Key to Life

The Key to Life Charitable Trust is a registered charitable trust aiming to affect positive social change surrounding suicide prevention, suicide awareness and mental health in New Zealand. The Key to Life Charitable Trust is a community driven peer support NGO. We collaborate with clinicians, the government, the private sector and like-minded service providers to affect positive social change in the way New Zealanders perceive suicide and mental health. How? The Key to Life is a natural progression from the proven peer support model employed by the internationally acclaimed Nutters Club. This model maintains a clearly demonstrable track record. This track record is still successfully engaging mental health service users and ordinary New Zealanders as the only initiative worldwide which uses a cost effective and efficient overlay of conventional media (radio, television and publishing) with the innovation of online based social media applications. The Nutters Club plays a major role in addressing and alleviating stigmas associated with suicide and mental illness by acting as a bridge between communities of need and support services for New Zealanders of all ethnicities and socio-economic circumstances. The Key to Life Charitable Trust will develop and produce a series of nationwide media education campaigns that will tackle the ‘stay staunch’ and ‘harden up’ attitude held by many New Zealanders and allow them to see for themselves, the detrimental effect their stance is having on an already vulnerable section of our society. Why? The current stay staunch “let’s not talk about it” culture prevalent in New Zealand society today has proved ineffective. We believe that without positive attitudinal societal change the 547 New Zealander’s who succumbed to suicide last year will be joined by a similar number this year. These figures can no longer be ignored or swept under the carpet by those who champion the ‘stay silent on suicide’ mantra. The fact that 3 families lose someone to suicide every 2 days in a country described by many as ‘gods own’ is an absolute travesty. Our response to this insidious and silent epidemic comes from the real experts on suicide. These are the people who have actually lost someone to suicide or who have attempted suicide themselves and they are all saying the same thing “We need to start opening up and talking about this. We need to be able to share our experience with others who have ‘walked in our shoes’. A safe environment where we won’t be judged and we won’t be shamed.” We say their pleas can no longer be ignored

We know from anecdotal evidence and personal experience that the worst part about being depressed and having thoughts of suicide is the absolute aloneness and helplessness of it all. We also know through our experience with The Nutters Club that sharing life stories helps to counteract these negative emotions of fear, loneliness, shame, isolation and abandonment by providing hope. Our patron Sir John Kirwan is a man who knows all about the power of hope. In his 2010 book “All Blacks Don’t Cry” he wrote ‘At my worst moments, I lost all sense of hope for the future. As I began to slowly get better, I began to be able to say to myself, 'This will pass, you'll get through this. Hang on to hope.'

The Key to Life Charitable Trust uses the frontline experience of those who have walked the walk back to recovery to build bridges to hope. Empowering communities through trust encourages them to become an integral part of the solution and will drive inter-generational attitudinal social change needed to reverse the incidence of suicide and depression.