the robotic plane jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at 13 000 feet
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doing a Lamborghini around a racetrack in Las Vegas it's a little bit hard to see but my legs are actually bent over
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that is not a joke they did not design sports cars for six foot three tall people
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and I've been hang gliding right so what are we seeing at the
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moment in terms of mental health uh unfortunately it's not good so this was
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a study from the US we don't have any decent New Zealand data yet but hopefully it's coming shortly
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before the pandemic eight and a half percent of the U.S population reported clinical levels of depression
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in the first couple of years the pandemic that jumped to 27.8
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the really disturbing number there though is severe from 0.7 which is almost nothing to 5.1 as far as I'm
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aware that is the sharpest rise in mental illness that has ever been recorded in human history
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does that surprise you is that what you're seeing
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yeah so it's one of the big questions is um is this just we're recognizing this more
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now or is this actually more common I don't think I've got another slide deck there's a study called the
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epidemiological catchment area study a bit of a mouthful they interviewed people that were born in 1905 and they
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found that people that were born in 1905 they had a one percent lifetime chance of having depression they carefully
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interviewed them it was Anonymous reporting so there wasn't a reporting bias and it seemed like mental illness
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was fairly rare then they interviewed people that were born um in later and today we think something
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like one in four people in any given year will have clinical levels of depression
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so it's not just that we're recognizing it more we think there has been a staggering increase in this
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why do you think there's been such a massive increase in this
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we've got time yeah
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um you just say um yeah I think some of the laws that have made probably don't actually help build resilience in people
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yeah uh cost of living that's a massive stress for people and I work with a lot of people on really good salaries and
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some of them are struggling to live so you can imagine how much worse off it is for other people
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like 100 years ago was pretty simple there's no technology yeah
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quite a simple yeah it's estimated we've used somewhere between seven and a half and ten
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thousand ads on social media each day and we interact with more people in one day than someone in the Middle Ages
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interacted with probably in their entire lifetime so there's a lot more complexity yes
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yeah yeah and one of the other things is and before smartphones came along you used
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to be able to leave your work at work now what happens a lot of people take their work home with them and they never get a break
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there's a couple of other things to look at as well it's not just depression also just a
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second before you get that one um now people are wondering well what is depression and is it real so there's this interesting study uh
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they took a scan of people's brains and they found there's a bit of the brain called the hippocampus that's one of the
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parts of the brain's brain associated with memory and emotion and they found that people that have depression this
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part of the brain can shrink by up to 17 so they're a very real and very
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significant changes that have within the brain does that surprise you that I see that
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this part of the brain could be associated with memory we don't really think of depression as being affected by memory do we
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but if you listen carefully to what a lot of people with depression say sometimes they say things like I can't
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remember the last time that I was happy I can't even remember what happiness is
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and people with depression often have stronger memories of the negative or the sad events and less strong memories of
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the happy or the positive events in their lives so it's quite possible that depression may have more to do with memory who were previously recognized
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the World Health Organization has said that depression this one mental illness is the leading cause of disability
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worldwide it accounts for more time off sake and more lost productivity than
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anything else if someone has a heart attack and they survive how long will they probably have off work
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maybe two to twelve weeks depending on sort of the severity of it if someone has depression how long can
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they be off for months or years yeah and I met a police
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officer fairly recently he was in the child protection unit and seemed to be
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okay and then had a massive meltdown I think the last 10 years he just has not been able to work and he hasn't shown
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much sign of giving better so yeah you can see the impact that was going to have on someone
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now have you ever um met someone that you think might have depression and they say something you ask them how are you
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and you can see they're not okay and they say I'm fine and you think well you're just telling
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me what I want to hear are you just making this up there's another part of the brain called the insula and that's one of the parts
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of the brain associated with self-evaluation and self-understanding
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and if the part of the brain doesn't work so well for self-understanding what do you think that means for a lot of
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people with depression they don't know what's going on so some
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people if you ask them how are you and they say I'm fine they genuinely think they are fine they're not lying or
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anything like that they genuinely don't realize they have a problem so unfortunately I'm recognizing this in
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yourself can be difficult and I'll address that a little bit some people obviously do know they have it but other
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people it can take them a long long time to figure it out language
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teaching like how you say hello to somebody yeah yeah sure the answers depending on how
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you actually are yeah if you ask people in the Western World how are you pretty much everyone
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says I'm fine automatically if you go to say African cultures you ask someone how are you you will get a genuine response
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so there's a bit of um
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yeah that's the problem yep
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so we've got three people here we've got Fritz Sarah and Lucy so Fred is happy once for most of the time once every few
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weeks he feels quite low we've got Sarah she just lost to grandmother she's overwhelmed and totally distraught and
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we've got Lucy she has a wonderful life a great and supportive family a great boyfriend and a great job yet most days
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she feels totally worthless doesn't want to get out of bed finds nothing makes her happy and doesn't see the point anymore
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so first of all Fred who thinks that Fred has depression
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okay Fred has a very serious medical condition I'm going to say it now if you can't pronounce that that's okay and
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just try and follow with me the name of the condition that Fred has is called life
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so we need to be incredibly careful when we talk about this we don't want to pathologize or turn into an illness all normal human behavior it is normal to
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have days where you feel good and it's normal to feel days we don't feel so good some people call those days we don't feel so good Mondays and I agree
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entirely at least we've got zero what do you think she's got grief grief is not a
