Tui Taurua: Into the light

Tui Taurua describes herself as a “mental health warrior”. After more than two decades in and out of psychiatric hospitals, being over-medicated and misdiagnosed, she turned to te ao Māori for answers. It saved her life, as she tells Dale Husband in this kōrero. Now, she uses her lived experience to fight for change in a system that too often fails Māori.  (Warning: This kōrero discusses suicide.)

 

Ngā mihi, Tui. I always start with family history, so would you talk to us, please, about your upbringing and what your folks were doing when you were young?

I was brought up when Dad was in the army. We lived in Papakura for most of my school years. I went to Papakura Normal Primary School and Papakura Intermediate. Then I went to Rangitoto College when Dad worked in Paremoremo prison as a warden.

You’re part of a big brood, and you’re the eldest, I hear?

Yes, I’m the first cab off the rank. There are 11 of us all told.

My mum and dad had four children — that was the first family. And then my father married and had four children. And Mum also married and had three more children, but one died in early childhood. We found another sister on Dad’s side just before he died.

Being the eldest comes with responsibility. You don’t choose to be a tuakana, but I guess you’re chosen.

No, you wouldn’t choose it.

How did that responsibility sit with you, Tui?

Difficult, really. I was in the psychiatric system for many years, and it was difficult for me to understand that role while trying to survive the psychiatric system.

I moved into the role when our dad passed away in 2018, and I had to start picking up some of his mahi. It was still hard for me to sit comfortably in it, but we’re getting there now.

I loved your dad. I was lucky to work with him in the latter part of his life, and he was always an interesting character, Pāpā Kingi. He told me that it was only when he was in the army that he discovered his real name. He’d grown up being called Albert. He reckoned he was named after a rooster.

Yes. That story came out when I was the chair of the Māori lived experience group Te Kete Pounamu around 2016. I brought my father on to be my kaumātua, and that’s when he started sharing stories about his name, about battle fatigue, and the PTSD that he carried. What I saw was him being with like-minded people who’ve had struggles with mental health. I felt like I saw a different side of my father. He felt accepted for who he was. He didn’t have to hide it.

There are a lot of sides to my dad, and I loved all of them.

I don’t know your mum at all. Would you be kind enough to talk about her lines?

My mother was Mate Horomoana Ashby. She was a tiny woman with lots of power. She was fun, but she was also very direct. Her whakapapa, Ngāti Rāhiri, is ahikā here in Waitangi.

But she didn’t raise me. I didn’t grow up with her — I met her when I was older. It was a bit of a struggle for a mother-daughter relationship, but it was okay. It’s part and parcel of not meeting until I was a teenager.

She passed away in 1999. She had moved to Waitangi, and I would visit her quite regularly between my psychiatric admissions over the years. She passed on some whenua to me, and I now live in Waitangi in the papakāinga. It was a great gift for her to give me that land because it really helped my health and wellbeing to feel like I belong to the whenua and my whakapapa.

And then my dad’s whakapapa — Ngāti-Rēhia, Ngāti Kawa, Ngāti Rāhiri — really cemented who I was. I guess that’s when I started feeling more comfortable with being a tuakana. When I came home to Waitangi, I started connecting with my natural brothers and sisters, which has been an amazing opportunity and a blessing.

It wasn’t easy for any of us, but then trauma has a way of changing and shifting things. Coming out of trauma is like coming into the sun. You come out of the trauma and be the best that you can be. It takes time, and it takes perseverance, but it can be done. I’ve come out of te kore, te pō and into te ao mārama, which is a lovely warm place to be.

Army life is difficult on families. I know your dad did stints offshore as well. You said that you reconnected with your mum later in life. Who raised you? Were you brought up as a whāngai in another whānau?

I was brought up with my dad’s second wife — Dad was in the army, so he wasn’t home a lot. But I met my natural mother when I was 17, just as I’d moved into the workforce. I’d left college and started working at John Burns in Auckland as a junior typist. And I didn’t meet my natural brothers and sisters until I met Mum.

Because we’re talking about te pō, te kore and te ao mārama, tell us about the dark times. How did trauma surface for you? When did you first enter the mental health system?

I entered the mental health system in 1977, after the birth of my eldest son. His birth was traumatic, an emergency caesarean, and I was admitted under the diagnosis of postnatal depression. I believe that was brought forward by the childhood experiences that I’d been running from but had always haunted me. I struggled with anxiety and panic attacks, which affected my view of myself.

I grew up in an environment that was traumatising. My story could be likened to Cinderella, except I didn’t have the prince riding up on his white horse to save me. I heard negative voices inside my head, which I believe were triggered by what I heard in my home. I lived in fear of physical and mental retribution. I felt unloved, unprotected, and unsafe for my whole childhood, which also affected my adulthood.

I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. My life was a disorderly mess. I didn’t find real peace until my mid-60s.

Kia ora, Tui. Our psychiatric system is very westernised, isn’t it, and often fails to understand us as Māori. Is that how you found it? How did you find your way out of that dark place and into the light, as you say?

