Absolutely brilliant post giving me all the answers to the questions I didn't realise I had. Having worked in, and left, mental health, the disparity between the kaupapa he scaffolds and the way he behaves is huge. I couldn't have these conversations about him with anyone I worked with and I couldn't find all the facts. My webworm subscription has just been repaid ten times over. Thank you David and Jess!! 🫶🏽🙏🏽
Thank you for this. As a counsellor I did some work with some I Am Hope clients about 5-6 years ago. The work itself I think was desperately needed, picking up on younger teenagers who were unable to get a referral for therapy through their GP due to age. But the funding ran out fairly quickly and I ended up not being paid for some of the work. It was okay - I wasn’t hugely dependent on being paid for the work but when this issue was raised in the media I heard Mike King make a statement that all counsellors had been paid. I knew that wasn’t true and it put me off doing any more work for the foundation.
So pleased this has been written. Amazing work Jess 🫶. I have spend most of my life speaking about this stuff. How getting support is so hard. Even in the ACC sensitive claims unit, getting support for suicidality is still incredibly difficult. His voice in that world, especially online, has been horrible. What was not covered here is he is majorly misogynist. He is the most patronising man I have ever come across. Sadly the world supports men like that, and that is how they rise so easily. It feels like as Kiwis we are so used to being treated like crap for some reason we are expect to keep quiet and put up with it. Then it goes away. This cycle has carried on forever. I gave up speaking out against him as a woman it is impossible going up against his type of mentality as it is supported by too many people. Sadly keeping quiet keeps everyone stuck in the cycle. I have spoken to so many people over the years in the crisis response world who really struggle with his mentality.
Echoing many others in the mental health space this is such an important conversation to have. I remember being so concerned when I went along to an event on the I am Hope tour (years ago now) and he was asking very vulnerable rangatahi to share stories - with no supports for all those attending who might have been affected by what was shared. He can say things have moved on all he likes but having spoken to someone who recently saw him speak (last month) - he actively bullied audience members (e.g. calling out the heaviest person in the room) and basically told them that Mental Health Professionals are ‘full of shit’. He refuses to work together with other services and his narrative that people working in mental health should be available to the young people they support 24/7 is so dangerous. I could say so much more but it has been said much better! I really don’t know how we shift the airtime he gets.
"Understand Frodo, I would use this Ring from a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine."
The desire to do good, doesn't always translate into good unfortunately. Keeping honest and listening to disagreement and criticism is something everyone one should do to keep themselves honest.
Not saying all criticism is right, but people should try hard to keep trusted people in their ears that can deliver on point criticism.
This is such a good and important article. As always Webworm cuts through to the real stuff!!
As someone who works with vulnerable young people every day I feel so torn between two things.
1. Mike King absolutely needs to go. 100%, no question, he is dangerous, volatile and damaging.
2. The Gumboot Friday website is a good, easily accessible and vital resource. I refer students and Whānau almost daily to check it out. I have had my own family members use it. Many of the alternatives are costly both financially and in terms of time.
As a side note, his son ‘Derty Sesh’ or whatever the hell he calls himself is absolutely horrrrrrrid!!
Isn;t that an interesting comment - you want him to go but you value his resource? Like all aspects of mental health - can we really be black and white about this?
But actually part of why I believe he needs to go is because his behaviour, and continued association with, I Am Hope and Gumboot Friday is now damaging the very thing he helped to build.
Credit where credit is due in Mike’s role of setting a resource like this up, but like many things the moving on at the right time for the greater good and benefit of others is, in my opinion, key here.
This shouldn’t be more about one very misguided individual than the extremely important and needed ‘boots on the ground’ work.
And, again in my opinion, some things with mental health are black and white. For example it is very black and white to me that alcohol is NOT the solution. When I first heard this from Mike King I desperately hoped he had been misquoted or taken out of context. But he had not.
Thanks you for this. He has got himself to this hero status and it's totally undeserved. His practice is not evidence based in the slightest. I think as taxpayers we deserve a closer look at his organisations financials given the huge amount of govt funding they get, but instead they just seem to get a blank cheque.
Hi David, this is the kind of post I subscribe to Webworm for.
Mike King's influence has worried me for a while. I used to have suicidal thoughts and raised a granddaughter who tried to kill herself several times and needed hospitalisation. This was in the late 2000s, we were living rurally, and there wasn't much help available. I used to think Mike King was a bit of a hero for drawing attention to these issues, but my views have changed. He often uses his alcoholism as a lever, although he never says he's sober. I'm an alcoholic too, in recovery for more than thirty-five years. I'm sorry for Mike, who exhibits many of the defects of character I've worked hard to recover from, or at least mute: ego, grandiosity, self-will, and anger. Without personal work, these behaviours are hard to shake, even if you don't drink anymore.
