"The prescribing of anti-depressants doesn't help deal with the causes of the problems that make people depressed or feeling suicidal, they don't help the real condition,'' Ms Williams said.
"What's driving depression and suicides are things like unemployment, poverty, sexual and domestic abuse, poor housing, all things we [in New Zealand] lead the way at."
When her 20-year old daughter Cloudy Williams killed herself in 2008, and until then-Chief Coroner Neil MacLean allowed the inquest into the death to be publicly reported, Ms Williams had no idea suicide was a serious issue in New Zealand, she said.
Since then she has campaigned to have embargoes on reporting those deaths or discussing the topic in schools lifted.
Ms Williams co-founded Community Action on Suicide Prevention, Education and Research (CASPER) with Auckland woman Maria Bradshaw whose teenage son Toran also died by suicide in 2008.
Ms Bradshaw recently completed a paper entitled "It Takes a Village: The case for adopting a social approach to suicide prevention", which questions the MoH position that the majority who carry out suicide could be diagnosed as mentally ill.
"In layperson's terms, the studies on which [the government] rely do no more than say that after a person dies from suicide, their friends and family report that at some point during their lives for a period of two weeks they were sad, had changes in their eating or sleeping patterns, lost interest in things they had previously enjoyed, felt guilty or worthless or thought of suicide."
"There is no evidence that these feelings and behaviours caused their suicide, or that they were anything other than a normal human response to stressful life events or trauma."
Ms Bradshaw said CASPER believed relocating funding from mental health services to services which reduce the impact of the social drivers of suicide was critical to improving outcomes.