Tuesday 29 August at 8.30am
Bereaved parents to announce which parties support political ask

· 606 shoes representing each New Zealander lost to suicide in 2016/17 will be placed at 57 Memorial Drive, Hamilton East and at the Dunedin Octagon today at 12 noon.

Parents of children who died by suicide will announce which parties support their political asks today, says YesWeCare.nz.

The announcement will be made at the memorial of Nicky Stevens, 21, who died from suicide in 2015, at 57 Memorial Dr, Hamilton East at 12 noon.

Mr Stevens’ body was found near the Waikato River site on 12 March 2015, three days after he went missing from a mental health inpatient unit while unsupervised.

Stevens’ parents, Jane Stevens and Dave MacPherson, will place 606 pairs of shoes around his memorial to represent every New Zealander lost to suicide in 2016/2017.

They will put 27 more shoes than planned after the latest suicide numbers, the highest since records began, were released yesterday.

The parents will bring a pair of their son’s shoes.

The same number of shoes will be placed in the Dunedin Octagon at noon today.

Stevens and McPherson were some of the first to call for an independent inquiry into New Zealand’s mental health crisis.

77% of New Zealand support holding an inquiry according to a TVNZ/Colmar Brunton poll.

YesWeCare.nz coordinator Simon Oosterman says a mental health inquiry is one of six political pledges bereaved families asked parties to support on 1 August 2017.

The pledges were crowd-sourced by the coalition with the support of more than 200 bereaved families, he says.

Oosterman says three mothers of children lost to suicide wrote a letter supporting the pledges asking politicians to “have the courage to put politics aside and do what is right”.

The six pledges are:

· Hold a mental health inquiry
· Restore $2.3b in health funding
· Set a suicide reduction target
· Increase primary health, GP funding (for early intervention)
· Commit to safe staffing
· Make every home healthy

Corinda Taylor, one mothers who wrote the letter, is running the Dunedin shoe event.

Taylor’s twenty-year-old son Ross died from suicide while under mental health care in 2013.

The Life Matters Prevention Trust, which Mrs Taylor setup after her son’s death, is supporting todays events.

The trust started collecting a petition calling for an independent inquiry in January 2016 and delivered it to parliament earlier this year.

Today is day four of the “Shoe Project” which is being held across the country.

The Shoe Project started in Cape Reinga and Bluff last Saturday and will finish at Parliament on 10 September, International Suicide Prevention Day.

YesWeCare.nz is a coalition of community groups, patients and their families and people working in health.

The coalition is driven by the Public Service Association (PSA), New Zealand’s mental health union.

The PSA’s national secretary Erin Polaczuk will join the event in Hamilton.

Bereaved families will launch a petition calling on the parties who haven’t supported the pledges to do so.

The petition will also call on party leaders and health spokespeople to meet families face-to-face on September 11 in Wellington on the first day of advanced voting.

ENDS

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