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mental illness that's considered a normal response to a difficult or traumatic situation but there is something called complicated grief where
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people get stuck in that grief and it can go on and on for months or even years and then lastly Lucy
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that's depression so when it starts to fix someone's functioning when they can't eat when they can't sleep when
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they don't want to get out of bed when it starts to thickly functioning that's really when it turns from having a bad day to depression
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look at a couple of other things what are some of the other symptoms that you think of when someone might have depression
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yep it's interesting and sometimes we think people say with depression I don't want to get out of beard often they
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don't actually have the energy to do it and something you could take say a fit 18 year old if you've got depression
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something as simple as getting out of bed and making a bowl of cereal in the morning they might be so exhausted doing
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that they have to lie down for the rest of the day so it can stack all your energy out of you
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anything else yep very much so yeah so some people
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will cry but other people will get angry and upset and like we've all probably been running late for a meeting and the
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idiot in front of us jammed the photocopier and we're running late probably get a little bit annoyed then that is not um a sign of depression but
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if someone's always getting upset or they're always on age and just they seem irritated by everything that can be an
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indicator anything else this is random is having a missing house considered a sign of
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people for some people um there's actually some interesting research that shows some people that are really intelligent they live in a mess
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um for some people it's ages but other people you know if they did keep a clean house and then you see the house in a
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total mess yeah that would absolutely be a warning sign so lack of personal hygiene you have someone usually
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presents themselves very well and they come and unshave and they just look like a mess yeah absolutely things like that
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um so you know you um you don't look after yourself so you um you know you're not
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eating properly yeah very much and not only that um there was
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a fascinating study that looked at childhood depression and Asthma and they found that if a child had asthma and
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depression their asthma symptoms were four times as bad as if they only had asthma
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so it can really affect the whole body I think we've got most of these oh numbness so a lot of people with
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depression we think they'll feel sad and some people do but half of all people with depression experience numbness or
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no emotions so if you ever ask someone how are you and they say I don't know they could
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actually be a sign of numbness if we're just looking for people that feel sad we're going to miss a whole lot of people
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uh you know hypersomnia they want to sleep all the time or they can't get to sleep at all they lose all enjoyment in
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life so people say food doesn't taste good and they've even done studies where they've found that people view the world
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in muted Shades of Gray to actually see the world differently
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so some people lose a lot of weight because they don't eat and other people gain a lot of weight so yeah they can
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absolutely be one now for most people when they go to the supermarket choose a breakfast cereal
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how long does it take them to choose one hopefully 30 seconds not too long
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hopefully it's a hopefully it's a simple decision what do you think happens if someone's got depression
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yeah that's simple decision can become overwhelming for someone and it might literally take them 20 or
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30 minutes to decide in fact some people are so overwhelmed they can't decide and
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actually walk out so what it does to their health and everything else that they can't buy the
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food they need we call this brain fog so difficulty
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thinking difficulty making decisions so if you ever recognize that someone used to be you know really sharp really good at replying to emails they'd be really
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decisive and then you notice that they're taking ages to get back to you they don't seem to be making decisions
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things don't seem to be going well that would be something to look out for
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the other big one is um particularly around suicide risk which I'll get to in a minute um is our distorted thinking I know
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someone that made a suicidal team she woke up in hospital all her friends and family were crying by her bedside and
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she genuinely believed this was all an act for the doctors and secretly all her friends and family wanted her dead
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they're not even get for that badly but just be aware that for some people they think they're a burden to other people
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we often think that people that die by Suicide are selfish and fortunately some people think they're doing the world a
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favor so if you ever recognize any symptoms of burdensome or people say you know I'm just taking up space I'm
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costing people money I'm a real burden to others these are things to look out for
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if you were to meet Robin Williams on the street what would you think he's a ghost
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yeah correct but when he was alive he would have seen like the happiest most energetic and joyful person that you've
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ever met we now know underneath that he suffered from depression for years so what was going on there
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yeah so just be aware of some people um can look happy on the outside and
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they can still have depression underneath so if someone tells you they've got depression and you think oh you look so happy always take it
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seriously yeah see you know Flawless images of people
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going about yeah amazing yeah
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you mean that's not your life I thought that was everyone oh right yes yeah
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um yeah I think there's a huge problem there was a completely analystick expectations a lot of people have yeah
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absolutely one of the other things we found is that
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people with depression they don't just experience physical sorry emotional symptoms they can also experience physical symptoms
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so one of those things we found is a lot of people with depression they experience back pain and this is not imaginary the reason for this is your
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brain is connected to the spinal cord and that makes up the central nervous system so it totally affects the brain
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they can filter down to other parts of the body so this is very real
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depression and workplace excellence why might this occur
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yeah if you've got brain fog say if you're in a busy site or something like that we've got lots of moving vehicles
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and you've got someone that's not thinking clearly and they've got brain fog what's likely to happen
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working to make mistakes so there is a health and safety risk to be aware of and particularly if people have got severe depression
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now the good news is that people can get better from depression it's thought that half of all people that experience
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depression will have one or two episodes about their life and they'll never have it again so already you have a 50 cure
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rate they'll just the people learn to live with us they can actually be cured and their brain change that I talked
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about before with the hippocampus the good news is that it can regrow welcome so there are some really good news with
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it take a seat and we're just going over depression and
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now we'll look at anxiety so again before I talked about the high
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rates of depression and we also think that anxiety is rising and absolutely stunning rate this is a report by Gene
