Transcript
According to the Health Research Council, almost half of the Pacific population is under twenty years of age and it's concerned at the increasing numbers with mental health issues.
Chief Executive of HRC Kath McPherson says a one key factor in that trend is young people with multiple backgrounds struggling to find their place in the world.
She says mental illness can sometimes be related to the context that people are in, especially when times are pressured.
"Pacific young people, there are quite a lot of expectations on them and I think we certainly heard stories that young people do feel those pressures. In fact, currently Pacific young people don't really use mental health services"
University of Auckland senior lecturer Doctor Jemaima Tiatia-Seath specialises in a number of areas around the study of mental health and Pacific people.
She says that it's not just accessibility to mental health services that needs addressing.
"This is not criticising any of the Pacific mental health services, but the mainstream services are not geared to cater for language barriers or even Pacific cultural competencies, so there needs to be more of that in the different types of services and what resonates with our communities."
Dr Tiatia-Seath says young Pacific people struggle with cultural pressures more because of the difficulties in navigating between multiple worlds.
"Whether its traditional, whether its New Zealand born, whether its their multi-ethnic self, whether its their sexual orientation. All these multiple identities, if we don't help our young people navigate between all these identities, that's more the issue."
Kath McPherson says research into mental health and well-being is necessary and a topic that should concern us all.
"It's relevant in the education. It's relevant in the work sector. So I think looking at ways we can support young people to be as healthy mentally as they are physically and to reduce the impact of mental illness is really crucial."
HRC see this as an opportunity for researchers, health care providers and social workers to collaborate to find strategies that will benefit Pacific youth.
Massey University lecturer Doctor Sione Vaka has done research with HRC in the past focusing on mental illness among Tongans in New Zealand.
Dr Vaka says the large number of Pacific youth who are New Zealand born suffer because of different expectations.
"Some of them with mixed marriages like between ethnicities and the exposures to non-Pacific ways of doing things and living through schools and social networks and all those areas, but at the end of the day when they go home, they go home to a Pacific home with Pacific values and expectations."
He says that the way forward with research into Pacific youth and mental health is culture.
"To work with young people we need to incorporate family, we need to incorporate community, we need to incorporate all those Pacific values that are quite important and what makes a Pacific person a Pacific person, so culture will be very important."
The Health Research Council will take registrations from the first of May until the second of June.