I have no idea where Mike King sits on the spectrum of recovery, but his actions are not those of a recovering person. My question is, should he be in charge of a mental health organisation? I think not, and I am not alone. An addictions practitioner from Red Door Recovery in Wellington, Justine Hamil, says at the end of a short audio clip embedded in this Radio New Zealand news report from 1 November, that in order to do so safely, the person would need to have done a lot of recovery work, and have ongoing therapy: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/532585/mike-king-alcohol-comments-are-we-funding-a-man-or-a-kaupapa
My compassion for Mike as a fellow sufferer doesn't extend to endorsing his thoughtless and damaging comments, which are taken as gospel because of his rockstar profile. It's time for him to go. Jess's post makes it clear the damage extends much further than a few critical lines in a news story. Thanks, Jess, for your service, and to David for getting it out to subscribers.
I have worked in mental health for the last 15 years and worked alongside many of the people mentioned in this article - especially during the 2017 election period campaigning first for the People's Mental Health Report, contributing to the Mental Health Review, getting involved in action alongside Simon Oosterman from the PSA and raising awareness through media stories on maternal mental health issues. Mental health was the key topic for the election and as a result of Labour's election, 2.4 million dollars went back into the health system - an ongoing and growing deficit thanks to National not keeping up with increasing costs/demands and inflation. It was a win at the time, though Covid a few years later messed everything up that's a whole other story. With respect to Mike King, everyone I know that works in mental health has had mixed feelings about him: grateful that he has raised awareness when it wasn't getting sufficient attention but also gravely concerned at the frequent inflammatory statements that he would make that came from a place of ignorance and an arrogance/lack of humility around not recognising where his knowledge ended and he needed to defer to other expertise and listen to those around him. It's the shooting from the hip while simultaneously believing he knew more than literally everyone else that worked in mental health or even experienced mental health that's the problem. I have had quiet words with people who work with him but whether they actually said anything or whether he just didn't care to listen, I don't know because nothing has changed. The squeaky wheel gets the oil and while Mike King's charity gets a lot of support and donations, plenty of mental health charities (including the one I founded and manage) doing really good and effective work are struggling to make ends meet. And how effective is Mike King's charity work? There have been criticisms that it really amounts to funding one free counselling session per child. I don't know if there is truth to that but if it is true, I would say that is not a good use of 24 million dollars.
With respect to the letter by Kyle Mcdonald regarding the Mental Health Foundation. Again, as someone who works in mental health for a decent length of time and I have to agree with his open letter. The messages of the Mental Health Foundation during mental health awareness week is not really aimed at people who actually experience mental illness. It is really aimed at everyday people experiencing every day stress and how to look after themselves. And none of the self-care advice is completely unhelpful to those with mental illness either: connecting with people, getting into nature - all that stuff is good stuff.... But it just feels jarring in the face of what is actually going on in the mental health space. When you look at the youth suicide statistics or the family violence statistics or the high representation of Maori amongst maternal suicides.... it just feels fairly underwhelming from the so-called Mental Health Foundation. And I think this is where Mike King gets some level of support from those of us working in this space or have lived experience of mental illness. He actually lobbies Government and is unafraid to say what's going wrong with the system - and really, I would expect the Mental Health Foundation to be speaking out on what has been a crisis situation for a long time. Instead, they are focused on "mental health light" messaging and every year that it comes out, I feel unsurprised disappointment. There is so much that could be said about a topic that has so many gaps in terms of education, awareness and stigma - such an opportunity to create awareness that might be genuinely helpful and might actually make a difference. So those are my mixed feelings about Mike King and shared amongst many of us clinicians working in this field. I do feel like his credibility is so compromised now that I think Governments will start ignoring his lobbying and challenging of systems that are not working in mental health... but who is there to take his place? Again, thank you for being unafraid to dive into the contraversial subjects that need to be highlighted.
Glad you’re weighing in on this. I would love to see this man chased off his throne! The stories I have heard about his bullying are just so numerous it’s scary.
Emily Writes has an interesting anecdote she published in her edm back in May about her own experience having her mental health “sorted” (in his words) by Mike King. Really makes you wonder how much harm some of his counsellors may have caused in the name of “fixing people” too.
Thanks Jess, well written and carefully details things so many of us have been deeply uncomfortable about, but reluctant to say anything about due to the (a) bullying and online backlash, and (b) not wanting to unnecessarily harm an organisation seeking to do good. The real shame is that Mike has had so many chances and opportunities to learn and do better, more than most of us get, and still, here we are.