I’m actually writing an essay, trying to figure this out. I’m doing a master’s degree, and these are questions that I’m having to reflect on. One of the things that became an important component of my life was being a voice-hearer. I didn’t realise what I was hearing, and I didn’t understand how to deal with it.

It feels like the voices have always been a part of my life. But I had no idea how to connect with them. My studies show that trauma exacerbated the voices. I didn’t really come to understand them until 2001 when I took my recovery seriously and looked to te ao Māori to save my life.

Westernised clinical services viewed my voices as hallucinations and prescribed medication. Their observation failed to address the trauma, which had left me broken mentally, physically, sexually, and spiritually. One psychiatrist told me to “grow up.” They just kept giving me medication, trying to stop all these voices. I was on 20-plus medications a day. Some of them were really yucky, and I didn’t know what to do about them. I became very lethargic and wasn’t nice at all.

Those experiences left me feeling like a pawn in a system that didn’t understand or want to understand me. The result was more than two decades of self-destructive patterns and behaviours. I was in and out of hospital, in and out of emergency departments, quite regularly. It became a cyclical pattern, a pathway to nowhere.

I don’t know how I stayed strong and managed to work my way through, because it’s not an easy journey.

After hitting rock bottom, I managed to turn my life around. Although I’m still on medication 48 years later, the dosage has been significantly reduced. The voices of my tūpuna have been my comfort and continue to be a guiding force in my life. I’ve overcome addiction to alcohol and drugs, which were once my coping mechanisms for dealing with trauma.

My journey to recovery was immeasurable. But not only has it been worthwhile, it’s also been my teacher.

Ngā mihi. Was there a particular event or person who helped to get you on that path?

What really changed me is when I started working in mental health in 1995. Around Christmas 1994, my sister saw an ad in the newspaper looking for community support workers. They were looking at bringing people out of the psychiatric institutions into the community. The advert encouraged people with mental health illness or distress, or diagnosis, whatever you want to call it, to apply for these jobs. I applied, and I got it. I started working in mental health in March 1995. Last month marked my 30th year in this work.

There were two documents that became important to me. One was The Blueprint, which came out in 1996. It talked about people with a diagnosis learning to live in the presence of their mental illness.

That was a lightbulb moment for me. I had always thought that you get your assessment, you get your diagnosis, you get your medication, and eventually you’re cured. But that’s not how it works at all.

So, I had to find my way through this stuff. At one point, I was in a psychiatric unit talking to the kaumātua about suicide and how I didn’t like the world. It’s not so much that I wanted to die as that I wanted to return to my nanny, who I loved, and I knew she loved me.

That was my dad’s mum, Arihia Pokai Heihei, who married my grandfather, Te Huhu Taurua. He was in World War Two as a prisoner of war — he came back sick and died while still in his mid-40s. She passed away in the 1980s. I spent every school holiday with my grandmother, who lived in Waitangi behind the marae. She and Dad spoke fluent te reo together. I always felt loved and safe with her.

Anyway, the kaumātua told me that if I had gone through with my suicide attempt, I would lose my whānau in the spirit world. That was a wake-up call for me because I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to lose my whānau.

So, I had to learn to live with my mental health.

But the psychiatric system wasn’t working for me — not the westernised model anyway, with its medication, diagnosis, and admissions and all these walls around you with barbed wire on the top and locked doors. As my dad said one time, “Oh my goodness, it’s like prison.”

That’s when I thought: What if I turn to mātauranga Māori? Would that save me?

First, I needed to find out what that mātauranga is. What does it look like? Because Dad grew up having to change his name to Albert and being beaten at school, he didn’t pass any of his mātauranga Māori knowledge to us. We didn’t have our reo or anything. So, I had to start delving into it for myself, and that’s when the second document, Te Whare Tapa Whā, by Mason Durie, became important.

The part of Te Whare Tapa Whā that really connected with me is wairua. I realised my voices were coming from the wairua. They were my tūpuna talking to me. Once I realised that, I decided to view my mental illness as a battle, and I was going to be a warrior. As a warrior, I was going to confront my mental illness or my diagnosis head-on and see if that would change.

It took another 20 years, but it did change. It saved my life. And out of that, I would write about my experience. I wrote about going to my awa, to my moana, about eating kai moana, because I knew it fed my spirit as much as it fed my tinana.

And I started learning my whakapapa, and learning how our mātauranga Māori can lead to recovery. Had I not gone there, I believe that the western model would have killed me. I believe I would’ve been successful in attempting suicide, and I would not be here today.

But here I am, 68 now, going on 69, and I’m having a vibrant life because I turned to my mātauranga Māori, and I started trusting my voices, and learning what I needed to learn.

I wrote this model called Rapua Te Hinengaro Tangata Toa, which means to seek the mind of a warrior. That’s how I dealt with my mental illness, and that’s how I changed my destiny.