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twin she's a very famous adolescent researcher she believes the average young person today based on historical
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records is more stressed and more anxious than psychiatric patients were
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in the 1950s and 60s does that surprise you
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I mean I talk all over New Zealand just about every industry you can imagine doctors nurses counselors social workers
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Builders Farmers police you know you name it I've probably spoken to them anxiety just seems to be everywhere
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so what is anxiety well if you were to feel fear in one of these three situations is that a bad
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thing not at all in some situations fear is a really good emotion and you want to feel
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it especially if you're being chased by a tiger if you don't feel fear you will become lunch
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so fear can have its uses when you become fearful your body activates What's called the sympathetic nervous
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system your body gets pumped full of adrenaline nor adrenaline and cortisol and all these chemicals prime your body
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for Action so you can fight the thing off or you can run away
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your um hat beats a lot faster your muscles become stronger your pupils dilate all
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these things happen so you're in defense mode this response is brilliant if you're being chased by a tiger
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what do you think anxiety is
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in a better race it's a really false alarm so if we take this classroom here no one is going to die in that classroom
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okay no one has done any physical danger there's no guns or knives or anything like that but if someone had anxiety in
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that classroom their body would um present the emergency response they'd be their heart would start to race some
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people would feel like they're going to die so they have the response of feeling like there's a tiger in the room but
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there's no tiger why do you think people get anxiety in situations that aren't dangerous
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when you're thinking about the body's emergency response it is designed to be blindingly fast it is not particularly
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accurate so if there's a rustling in a bush and it could be a tiger or it could be a bird your body says it's better to
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set off the emergency response and be wrong than to go over there and find oh this the tiger and by the time you do
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that you'll be dead the emergency response is blindingly fast but it's not accurate and we think
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that lack of accuracy is why people get anxiety around things that aren't really dangerous
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um initially without treatment how much control do you think you have over this not a lot
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yeah if your body thinks you're in danger it's going to set off the emergency response and if someone said
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to you just calm down don't worry it's okay fear of a tiger or someone telling you calm down which one's more important
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now a lot of people with anxiety they complain of tummy upsets and we often think they might be making this up to get out of something they don't want to
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do but when the sympathetic nervous system goes off it switches off the digestive organs and the reason for that
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is if you're under attack by a tiger your body wants to take all the unnecessary energy that it has
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and it wants to put it into survival digestion uses quite a lot of energy and
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if you're about to be eaten by a Target you don't need to digest food so your body switches off the digestive organs
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so this is why people feel physically sick when they have anxiety they're not just making this up they've sometimes
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either feel like they're going to throw up or they actually will
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there's just four things the frightened brain can do faint freeze flee or fight it is important to talk about the freeze
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response it's probably the most common response that people have um this is we just people freeze up and
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they don't do anything and just as a word if you're ever doing training with people um St John has found that if you train
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people in a classroom to attend accidents um when people get out to the real world they don't respond as they did in the
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training but if you have actors in makeup and you have simulated car crashes and things like that people
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respond much better and that's a way to overcome the phrase response
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now where is the think logically solve difficult problems you know playing for future where's that in any of those
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modes unfortunately people having anxiety
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they're in the here and now they don't think about the future or long-term decisions
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there's a strong link between fear and violence this is the fight response so
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it's been found that a lot of say domestic violence happens when people are afraid in the last couple of years
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of the pandemic we think domestic violence then doubled or troubled in New Zealand so just be aware when a lot of people are anxious they can become quite
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aggressive and sometimes people do some really really dumb things about six years ago
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in America there was a man in a petrol station he had a terrible fear of spiders and he saw a spider on his
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petrol tank so we did what all of us would do he took out his lighter and he
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lit the spider on fire and the Petrol in the car and the whole
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town petrol station now sitting here logically we know that was a really dumb thing to do
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what was he thinking yeah this is the problem when you're in
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that anxious mode you don't think about anything like I'm gonna look like a [ __ ] on the news tomorrow you adjust in
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the Here and Now it's unfortunately people make bad decisions down to him
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the worst form of anxiety you can have is what's called a panic attack and this mimics the symptoms of a heart attack when people feel like the chest is
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tightening up looking like their throat's tightening up and they feel like they're going to die now if you're not sure is this a heart
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attack or a panic attack if it's someone younger it's probably a panic attack if
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it's someone middle age and you're not sure it is better to assume it's a heart attack get it checked out by a medical
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professional because you don't want to be wrong on that one any idea how you could stop someone
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having a panic attack
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yep yep yeah yeah it's absolutely one technique
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and the other way is to get people to breathe so if someone's having a painter can take in front of you say I think
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you're having a panic attack I know this is really scary but I want you to
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breathe with me we're going to do it together now if you take a deep breath if
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someone's having a panic attack how much of a deep breath will they be able to take not much at all but um if you take a
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um and if you might have to do this over and over again how long do you think it'll take to calm someone down that's having a panic attack
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well yeah probably a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes because that's how long cortisol can stay in your system for so it's not
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a you know take five minutes go away and come back it's actually quite a long time
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and light depression anxiety is treatable with the right help I'll talk about some options a little bit later
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oh uh what's so one on the slide um a lot of people also get what's called phone anxiety this is where they get
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very nervous talking on the phone how is this a problem for getting help for a lot of people
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at the end of every media article on suicide we have this massive list of helplines
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that if people struggle to talk on the phone they won't access the help they need so for example youth line they have
