Golden Bay’s unique mental health facility, Te Whare Mahana celebrates 20 years
Te Whare Mahana founder Carol Parkinson-Jones.
One of Golden Bay’s most valuable community assets will receive deserved recognition when Te Whare Mahana celebrates its 20th birthday this weekend.
Former residents of “the warm house” will join past and present staff and supporters in a series of birthday events on Saturday, at 163 Commercial Street, Takaka.
Carol Parkinson-Jones founded Te Whare Mahana and has been involved with the organisation of the birthday celebrations. She explained the circumstances in which Golden Bay’s mental health facility came into being.
“I’d always wanted to found an institution along the lines of an old-fashioned asylum,” said Carol. “Somewhere for people to go when they need a break from their normal lives, while they sort themselves out. We hit an auspicious time in the late 80s when Helen Clark was a young Minister of Health and there was funding available through the Housing Corporation. We could get a 100 per cent loan to buy a house for people with disabilities.
“In 1989 my husband Simon and I were back in the Bay on holiday and friends from Rainbow Valley who knew what we wanted to do told us we should go and have a look at the old convent. It was for sale at the time. It was just perfect for the purpose – nice and close to town but a little bit private and secluded with a big yard and plenty of space. We got it and moved our family in and Simon started to re-gib the walls and paint and plaster the place. When it was finished we moved out, employed our first staff, Fay Knight and Sarah Hornibrooke, and Te Whare Mahana officially opened at the beginning of 1990.”
Carol explained that she and Simon had lived in an “intentional community” for 15 years and that they had been struck by “how great people are when they work together.”
“Amazing things can happen when you’re drawing on the talents of a whole lot of people,” she said. “I wanted to develop a therapeutic programme based on the concept of intentional community—people working together to heal themselves.”
In the early days Te Whare operated on a shoestring, and Carol spent a lot of her time trying to secure funding to ensure its survival.
“Our staff were part-timers employed on work schemes through the Department of Labour,” she said. “Golden Bay was the ideal place to be doing this kind of thing because it was culturally diverse and tolerant of difference. The relaxed pace of life had, and still has, a calming effect on people who are feeling strung out.”
John Gawith has been Te Whare’s clinical director since 2000. He explained some of the ways Te Whare responded to its residents’ needs at that time.
“We had residents with more complex needs, showing features of borderline personality disorder, so we needed an appropriate treatment that was evidence-based,” he said. “We brought Mike Williams, a clinical psychologist, down from Auckland for about 18 months and he started to train us up in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. After that we had other people come in and work with the staff. It’s been a gradual process and the staff have been great. We are now the only residential programme using DBT in New Zealand.”
DBT, developed in the US by Marsha Linehan, works well for people who are having trouble with interpersonal chaos, emotions that vary a lot, and impulsive behaviour, explained John. It works on four sets of skills: core mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness and distress tolerance. Clients, who typically stay at Te Whare Mahana for 9 to 12 months, have a therapist and they get skills-coaching to reduce things like self-harm and suicidal behaviour.
“Linehan has over 150 specific skills in a manual,” said John. “Clients are coached in the skills that work for them and they then apply them to improve the quality of their lives.”
The celebrations at Te Whare Mahana go from 1 to 4pm tomorrow, Saturday. They will feature a play written by Carol Parkinson-Jones about the first 10 years, some music, a report from Te Whare’s manager Jo Johnston and a detailed description of the second decade by John Gawith. The celebration is open to everyone who has been associated with Te Whare Mahana over the past 20 years but, for catering purposes, organisers would like people to let them know that they will be attending.
Neil Wilson