"..(b) not wanting to unnecessarily harm an organisation seeking to do good." sums it up so nicely! It's such a hard thing to articulate that you support the cause but not the face.
Thank you Jess (auto correct was quite keen on yr name being Jesus lol) and David.
Awesome article. I work in mental health and addictions and am grateful for articulate accurate reporting such as this. So much I would love to say but I’m not articulate and would become irate and distressed if I did. The comment about the anti bullying campaign and the hypocrisy of not standing up to a major bully really resonated. Sadly this is not uncommon in the field I work in. The silence at times is deafening when people could and actually should, speak up about issues that really really matter. Mike King is not alone in having a “scorched earth policy” towards any critics. Sadly I see this quite frequently and it’s a real deterrent to people speaking frankly.
Back in 2017, we lost a friend. The I Am Hope website was the one place we finally found explanations for his behaviour leading up to his death. It had really good resources on depression, particuarly in men and how it can manifest quite differently to my personal experience with depression.
Our friend's behaviour was baffling in the year before he died, so different to his normal 'self' and it pushed everyone away. Those resources showed he followed a fairly clear path. It was incredibly hard to know we missed so many signs, but also helpful in that I've now seen similar signs in others and have been able to be supportive. A big one is not take their acting out as something personal but as a sign they are struggling.
A friend knew of Mike (vague acquaintance in the 90s) and was always amazed at his prominence because he'd witnessed such ingrained, deeply, deeply troubling issues with him back then.
While I feel sad about it, I no longer support his work.
I have been very impressed by Jazz Thornton and her work.
I think the common thread here with Mike and others such as John Cameron etc is that they can’t see how being in the limelight actually stops them from achieving the goal the say they’re trying to achieve. When the personality and image is bigger than the kaupapa of supporting people in community, it’s shit.
Absolutely brilliant post giving me all the answers to the questions I didn't realise I had. Having worked in, and left, mental health, the disparity between the kaupapa he scaffolds and the way he behaves is huge. I couldn't have these conversations about him with anyone I worked with and I couldn't find all the facts. My webworm subscription has just been repaid ten times over. Thank you David and Jess!! 🫶🏽🙏🏽
Thank you for this. As a counsellor I did some work with some I Am Hope clients about 5-6 years ago. The work itself I think was desperately needed, picking up on younger teenagers who were unable to get a referral for therapy through their GP due to age. But the funding ran out fairly quickly and I ended up not being paid for some of the work. It was okay - I wasn’t hugely dependent on being paid for the work but when this issue was raised in the media I heard Mike King make a statement that all counsellors had been paid. I knew that wasn’t true and it put me off doing any more work for the foundation.
So pleased this has been written. Amazing work Jess 🫶. I have spend most of my life speaking about this stuff. How getting support is so hard. Even in the ACC sensitive claims unit, getting support for suicidality is still incredibly difficult. His voice in that world, especially online, has been horrible. What was not covered here is he is majorly misogynist. He is the most patronising man I have ever come across. Sadly the world supports men like that, and that is how they rise so easily. It feels like as Kiwis we are so used to being treated like crap for some reason we are expect to keep quiet and put up with it. Then it goes away. This cycle has carried on forever. I gave up speaking out against him as a woman it is impossible going up against his type of mentality as it is supported by too many people. Sadly keeping quiet keeps everyone stuck in the cycle. I have spoken to so many people over the years in the crisis response world who really struggle with his mentality.
Echoing many others in the mental health space this is such an important conversation to have. I remember being so concerned when I went along to an event on the I am Hope tour (years ago now) and he was asking very vulnerable rangatahi to share stories - with no supports for all those attending who might have been affected by what was shared. He can say things have moved on all he likes but having spoken to someone who recently saw him speak (last month) - he actively bullied audience members (e.g. calling out the heaviest person in the room) and basically told them that Mental Health Professionals are ‘full of shit’. He refuses to work together with other services and his narrative that people working in mental health should be available to the young people they support 24/7 is so dangerous. I could say so much more but it has been said much better! I really don’t know how we shift the airtime he gets.
What an absolute twat he is!
"Understand Frodo, I would use this Ring from a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine."
The desire to do good, doesn't always translate into good unfortunately. Keeping honest and listening to disagreement and criticism is something everyone one should do to keep themselves honest.
Not saying all criticism is right, but people should try hard to keep trusted people in their ears that can deliver on point criticism.
Yassssssss. Came here to use this quote too, very happy to see I was beaten to it.
This is such a good and important article. As always Webworm cuts through to the real stuff!!