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a phone number a text number an email line there's multiple ways to get help
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that was anxiety difference of being nudes yeah so I'd say that for a lot of people and if they think about giving a
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talk in public well if they think about a job interview it's probably fairly normal to you know maybe feel a bit nervous that's that's life that is not
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anxiety it's really when you couldn't go to that job interview you were so anxious you threw up you couldn't
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concentrate at all it's probably more into the anxiety category so when it stops you leading a normal happy and
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productive life that's when it turns from just normal life just normal nerves which we all get to probably anxiety
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right post-traumatic stress disorder what do we know about this
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it's very well I'll show you why it's real in a minute um so let's think about a memory most people can remember what they did on
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Christmas day that's usually a feeling we were all day so if you think back to what you did on Christmas day maybe you
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can remember the people you were with the food you had maybe the presents you got but when you think about that you
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think about that as a distant memory right you don't relive it what do you think happens with PTSD
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you re-love the event over and over again as if you are going through it so
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for example if someone was in a bad car crash 20 or 30 years ago and they have PTSD they re-live it as if it's
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happening to them again not only do they relive it in their mind it's like their whole body is being
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taken back to that situation so it's like it can be a bodily flashback for a lot of people is it of a single thing
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if people say the biggest yeah yeah excellent question um so for
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some people it will be one specific event you know if there was say a mortar shell or something that exploded near
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them some people will have a one-off event there's other people that you know it's the whole deployment or something
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like that that could trigger it um in terms of the way they present there's not a lot of difference in terms
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of people have flashbacks um to give you an idea of how debilitating this can be for someone someone I know um she was with her
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brother on a car I think they're about 12 at the time there's a bad car crash her brother was killed and we think her
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face was pushed into the leather seat in front of her every time she smelt leather she had a flashback of that car
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crash so think about how many of the other things you've got on you can you imagine being allergic to life for years she
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didn't understand what was happening she just seemed to have this explosive outbursts for no obvious reason
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so it can be very very difficult and you can obviously have multiple traumas like you know in Christchurch is
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when the earthquakes the mosque shooting so yeah yeah there can be several things
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so what is going on in the brain with PTSD well this is a brain scan by Ruth lenius
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right let me explain this so up here and by the way white orange and yellow means the brain is doing more so up here
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you've got the prefrontal cortex that's the planning logical and part of the brain and we can see
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with someone without PTSD that's showing lots of activation up here you also have the parietal lobes that's where you are
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in space and time what has happened to the PTSD brain
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it's doing something it's very much doing something
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yep any guess that's what that area might be this is yeah the limbo the memory and
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emotional bit the limbic system so what has happened is people with PTSD
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the only parts of their brain that seems to be working
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is the part associated with memory so that this stuck in the past and
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there's no prefrontal cortex to be able to um solve this or move on so it's really really debilitating for
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people how do we tell most people to deal with their PTSD we tell them to
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talk about it there's a sorry just a minute I'll go to this one next sorry I'll come back to
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the previous slide um what we found is there's a bit of a brain called Brokers area this is one of
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the parts of the brain associated with speech and language and we've found that if someone has PTSD this part of the
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brain doesn't show much activation so they can't always talk about what's
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going on for them so I'm sure you've heard you know soldiers coming back from the war people say they never talked about the war
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often they can't talk about the war just go back to that previous slide for
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a second ah so if you want to know more about PTSD there's a fantastic book called the body
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keeps the score by Bissell vanderkolk he's from Harvard Medical School he's probably the world's leading expert on
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hearing trauma and in this book it's got lots more signs and symptoms of PTSD but it's also got a lot about how to heal
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this so I highly highly recommend that okay there's quite a lot of information in a fairly short period of time and
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just with the people um next to you can you discuss some of the things I talked about with depression anxiety and PTSD is there one
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thing you didn't know before or one thing that stood out for you and that Habitat to people around you for a couple of minutes
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so what could cause all this well there's many many factors but one interesting thing that scientists are looking at at the moment is the impact
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of sleep so in the past we used to think if someone had a mental illness like depression or anxiety that would affect
31:41
their sleep what we've now started to realize the last 10 or 15 years is that poor sleep
31:46
can trigger cause or exacerbate some of these things so first of all in terms of suicide most
31:53
suicides happen either in the afternoon after often several nights of really bad sleep or between 12 a.m and 3 A.M I had
32:01
a farmer at one of my public seminars and he came up to me and said he had all these bills on his farm he thought there
32:06
was no way he was ever going to pay them off and he thought suicide was the only way out this happened at about two or
32:12
three in the morning fortunately he gave up on that idea and he got a good night's sleep
32:18
what do you think he thought when he woke up in the morning he thought all his problems were
32:25
solvable and even if we haven't got to the point of suicide I'm sure all of us had a really small problem late at night that
32:32
seems like a disaster so in terms of interventions around suicide one of the things I drum on
32:37
about with all the presentations I give is sleep if you can improve that you can make a big difference quite quickly
32:45
the other thing about sleep is it tends to be a rapidly changeable trait and sometimes in terms of Suicide Prevention
32:51
people talk about things like inequality how long does inequality take to change for people
32:58
decades in some cases like it's not a quick fix often but sleep if you know what you're doing you should be able to
33:03
improve someone's sleep pretty quickly so that's one of the reasons that I suggest really trying to focus on sleep
33:09
as an intervention is because it makes a big difference
33:15
so another example of how a mental illness can be related to sleep there's a bit of your brain called the amygdala
33:20
that's one of the parts of the brain that helps process fear and we've found that if you don't get one good night's
33:26
sleep the amygdala can show 60 percent more activation now normally that's not
33:31
too much of a problem because you have a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that tells the amateur
33:37
just calm down don't worry about it it's okay but we found that if you don't get a
33:43
good night's sleep the link between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala doesn't work as well so you've
33:49
got the Amendola firing on all cylinders and you don't have the break and so it's one of the reasons that poor sleep can
33:55
be directly related to anxiety right teenagers
34:01
what do we know about teenagers and sleep first of all when do you think that teenage brain finishes development
34:12
it could be between age 25 and 30. so most adults they produce melatonin
34:19
through the day but they produce enough to go to sleep at about 9 10 or 11 o'clock at night what do we think happened with teenagers
34:30
well they finished producing melatonin at about 11 12 or 1.
