by Today I heard the news that Greg Boyed, the New Zealand news presenter, had died while on holiday in Switzerland with his family. He had a very good job that gave him national recognition and respect; he had a wife and two kids. But he also had depression. That eventually got the better of him. So very sad. I’ve just watched the short but very moving tribute that his colleague Daniel Faitaua gave on TV One.
Suicide rates in New Zealand are a national tragedy and something of a mystery to me. I did however stumble upon this web page, whose authors clearly have even less of an idea than I do. One thing I do know is that the previous government gave progressively fewer shits about mental health with each of their nine years in power, and the current bunch need to make reversing that trend a top priority.
My own mental health has improved massively since I left New Zealand. As the recent article I read about “shit-life syndrome” spelt out, I had plenty of reasons to be depressed over there. No family, no real sense of home, few friends, and unsatisfying jobs where I spent the day looking at one computer screen or another and attending pointless meetings where I tried not to look stupid. And most of those things are still true now in Romania! Work is a biggie, though.
My mental health problems haven’t completely gone away, and I still take antidepressants, but by making a complete lifestyle change I seem to have escaped that endless desert of despair. My dad sometimes talks about the risks I took in moving to Romania, but it would have been bloody risky to have carried on what I was doing in NZ.
