After experiencing an eating disorder, Aucklander Jade Varney began advocating for better mental health services for young people. She tells Alex Spence she is dismayed at the lack of progress nationally.
One day near the end of the election campaign, Jade Varney, an Auckland secondary school student, took a break from studying for her final-year exams and looked over the political parties’ campaign promises on improving youth mental health.
She didn’t see much that inspired her.
A new minister for mental health? A few more training places for psychologists? A $20 million “innovation fund” for community providers?
“That’s great,” Varney says. “But I genuinely do not think it [youth mental health] is a priority.
“It just feels like the words ‘mental health’ get flung around to keep people happy. And it really angers me.”
At 17, Varney was too young to vote in the general election last Saturday, but she is more invested than most in the policies the next government implements in this area.
Varney is recovering from an eating disorder that severely affected her mental and physical health over the past few years. That experience compelled her to campaign for better support and treatment for other children and teenagers who experience mental illness and distress.
On October 29, Varney will run half the Auckland Marathon to raise money for Mike King’s charity, I Am Hope. She will carry hundreds of stones in a backpack during the race in memory of young people who have died by suspected suicide. (At the time of writing, her Givealittle page had raised nearly $1800.)
Varney is one of a growing number of young Kiwis who have experienced mental health difficulties at a crucial time in their lives.
Between 2012 and 2019, according to the landmark Youth2000 study, the number of secondary school students in New Zealand with significant symptoms of depression jumped from 13 per cent to 23 per cent. Nearly a quarter of students in the latest survey reported having self-harmed in the past year, while 21 per cent said they’d seriously thought about suicide.
The reasons for these alarming trends are not well understood but are thought to be a product of several complicated, intersecting factors, including social determinants, changes in parenting, and the rapid uptake of smartphones and social media. The Covid-19 pandemic compounded problems for many young people and triggered new episodes of distress and mental illness for those who had not experienced it before.
As the Herald exposed last year in its Great Minds series, these sharp increases in rates of mental illness, self-harm, and distress have not been matched by an adequate expansion of government-backed initiatives to prevent or treat those conditions, according to health professionals, researchers, officials, parents, and young people.
While Labour committed about $2 billion to improve mental health since 2019, services for children and teenagers remain fragmented, inconsistent, hard to access, and difficult to navigate.
Every year, thousands of teenagers spend hours in hospital emergency departments after self-harm incidents and suicide attempts. Some patients spend many months waiting for psychological therapies that are vital for recovery. Prescribing of antidepressants and other psychiatric medicines for under-20s has drastically increased.
For Varney, the first major experience with mental illness began during the Covid lockdown of autumn 2020.
Suddenly isolated from school and friends, Varney, then 14, says she went down a rabbit hole of dieting and exercise. It was partly inspired by viral trends on social media, where she saw young women glamorising extreme calorie restriction. “That’s what I’ve got to do if I want to lose weight,” she thought.
The lockdown ended but Varney’s weight loss continued and soon people were getting concerned. Not long after, she was diagnosed with anorexia.
Varney’s recovery came only after intensive therapy with a private specialist, a two-month break from school, and immense emotional strain on her and her family.
She was fortunate, she says, that she was able to get treatment from one of the leading clinicians in the field in Auckland.
Others she knew with eating disorders went through the public system, did not receive the same quality and consistency of care, and endured harder recoveries because of it.
The disparity inspired Varney to create a petition calling on the government to improve mental health services for youths.
After the petition got more than 12,000 signatures online, amplified by King’s support, it was presented to Parliament by Act leader David Seymour, Varney’s local MP. Varney was invited onto TV and radio to discuss the topic.
She continued to push the issue last year as one of 120 Youth MPs in the 2022 Youth Parliament. “Ignored, forgotten, and neglected, the three words that come to mind when I first think of New Zealand’s youth mental health services,” Varney told the House.
Because of her activism, Varney says she has encountered many young people around the country who haven’t been able to access support when they needed it.
“The recurring theme that I’ve been getting from these people was that they weren’t able to find help,” she says.
Labour’s investments into mental health-related services did include some positive initiatives for young people, such as the Mana Ake programme in schools and the Piki therapy scheme for 18-to-25-year-olds in Wellington.
But much of the focus has been on developing early interventions in primary care that are not specifically designed for young people.
The youth services that have been established tend to be isolated to specific groups or places and not universally available. And they have been slow to expand, hampered by staffing shortages, funding constraints, and other obstacles that plague the sector.
Varney is frustrated there are still huge gaps in prevention, early intervention, and specialist treatment for young people. And she is not convinced, for all the promises by politicians, that any of the parties have a comprehensive vision for resolving the crisis.
During the election campaign, National promised to introduce a dedicated Minister for Mental Health; to establish a $20 million innovation fund for community projects (it cited Gumboot Friday, King’s online counselling services for youth, as an example of the sort of thing it wants to encourage); and to recruit and train more clinical staff such as psychiatrists and psychologists.
Act, its expected partner in government, pledged to create a new national agency, Mental Health and Addiction New Zealand (MHANZ), to direct $2 billion in annual spending on mental health services. Act says it wants users to be able to choose between service providers and would empower MHANZ to contract those providers and monitor their effectiveness.
Varney says mental health is the top priority among her contemporaries, and they are frustrated their sense of urgency is not shared by policymakers in Wellington.
“It’s such an important issue,” she says. “We’re literally the future of the country. And hardly any emphasis or priority has been placed on helping us.”
“I’m very worried for the generation below mine,” she continues. “Because I think if nothing starts to change soon, nothing will change for a long time. These systems will just continue to worsen. The generations that are following me will have no foundation to stand on whatsoever.”
Alex Spence is a senior investigative journalist based in Auckland. Before joining the Herald, he spent 17 years in London where he worked for The Times, Politico, and BuzzFeed News. He can be reached at alex.spence@nzme.co.nz or by text or secure Signal messaging at 027 235 8834.