34:36
so their biological clock is two to three hours after an adult now we often tell people well if you're
34:42
tired just go to bed earlier what do you think happens if you put someone to sleep and they don't have a
34:47
buildup of melatonin on this system they just lie there they can't get this
34:53
late so sleep is not something you can do automatically you need this buildup of melatonin so telling people to just
34:59
go to bed earlier doesn't actually work for a lot of people so and this is something we should consider
35:06
right there's a whole heap of sleep problems and we don't have time to go through all of them today but what do you think of sleep problems fixable or
35:13
do you think this is something that some people are stuck with for life yeah almost all sleep problems if you
35:20
know what you're doing can be improved I had a man at one of my seminars and he said
35:26
um I think it was in the 70s or 80s and he knew he had sleep apnea his whole life we had breathing difficulties and
35:31
he thought well it's a bit late to do anything about this now and I said like come on why don't you get this sorted out anyway I talked about talking him
35:38
into it but eventually he did and after one night of getting better sleep what do you think he said
35:46
that yeah he also said I feel like a new man so um you know it's never too late to do
35:52
something about this oh see if you go to a MGP or Pharmacy you can get a test on a machine and then
35:59
you can buy this machine that helps you breathe and it stops you waking up at night so they can yep make a difference
36:05
yeah right it's a couple of other things just want to look at very briefly um brain
36:11
injuries we don't talk about this much do you think it sounds got a high or low rate of brain injuries
36:19
yeah we've got one of the highest rates of brain injuries in the world it's not our rugby culture any idea is
36:26
what it is domestic violence we've got the highest education violence in the world probably
36:31
so well it's the oecd so we've got a very very high rate so there's lots of
36:36
people who've got brain injuries that don't know about it some of the symptoms of a brain injury can be memory loss aggression and fatigue what does that
36:43
look really similar to depression yeah so this is why it's
36:48
importantly to qualified health professional make a diagnosis um just to give you an idea at frontiers of Hope probably half of all the people
36:55
that come to us with so-called treatment resistant depression they actually have a brain injury that no one's ever asked
37:00
and they haven't looked at so um really important we try and identify us and the final thing that I want to go
37:06
through oh sorry um if you want more information about brain injuries brain injury New Zealand's Got
37:12
lots of good fact sheets they've got lots of ways to help people um so it's a great site
37:18
something else that's probably worth mentioning in terms of Suicide Prevention there's something called pmdd or pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder now
37:26
most women when they have their period they might be a bit moody or they might be in a bit of pain
37:31
what do you think happens if you have pmdd
37:38
you have an extreme form of us and some people be very happy and then it comes the time of this cycle and they can
37:44
absolutely crash I've Got a Friend with us and one day she was really happy and the next day she just said life is not
37:51
worth loving I can't see how I'm ever going to be happy again and it was scary to see how happy she was when and then
37:56
just totally totally fresh so a lot of women have this and they don't realize about it they have it so it's important
38:03
to raise some more awareness yeah right on to Suicide Prevention
38:10
now what do you think can we actually prevent suicides or if someone's really determined are they just going to do it
38:16
and there's nothing we can do to stop a lot of people think that if we stop them doing it one way they're just going
38:22
to do it another way there's no point even trying is this very important study conducted
38:27
on the people that were going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge so and between 1937 and 1971 500 people
38:35
stopped off jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge many of these people were physically held back so these were not
38:41
people that had vague thoughts of suicide these were people that had a plan and they were actively carrying it
38:46
out where the researchers followed them up years later they found a staggering 94
38:52
were still alive or had died of natural causes so in other words if you can help
38:58
someone at that time of Crisis there was an exceptionally High chance that they will live
39:05
so we certainly um I've talked about depression and that's certainly a risk factor for our suicide but did you know
39:12
that a lot of suicides are not the result of mental illness a lot are the results of like a relationship breakout
39:18
getting fired from a job it's a same-day crisis and overall somewhere between a
39:23
third to a half of all suicides as a result of the same day crisis and particularly for men it's not like 80
39:30
percent of suicides are not the result of mental illness
39:35
so this is where um failure has a big role in this I'll talk about that a little bit later
39:45
so we often think that suicides are planned over a really long period of time and some of them are but this study
39:50
asked the team survivors how long was there between you thinking about this and carrying it out 24 said five minutes or less
40:01
so a lot of suicide yeah so I heck of a lot of them are very very spontaneous they are not a
40:07
carefully thought out plan what's something that can make people more spontaneous
40:14
poor sleep so one of the reasons I put sleep as an intervention is it's a very strong way to address some of these
40:19
things so there are some summer signs that are very impulsive and there are others that are planned over a much longer period of
40:26
time the ones that are planned over a longer period of time these are some of the things to look for so if you recognize
40:33
that anyone's talking a lot about death you need to talk to them I'll teach you how to do that in a minute if you hear someone say things like
40:40
there's no point anymore suddenly getting better after long history of depression isn't that a good
40:45
thing uh well unfortunately I found is a lot of people who've been depressed for a
40:51
long period of time they suddenly get better it's because they've made a decision to end it and that's why their mood seems to increase so start asking
40:58
questions with that and what we call ruminant of thoughts so this is where if someone say had a relationship break up
41:04
10 years ago if they're always going on about that and they can't get that out of their mind they ruminate on this
41:09
that's possibly a risk factor for suicide and giving away prized positions I'm not talking about someone on the