As someone who works with vulnerable young people every day I feel so torn between two things.
1. Mike King absolutely needs to go. 100%, no question, he is dangerous, volatile and damaging.
2. The Gumboot Friday website is a good, easily accessible and vital resource. I refer students and Whānau almost daily to check it out. I have had my own family members use it. Many of the alternatives are costly both financially and in terms of time.
As a side note, his son ‘Derty Sesh’ or whatever the hell he calls himself is absolutely horrrrrrrid!!
Sesh was a Webworm from 2020! So long ago now... and he's still at it: https://www.webworm.co/p/i-talk-to-a-nz-conspiracy-rapper
He literally makes my brain want to implode on itself 😩
Well that was interesting
Isn;t that an interesting comment - you want him to go but you value his resource? Like all aspects of mental health - can we really be black and white about this?
I probably should’ve been a bit clearer, sorry.
I do value THE resource of Gumboot Friday.
But actually part of why I believe he needs to go is because his behaviour, and continued association with, I Am Hope and Gumboot Friday is now damaging the very thing he helped to build.
Credit where credit is due in Mike’s role of setting a resource like this up, but like many things the moving on at the right time for the greater good and benefit of others is, in my opinion, key here.
This shouldn’t be more about one very misguided individual than the extremely important and needed ‘boots on the ground’ work.
And, again in my opinion, some things with mental health are black and white. For example it is very black and white to me that alcohol is NOT the solution. When I first heard this from Mike King I desperately hoped he had been misquoted or taken out of context. But he had not.
Absolutely horrifying!
As someone who has spent 25yrs working in the mental health sector all I can say is thank you for this. This needs to be heard.
Thanks you for this. He has got himself to this hero status and it's totally undeserved. His practice is not evidence based in the slightest. I think as taxpayers we deserve a closer look at his organisations financials given the huge amount of govt funding they get, but instead they just seem to get a blank cheque.
At the cost of other organisations whose funding was cut.
Hi David, this is the kind of post I subscribe to Webworm for.
Mike King's influence has worried me for a while. I used to have suicidal thoughts and raised a granddaughter who tried to kill herself several times and needed hospitalisation. This was in the late 2000s, we were living rurally, and there wasn't much help available. I used to think Mike King was a bit of a hero for drawing attention to these issues, but my views have changed. He often uses his alcoholism as a lever, although he never says he's sober. I'm an alcoholic too, in recovery for more than thirty-five years. I'm sorry for Mike, who exhibits many of the defects of character I've worked hard to recover from, or at least mute: ego, grandiosity, self-will, and anger. Without personal work, these behaviours are hard to shake, even if you don't drink anymore.
I have no idea where Mike King sits on the spectrum of recovery, but his actions are not those of a recovering person. My question is, should he be in charge of a mental health organisation? I think not, and I am not alone. An addictions practitioner from Red Door Recovery in Wellington, Justine Hamil, says at the end of a short audio clip embedded in this Radio New Zealand news report from 1 November, that in order to do so safely, the person would need to have done a lot of recovery work, and have ongoing therapy: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/532585/mike-king-alcohol-comments-are-we-funding-a-man-or-a-kaupapa
My compassion for Mike as a fellow sufferer doesn't extend to endorsing his thoughtless and damaging comments, which are taken as gospel because of his rockstar profile. It's time for him to go. Jess's post makes it clear the damage extends much further than a few critical lines in a news story. Thanks, Jess, for your service, and to David for getting it out to subscribers.
I have worked in mental health for the last 15 years and worked alongside many of the people mentioned in this article - especially during the 2017 election period campaigning first for the People's Mental Health Report, contributing to the Mental Health Review, getting involved in action alongside Simon Oosterman from the PSA and raising awareness through media stories on maternal mental health issues. Mental health was the key topic for the election and as a result of Labour's election, 2.4 million dollars went back into the health system - an ongoing and growing deficit thanks to National not keeping up with increasing costs/demands and inflation. It was a win at the time, though Covid a few years later messed everything up that's a whole other story. With respect to Mike King, everyone I know that works in mental health has had mixed feelings about him: grateful that he has raised awareness when it wasn't getting sufficient attention but also gravely concerned at the frequent inflammatory statements that he would make that came from a place of ignorance and an arrogance/lack of humility around not recognising where his knowledge ended and he needed to defer to other expertise and listen to those around him. It's the shooting from the hip while simultaneously believing he knew more than literally everyone else that worked in mental health or even experienced mental health that's the problem. I have had quiet words with people who work with him but whether they actually said anything or whether he just didn't care to listen, I don't know because nothing has changed. The squeaky wheel gets the oil and while Mike King's charity gets a lot of support and donations, plenty of mental health charities (including the one I founded and manage) doing really good and effective work are struggling to make ends meet. And how effective is Mike King's charity work? There have been criticisms that it really amounts to funding one free counselling session per child. I don't know if there is truth to that but if it is true, I would say that is not a good use of 24 million dollars.