But as I said, it’s not a short-term thing. It was about taking one day at a time. I used to look at the waves on the sea and see how they’re constantly moving towards the beach, and I realised that I have to persevere like the waves. I just have to keep going, never give up, and keep moving.

I’ve never been back into the psychiatric system since 2001. I’m still on medication to help with the voices, because when I’m busy, they all want to talk at once, and I really need them to give me some sleep. So, I have a chat with them and say: “Can you fullas give me a bit of a rest?” And I take a bit of quetiapine, which helps me rest as well.

I still get anxious every once in a while, but I can deal with it now. I don’t have panic attacks anymore, and my anxiety is limited. The anxiety today is really about wanting to do better in whatever I’m doing, especially just before I present at a conference, wānanga or such.

But the thing for me is to just keep moving. Don’t be afraid, stand in your truth, and do what you need to do. With that perspective, I have many opportunities, and that’s how I’ve ended up in lots of different roles within the lived experience space.

It took some time for you to connect the dots that the voices you’re hearing are your tūpuna speaking to you, albeit they can be a bit noisy at times when you don’t want it. 

You’re not wrong.

What would you say of the need for more recognition of this beautiful side of our people?

The mental health services keep talking about Te Tiriti and wanting more mātauranga, but I still don’t see the changes. They’re not prepared to change the structures that hold us in spaces that are not okay. They say they want to change, but the structures and their way of writing the policies stand in the way. They write in a particular way — they take the heart out of the words, so it becomes a clinical black and white document, and Māori are not black and white. That’s part of the issue for me.

Yes, there are good people out there who try to change their practices. But they’re bound by accreditation boards — they’re bound by these things that hold them back. I was involved in one group that said they needed the approval of accreditation boards because they’re about keeping people safe. And I asked: “Which people are you talking about when you talk about keeping them safe? Because you’re not keeping Māori safe.”

That’s a little bit of the challenge that I have in this space. I would like to see true partnership in the health system. True partnership means Māori holding the purse strings and making the decisions for ourselves. Let us monitor the cultural training of health practitioners, and make sure workforce practices identify and call out those who work from an unconscious bias.

We get misdiagnosed, overmedicated, and written off. People don’t listen to us. They don’t see our wairua. They don’t ask about our whakapapa, our whānau, our whenua. They just want to manage our symptoms.

There are also very few Māori in clinical roles. That needs to change. We need Māori psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists — not just cultural workers. And we need to bring in mātauranga Māori. That means using our own ways of healing, not just the western model.

In te ao Māori, you’re a very special individual if you’re able to be the conduit between our old people who have gone and our people of today. Yet we live in a society that sees you as barking mad if you say you hear voices. How do you reconcile these things?

People are hungry for this knowledge that comes out of lived experience. People like me need to continue to talk about it, and, hopefully, help inspire our workforce as well.

But we need to hold the mātauranga authentically and carefully. People say really lovely things to me, and then I’ve got to go home and say: “Tui, don’t be prideful, just stay in the space. Stay grounded and stay authentic.”

I want to acknowledge your generosity in talking about your own reality. I had a cousin who went through Lake Alice and a nephew who committed suicide. We know that mental health distress is a very real issue within our communities.

But your enthusiasm for life is also a great lesson for us. What about the future for you? What can you see as you approach your late 60s about where life is going to carry you next?

I want to finish my master’s degree because I want to have some academic learning to support my lived experience. Whether we like it or not, having a degree gets you heard. I’m hoping that I’ll have the energy to continue with a PhD, but I will stay in this mahi.

This mahi is so important to me. The fighting to make changes inspires me and gives me energy, and it keeps me young. I’m learning to fight with words and be very clear about what I want. So, when I talk to the profession, I always think: “You better know your stuff because I know mine, and if you don’t know yours, I’m going to stand strong in my space. No apologies.”

I normally ask people what they do to keep themselves fresh, but you’ve painted a picture of a woman who likes to go to the awa, likes to go to the moana, likes to be part of these simple taonga that we still have access to. But is there something else that you do to help you stay fresh for the mahi?

When I go home, I close my door, and I’m not very hospitable. I like to have my own space, and I like to be alone. Home is my place where I can renew and be me and relax, and write my essays. I have my dogs, and I have a wonderful husband who seems to totally accept me having to wander around Aotearoa and even the world. He keeps my home fires burning.

Just being home on my whenua has made a huge difference.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tui Taurua has 30 years of experience in the mental health field. She has held public health (PHARMAC) and Māori health advisory roles (Health and Quality Safety Commission), and community support work.

Her current roles include chair of Noku Te Ao Lived Experience Advisory Roopu, deputy chair of Whakawaha Community Advisory Group for the Health and Disability Commission and Medical Council, and advisor and trustee of Collaborative Lived Experience Advisory Roopu, Collaborative Aotearoa. Tui is also a professional bicultural mental health lived experience supervisor.

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide and needs help, call the Suicide Crisis Helpline for support: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)

If someone you know is in immediate danger, please call emergency services immediately on 111.

E-Tangata, 2025