41:16
wedding day getting a family heirloom this would be out of the blue signpost all the positions for sale on Facebook
41:21
start asking questions writing goodbye notes significant negative changes or events talking about
41:28
wanting to die by Suicide or feeling hopeless how do you think people might convey
41:34
that they feel hopeless
41:39
if someone's lost a job and they say something like I'm never going to find another job again that could be a
41:45
hopeless statement so we need to look out for things like that
41:51
so if you recognize any of those warning signs that I've just talked about you should always ask the person now some
41:58
people think hold on this is not my job I'm not trying to do this do we have psychiatrists patrolling the
42:04
streets looking for people that are suicidal so who do you think is the first person
42:10
that's most likely to pick this up yeah or colleague someone like that so
42:16
this is something that anyone can ask what I'm about to teach in our describe as mental health first aid so we teach
42:23
um physical first aid we're not teaching someone how to be a surgeon in a couple of hours you're teaching someone some
42:28
basic life-saving techniques that can help them till more help arrives
42:34
so if you recognize any of those warning signs that I talked about or you're concerned about someone you need to
42:39
explicitly ask them you say you just said to me you don't think you're ever going to find a job or
42:45
you said there's no point anymore I know this might be a really tough question
42:51
but does this mean you're thinking about ending your life or suicide you must use the word suicide or end your life if you
42:58
just say are you going to do something stupid people they could mean are you going to get drunk now we don't mind if they say no that's
43:05
okay we can breathe a sigh of relief but what do we do if they say yes
43:13
well a really good thing to say if someone says yes is I am so glad you told me that
43:19
how do you think it would feel to admit that you're suicidal to someone else what have I done if I told the right
43:25
person but if you hear the words I am so glad you told me that you'll probably
43:30
think I told the right person I'm somebody worried that if the person's not suicidal could ask and be
43:37
dangerous research is Crystal Clear if someone is not suicidal asking them does
43:42
not give them ideas so we need to be really clear on that one
43:48
foreign do you think people will tell you the truth
43:53
I've asked the hundreds if not literally thousands of people this in my lifetime um the overwhelmed majority have told me
43:59
the truth so if you ask this in a genuine way most people give you a good answer what do you think you should do if you
44:05
think they're joking still take it seriously one bad woman
44:13
said to me I'm gonna go kill myself now and she was laughing and she was smiling I was 99 sure she was joking but I
44:20
stopped and I said sorry you just said to me you want to kill yourself do you really mean that and
44:26
then suddenly her face turned solemn and she noddled so even if you think someone's joking about it do take it
44:32
seriously right now the next bit is if someone's
44:38
suicidal you need to make some sort of safety plan in proportion to the risk they are in so if you ask someone when
44:44
are you going to do it and they say next year sometime you need to get that person less not no help if someone says
44:50
they're going to do it this afternoon what do you do
44:57
yeah drop whatever you're doing whatever you're doing is not as important as saving someone's life okay so filling
45:04
out that risk management survey or something like that not as important as saving someone's life so someone's about
45:10
to die in the very near future don't leave them alone and get them to more
45:15
help so you've got your check plans you've got people like nurses if it's outside of the base
45:21
um I recommend taking people to a GP you should be able to see a GP fairly quickly what's the danger was saying to
45:27
put someone on a long counseling wait list
45:32
yeah it's uh it's devastating for someone to be in crisis and then to be told it'll be nine months before we can
45:39
see you and by the way the Mental Health Service I run frontiers of Hope if someone think crisis we will see them you know we will
45:46
make time for them um we won't say oh yeah we can't see you for nine months or something like that we're really trying to make um help us
45:53
instantaneous as possible
46:00
yeah if you believe someone's about to die in front of you ring one one one
46:05
I've only ever had to call the place on three people in my life how do you think all three of them reacted
46:12
they were not happy you you think I'm gonna okay however one of the things at night one of the things we had a week later
46:18
one I think a couple of months later so even if you have to really upset someone in the short term their life is more
46:24
important than that now I hear some of you say yes but what about the Privacy Act
46:30
some people think the Privacy Act says you can never reveal confidential information is that correct
46:36
no so there is Rule 11. rule 11 says that if you believe that someone is in
46:42
danger of death or serious harm you have an absolute right and I would say obligation to break the confidentiality
46:48
and keep them alive I mean this literally people New Zealand have died because people don't understand the
46:54
Privacy Act they've kept confidential information away from other people so
47:00
we've we're simply had this misunderstanding we've seen her privacy as the highest good human life is always
47:06
more important than someone's privacy so we have to be crystal clear on what the Privacy Act does and does not say
47:13
any questions on yeah
47:18
yeah and worryingly I talked to you about doctors nurses psychologists and people don't know this unfortunately
47:23
because they've had it drilled into them the Privacy Act says oh you can never break confidential information that is
47:29
not what the hex is just one other thing to be aware of so
47:35
I've talked about um depression anxiety and PTSD they're the most common things you'll come across there is something
47:40
else called psychosis what is psychosis
47:47
yeah where people have delusional or irrational thoughts they might climb to the top of a building thinking they can
47:52
fly or they might hear voices The psychosis is something you can manage yourself can you talk someone out
47:59
of us psychosis is a medical emergency your only option is to call 111 you can't
48:06
talk someone out of a psychotic episode they're going to need to be restrained so it's really important unfortunately
48:11
I've seen people teach mental health first aid courses where they imply you can talk anyone out of us and you can
48:16
help anyone if they've got psychosis you really really can't
48:22
foreign after this you can go around diagnosing
48:29
