Twelve days of Christmas: Depression no laughing matter

Auckland Airport is giving $120,000 to 12 charities as part of its annual 12 days of Christmas. The Herald is profiling each initiative.

School aged children don't know Mike King as the funny man, he's instead the guy on stage telling them it's ok to talk about problems and to ask for help.

But despite the serious message, he seems to get a few laughs along the way.

Key to Life Charitable Trust ambassador Mike King and three to four other volunteers travel New Zealand speaking to intermediate and secondary school aged children and communities groups.

Key to Life spent about three days in one town or city and gave two talks to schools during the day and then spoke to community groups at night.

During the one-hour presentation, King discusses his journey growing up and thinking he was worthless which led to a battle with alcohol, depression and drug addiction.

He also tries to remove the stigma around mental health issues and encourages people to talk more openly about their problems.

"We are top of the cliff suicide prevention. The cliff is so far back from the edge that people don't even realise what we are doing is suicide prevention. Again, that is going into schools and normalising problems. "

King said they went into schools arming kids with simple tools to help someone in distress because families and communities were always the first responders.

He said people seemed to think they had to fix the problem when all they really had to do was listen and guide the person to where help was.

King said statistics showed 20 per cent of people have a major episode during their life time associated with some type of suicidal thinking, but 80 per cent of those people never asked for help.

"It's usually because they are embarrassed about what other people will think, what other people will say and what other people will do...

"Stigma is still the number one killer of New Zealanders. And until the 80 per cent of society that know nothing about mental health and can't imagine why anyone would want to take their own life and whose judgemental attitude is having an affect on the 20 per cent of people going through problems.

"And until we change that attitude nothing is going to change. You can have all the best prevention programmes, you can have the best intervention programmes in the world but if society's attitude is 'it's someone else's problem and I don't have to do anything' then it's not going to change."

In 2016, Key to Life gave 106 talks and visited 38 schools.

The much-needed $10,000 grant from Auckland Airport would be spent on resources and travel so five more schools could be visited, helping another 5000 children.

Auckland Airport general manager of people and safety Anna Cassels-Brown said the airport fully supported the message Key to Life was spreading. "We love the work Mike and the Key to Life team are doing to help build the skills and resilience we all need to deal with life's challenges."