With respect to the letter by Kyle Mcdonald regarding the Mental Health Foundation. Again, as someone who works in mental health for a decent length of time and I have to agree with his open letter. The messages of the Mental Health Foundation during mental health awareness week is not really aimed at people who actually experience mental illness. It is really aimed at everyday people experiencing every day stress and how to look after themselves. And none of the self-care advice is completely unhelpful to those with mental illness either: connecting with people, getting into nature - all that stuff is good stuff.... But it just feels jarring in the face of what is actually going on in the mental health space. When you look at the youth suicide statistics or the family violence statistics or the high representation of Maori amongst maternal suicides.... it just feels fairly underwhelming from the so-called Mental Health Foundation. And I think this is where Mike King gets some level of support from those of us working in this space or have lived experience of mental illness. He actually lobbies Government and is unafraid to say what's going wrong with the system - and really, I would expect the Mental Health Foundation to be speaking out on what has been a crisis situation for a long time. Instead, they are focused on "mental health light" messaging and every year that it comes out, I feel unsurprised disappointment. There is so much that could be said about a topic that has so many gaps in terms of education, awareness and stigma - such an opportunity to create awareness that might be genuinely helpful and might actually make a difference. So those are my mixed feelings about Mike King and shared amongst many of us clinicians working in this field. I do feel like his credibility is so compromised now that I think Governments will start ignoring his lobbying and challenging of systems that are not working in mental health... but who is there to take his place? Again, thank you for being unafraid to dive into the contraversial subjects that need to be highlighted.
100% agree. Mental Health lite is a good way of putting it.
Glad you’re weighing in on this. I would love to see this man chased off his throne! The stories I have heard about his bullying are just so numerous it’s scary.
Emily Writes has an interesting anecdote she published in her edm back in May about her own experience having her mental health “sorted” (in his words) by Mike King. Really makes you wonder how much harm some of his counsellors may have caused in the name of “fixing people” too.
“He had emotions and we had facts and he always won,” they say.
Pretty much sums up the 21st century.
Thanks Jess, well written and carefully details things so many of us have been deeply uncomfortable about, but reluctant to say anything about due to the (a) bullying and online backlash, and (b) not wanting to unnecessarily harm an organisation seeking to do good. The real shame is that Mike has had so many chances and opportunities to learn and do better, more than most of us get, and still, here we are.
"..(b) not wanting to unnecessarily harm an organisation seeking to do good." sums it up so nicely! It's such a hard thing to articulate that you support the cause but not the face.
Thank you Jess (auto correct was quite keen on yr name being Jesus lol) and David.
Awesome article. I work in mental health and addictions and am grateful for articulate accurate reporting such as this. So much I would love to say but I’m not articulate and would become irate and distressed if I did. The comment about the anti bullying campaign and the hypocrisy of not standing up to a major bully really resonated. Sadly this is not uncommon in the field I work in. The silence at times is deafening when people could and actually should, speak up about issues that really really matter. Mike King is not alone in having a “scorched earth policy” towards any critics. Sadly I see this quite frequently and it’s a real deterrent to people speaking frankly.
Great article ❤️🩹
Thanks Tessa. "I would become irate and distressed if I did" - I feel this in my bones!
Back in 2017, we lost a friend. The I Am Hope website was the one place we finally found explanations for his behaviour leading up to his death. It had really good resources on depression, particuarly in men and how it can manifest quite differently to my personal experience with depression.
Our friend's behaviour was baffling in the year before he died, so different to his normal 'self' and it pushed everyone away. Those resources showed he followed a fairly clear path. It was incredibly hard to know we missed so many signs, but also helpful in that I've now seen similar signs in others and have been able to be supportive. A big one is not take their acting out as something personal but as a sign they are struggling.
A friend knew of Mike (vague acquaintance in the 90s) and was always amazed at his prominence because he'd witnessed such ingrained, deeply, deeply troubling issues with him back then.
While I feel sad about it, I no longer support his work.
I have been very impressed by Jazz Thornton and her work.
I think the common thread here with Mike and others such as John Cameron etc is that they can’t see how being in the limelight actually stops them from achieving the goal the say they’re trying to achieve. When the personality and image is bigger than the kaupapa of supporting people in community, it’s shit.