all your friends and family with mental illnesses as I mentioned before some of the
48:34
symptoms of a brain injury can be very similar to those of depression so it's
48:40
too important to let a qualified medical professional make the diagnosis
48:46
right so I've talked about what to do if you think someone's suicidal what do you think you should do if maybe you're concerned that someone's depressed or a
48:52
bit anxious but you don't think they're quite at the point of suicide as we've said before if you ask someone how are you
48:58
you're probably going to get the response I'm fine even if they're not so you need to ask it in a different way
49:04
a really good way to go up to someone is to say what you've observed so for example if you know that someone used to
49:10
be a really happy person they used to come to lots of social events and they used to seem to have a likeness about
49:16
them but now you've noticed well they seem to have the weight of the world on their shoulders they've stopped coming
49:21
to social events you should go up to that person privately and say lately I
49:27
have noticed you don't seem to be yourself I've noticed that you don't seem to have
49:32
the same happiness you used to and I've noticed that you haven't been coming out to as many social events
49:38
if you say I have noticed and list concrete things how do most people react to that
49:47
some will be surprised because they won't know but you can't just brush that off if you just ask someone how are you
49:53
you can brush that off really easily but if you say something along the lines of I have noticed in this concrete examples
49:58
it's much harder to brush that off
50:04
there's something called the bystander effect and this happens when someone's lying injured on the road lots of people
50:10
walk past because they all think everyone else will do something about this and unfortunately I've given talks to
50:16
workplaces where there might be a hundred people in the workplace and everyone knows that someone's not coping
50:21
and unfortunately no one does anything because they all think someone else will do something if you notice that
50:28
someone's not coping make it your personal responsibility to do something about it
50:33
and honestly I've written a book um on suicide prevention if I became unwell I would far rather 10 people came up to me
50:40
and said Michael I've noticed Michael I'm concerned about you and for everyone to think well he wrote a book on suicide
50:45
prevention he must know what he's doing he must be okay so if you notice it do something about
50:50
it and if for some reason like it's a senior officer and you don't feel um comfortable talking to them you know
50:55
tell their manager tell someone but make sure you do something about it any questions on that
51:04
okay so if it's all too confusing if um as I
51:10
said before a lot of people say with depression they get overwhelmed making decisions so if you Google something like counselor in your area usually a
51:17
whole lot of responses come up and then you've got things like would you like a CBT counselor a DBT counselor a person
51:23
seems a therapist an acceptance and commitment therapist a Gestalt therapist a nature therapist what do you want
51:29
and it's really overwhelming for some people so it's all too overwhelming I say go see your GP because it's one
51:36
place to go to there's something called The Family
51:41
Services directory has anyone come across this has a complete list of all the support agencies throughout New
51:47
Zealand there's about 5 000 Nationwide I recommend you go on there and just find out about some of the services that are
51:53
there in your area because you never know when you might need this I host a local radio show and planes FM
52:00
in Christchurch and I've asked person after person if you had one bit of advice for someone going through this
52:05
what would it be any idea what person after person has said to me
52:13
they said I wished I knew I could change counselors or doctors so in other words the help you're
52:19
getting is not helping you you can change
52:24
okay and the last how are we doing for time I'll be about three minutes over uh I
52:30
just want to talk about one thing that can actually help um get you better so this was a group of mainly retired
52:36
men in Christchurch and they thought look we're not the kind of men that want to sit around in group therapy and
52:41
unfortunately a lot of them were quite depressed they thought our career is over and often in the Western World when
52:47
we meet someone we ask them what do you do and if you don't have something to say a lot of people don't feel that
52:52
great about themselves so these people got together and they thought look we don't want to sit down in group therapy but we're quite
52:58
practical we're quite good with our hands so they got together in groups of two or three and they went around door knocking and they said to people if
53:05
you've had any odd jobs around the house like putting up a shelf fixing a washer we'll do that for free
53:10
what impact do you think this had on people massive so when they made a good group
53:16
of friends during this they got out of the house they weren't sitting around feeling sorry for themselves and they felt they were doing something positive
53:22
for society so volunteering can be a great way to address some of the things I've talked about
53:28
I think we're really bad yeah really bad yeah yeah
53:37
I'm interested enough for most people actually the happiest after age 70. so unfortunately other people when they
53:43
retire they really go downhill if you can just get through that bit you're probably going to have the best time of your life
53:48
so yeah um not only does volunteering make you feel better the study of over five and a
53:53
half thousand elderly people found that those that volunteered for one or two hours a week they had a 73 sorry a 63
54:00
lower chance of dying it's not only can volunteering make you feel better it could actually save your life
54:10
one of the things that unfortunately I see a lot of people talk about mental health treatment and they say things
54:15
like you know take time for yourself practice self-care and all these sorts of things and it's all about you
54:23
what we know about well-being all has to do with relationships and
54:29
unfortunately many of the treatments that we offer today they're all in isolation you know they're all people being on their own when actually we need
54:36
to connect people together the largest ever study of longevity or how to live a long life it found that I
54:43
believe not the biggest predictor of living a long life they had nothing to do with smoking eating well anything like that the biggest predictor was
54:49
whether you had deep stable positive connections and I feel there's so many bits of
54:55
mental health advice out there most of them about you know you look after yourself take time for yourself
55:00
