u/Cultural-Lychee-5374

Field report on how the mental health system is chugging along. I popped into see the emergency mental health team after 7 days of moderate-to-intense suicidality. They rang me this morning, 8 days later, to offer me a bed.

If anyone is wondering why our mental health stats look like that… that’s probably a part of it. Two weeks is a long time to want to die before the system has room to help you live.

Seems to me like you shouldn’t need to shit talk the opposition if you actually have something to stand for yourself. I don’t believe the negativity is good for the elections, for democracy, for participation, for the health and welfare of our politicians (who are happy to wave their hankies around the issue of political violence whenever they get to be a victim of it but don’t seem to care much about deescalation when the rhetoric suits them), or for us. It makes New Zealand a worse place.

I’d be happy to never see another one again tbqh.

I said in a comment somewhere that National’s new policy would have people who aren’t even making living wage supporting their (potentially unwell) adult children under 20. This is still true, as the policy doesn’t distinguish between one or two parents. But I thought I’d do the maths to see how close it was for a single earner.

If you find yourself in this situation, you will be better off on $55,000 a year than $65,000 because then your child will receive $20,000 yearly income support that doesn’t have to come from your wallet.

I expect to see a few parents cutting their hours when this policy comes in. It only makes financial sense to do so.

National’s cruel and idiotic schemes won’t result in people working more, it will result in people working less. Which is also what all the rest of their WINZ policies do, incidentally. When you increase the burden of compliance for sick people on benefits, that time and energy comes out of the hours they are already working. Because most jobseekers with medical exemptions do take on some part time work. Just like most young people on benefits already are financially supported by their families. You sort of have to be to survive. If you can’t you’ll be even more fucked mentally or physically by the greater poverty you are living in.

Unwell people aren’t suddenly magically capable of doing more because they have to put more effort in to survive. In fact the stress alone may make them capable of less. Ask me how I know.

(Living wage raises to $29.90 on Sept 1)

I live in Christchurch. I did not want to wake up at 3am to spend my whole day getting to and from this one appointment. This system is stupid. That is all.

Education has been obsessed with leadership for as long as I’ve been in it — everything was about inspiring leadership, leadership opportunities, developing future leaders, etc. Which is weird to me, because it leadership seems like something that people should be able to develop themselves, and if they can’t, they’re not great leaders, are they?

I’m now back in university as an adult student and am noticing some things I missed the first time around. We have student representation that doesn’t get engaged with, a zillion defunct clubs listed on our clubs list because it’s more beneficial to start a club than participate in one, democratic decision making that hardly anyone participates in and even fewer people are actually informed about, and overly-formalised and structured “leadership ladders” that I can’t help thinking produce people keen on credit and control and not enough people good at participating.

A bit like how I’ve noticed promoting the message “get out and vote” without promoting the message “get politically informed, THEN vote” does not produce good democratic decisions, I’m not sure raising a country of leaders without caring about what everyone else is doing underneath them is very productive. Kinda over leadership language and starting to wonder if it isn’t covering quite a large gap where things like “empathy” and “expertise” should live instead.

🥝 —> does not cut it. give me feathers or give me death

Look at all these subpar birds 🦅 🦆🦜🕊️🦢🐓🦃🦉🦤🦩🐦‍⬛🦚🪿 where is our representation? smh