practice self-care and we forget about other people and really if we want to cure to some of the
55:06
stuff connections that is what really really will help I think danger because people think the
55:13
number of friends that were on Facebook and around the context yeah a deep connection so yeah just any couple of
55:18
people on Facebook unfortunately doesn't quite yeah let's go yeah um the way I describe a deep connection is if you
55:23
were having a really tough time who could you go to those are the people that are your real friends
55:30
okay so um last but now I said before that's like a third to a half of all suicides with a result of a same-day
55:37
crisis such as getting fired from a job or a relationship breakup how do we deal with those
55:43
well a few years ago I was living in the UK and I'd always wanted to do a magic trick in front of a large audience I saw
55:49
the addition to Britain's Got Talent I thought this is my chance so I applied I got through I came to the day of
55:56
filming and I said only 20 minutes backstage to set this up and they all said to me that's fine that's not a
56:01
problem unfortunately someone came to me at 4 30 in the afternoon and they said we need
56:08
you on the stage now so nothing was set up correctly
56:14
everything that could possibly have gone wrong did go wrong but everything that could not possibly
56:19
have gone wrong also somehow managed to go wrong I had 3 000 people in the audience
56:25
yelling off off off to the worst moments of my entire life
56:32
but actually got worse than that because Amanda Holden was absolutely horrible about my teeth and this was going to be
56:37
broadcast in front of 12 million people so if you had a fail fail big right
56:44
yeah so when this happened I thought my life was ruined I thought every time I applied for a job someone's going to
56:50
Google my name and say no way and every time I want to get into a relationship with someone they're going to Google my
56:55
name and say it's not going to happen I was running School camps to the UK and the day after the show aired a new group
57:01
came in I was really hoping they had not seen the most popular show on TV
57:07
they had and they wanted to know what happened well first of all I asked them what their talents were and he came to me and
57:13
I said my towns is failing and they all laughed at me but then I said no no I'm serious anyone can fail once that
57:21
requires no effort and no skill but to have the talent of failing you need to fall off the horse get back up and try
57:26
again then this was a group of teenagers they didn't give me a lot of feedback at the time but afterwards some of them came up
57:32
to me and they said we think you're one of the most inspiring people we've ever met and I said hold on hold on I made a
57:39
turkey of myself on national TV and they were calling me inspiring
57:45
and just yeah don't need to point that out um
57:51
and I thought they'd just be nice about it and just trying to make me feel better but then another group came in they'd
57:56
seen the show I told the story and I got the same reaction from them since I got a good reaction from a couple of groups I figured there might
58:02
be something to this what I've actually started to realize was that we have a massive problem with
58:07
how we deal with failure in this country I was working as a youth worker in an organization in Christchurch we had a
58:14
young Olympian come in to see us she had spent her whole life trying to go to the Olympics and she wanted to win a gold
58:19
medal for New Zealand the day before she came to see us she got a rejection letter in the mail
58:25
without saying she wasn't going to the Olympic team without thinking she immediately tried to end her life
58:32
because when I heard that story I started to understand why Australia could have such an impact on people the problem was in this country we are
58:40
allergic to failure when everyone went to race in school we like to give them a certificate of participation so that no
58:46
one feels bad the problem is in real life if you experience a relationship breakup you do not get a certificate of participation
58:53
divorce proceedings may be but not a certificate of participation and so tragically a lot of people don't
58:59
know how to fail and I mean this literally it is killing people we have too many young men that get fired from a
59:05
job and the first thing they think about is suicide but it doesn't have to be that way what
59:11
if we change the culture what if we had a culture where instead of hiding our failures we openly talked
59:17
about them there's a story about a man that owned a business it didn't do too well in fact
59:23
the business failed so badly this man was left with a debt that took him 20 years to pay off you might have heard of this man his
59:30
name is Abraham Lincoln one of the greatest presidents of the United States now many people know that Lincoln played
59:36
a big role in ending slavery but they don't know about his business failure why we erase this from the history books
59:43
I say we should write this backhand it is not to bring these people down because I think if we know about their
59:48
failures it makes them even greater now it's all very well for me to share
59:53
my biggest failure but if you want to do something about that third to a half of some of all suicides
59:59
I dare to share your big failures with people I don't mean the little ones I don't mean the time not the coffee cup off the
1:00:04
workbench we'll had a good laugh about it no no I mean the time you desperately want to give them that course and they
1:00:09
rejected you on that soul-crushing relationship break up your hand you never know what impact hearing
1:00:16
someone's failure could have because if there's a young man that thinks about suicide if they lose a job if they live in a world where we don't
1:00:22
talk about our failures we hide them and we pretend they don't happen maybe suicide seems like a good option
1:00:29
that if we live in a world where we openly discuss our failures he knows oh yes I know this person they got fired they went on to recover and I know this
1:00:35
other person they also got fired and they went on to recover then suicide may not seem like such a
1:00:40
good idea but we can only do that if we're willing to be open and honest about our failures
1:00:47
right that's everything that I have for you today uh if you do have any questions please you're more than welcome to come up and talk to me at the
1:00:52
end um if anyone's got any specific situations they want to discuss really happy to do that uh there is my email
1:00:59
address um if you want to know about the Mental Health Service I run frontiers of Hope and we can see people online from all
1:01:05
over the country uh so that's the uh if you do have any questions you want to email me about please feel free there's
1:01:11
my email other than that thank you very much for listening and I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon
1:01:17
[Applause]