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RNZ News
5 hours ago
- RNZ News
The mental health charity trying to help reluctant gun owners
Photo: 123rf A former farmer has set up a charity to help firearm owners seek mental health support without fear of having their guns taken away. Glen Thurston started Mental Hunts after having his own firearms licence revoked when he sought mental health help in 2019. Following the 2019 Christchurch terror attack, the government banned military-style semi-automatic weapons. It then set up a gun registry, tightened licence rules, and enabled health workers to flag physical or mental health concerns which could result in suspension of a firearms licence. Thurston said because of this, many licence holders were now reluctant to seek mental health help. Glen Thurston said he felt like a burden on a farm when he lost his gun licence. Photo: Supplied/Mental Hunts Through Mental Hunts he works to connect firearms holders with the help they need. He had previously been to the doctor about his mental health, but 2019 was the first time he had been asked about firearms. "And I was like, 'What? What does that got to do with anything? I've never been asked this question before'," he said. "Long story short, I ended up having my licence revoked and you try farming without a firearms licence when you need to euthanise a cow or anything like that, or pest control. "It really, really restricted me. I no longer farm. I became a bit of a burden. I felt like I became a bit of a burden on the farm, always needing to call them up if I needed to deal to a sick animal or anything like that." Thurston said it made him feel like a criminal, damaging his mental health further. He said things have improved for licence holders, thanks largely to the Firearms Safety Authority The authority's senior partnerships adviser Kendra Hill said having a mental health condition did not automatically exclude a person from getting a licence. "As part of the application process, we might ask for some supporting information from your health practitioner so that we can understand how the health condition might be managed to ensure that you and those around you are kept safe. "There isn't an exhaustive list of health conditions relevant to safe use and possession of firearms. If we think that there is a concern for a person's safety, there's a range of different interventions that we can take. "But what I want to emphasise is that the appropriate treatment and management of a physical or mental health condition is always gonna be preferable to suspension or loss of licence." Hill also acknowledged the benefits from getting outside and going hunting with mates could do for a person's mental health. The government has promised to reform the firearms system. Potential changes are likely to be announced later in the year and go through Parliamentary processes during 2025-2026.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Breaking the cycle of transgenerational trauma
Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri Photo: SUPPLIED We inherit our genes but can we inherit trauma? There's no doubt we can feel it but can the trauma of previous generations be expressed in our genetic code? How does a parent's experience of war, ethnic persecution, cultural oppression, state or domestic abuse manifest itself in their child? Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri from Monash University in Melbourne is an expert in transgenerational effects, looking at how the lived experiences of one generation can shape those that follow. An Oxford scholar, Dr Camilleri talks to Mihi about the relationship between biology, psychology and our environment and what we can do to break the cycle of transgenerational trauma. Photo: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
RNZ News
3 days ago
- RNZ News
The science of transgenerational trauma, epigenetics and hope for healing
Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri studies epigenetics and the transgenerational effects of trauma. Photo: SUPPLIED Do we inherit the effects of trauma physically from past generations? Do parents' experiences of war, ethnic persecution, cultural oppression, state or domestic abuse have lasting effects, manifested in their children? There's no doubt we can feel it, but can the trauma of previous generations actually be coded into the bodies of their children? New research is beginning to shed light on this. Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri, an Oxford scholar and now a researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, specialises in epigenetics - the interplay between our environments, lived experiences and how our genes are expressed. She talked to Mihingarangi Forbes about the biology and what that tells us about breaking cycles of transgenerational trauma. In a wider sense, "transgenerational trauma is when the effects of trauma in one generation ripple into the next generation, so it can shape us in a few key ways - biologically socially psychologically and culturally" Camilleri says. "So psychologically, if someone's experienced trauma it can effect how they parent, how they regulate emotion, and how safe their environment is in general - all will shape a child's development. Culturally trauma can disrupt people connection to culture, language, history, land, which can carry through generations if healing doesn't happen. So all of these things are constantly interacting with one another to produce these outcomes. "Biologically, stress can change how our bodies regulate things like hormones and immunity and those changes can be passed on sometimes through what we call epigenetic mechanisms - when we feel unsafe it can activate stress pathways in the body that alter how certain genes are expressed." Epigenetics is not changes to the DNA and genes itself, but changes to other biochemical tags that affect how DNA code is used, or to surrounding proteins. "I've described it as the directors notes on a script - these notes may tell the actors which lines to emphasise or downplay, but they're not changing the script itself," Camilleri says. For example, the fight or flight response is how the body continually responds to either real or perceived threats. And "this is when we start to get into the realm of phenotypic plasticity - it's a fundamental process in biology - it doesn't get a lot of attention, but things like stress or diet, these environmental conditions, can change our bodies, they change our neuroplasticity - the change the neurons in our brain, and they can change a whole host of other things, and that can induce these epigenetic changes." Genetics itself could mean a predisposition to experiencing stress in particular ways, including physically. Epigenetics can then "act like a volume dial" turning up or down those genes effects, and can be influenced by our parents experiences or our early childhood experiences. The effects of phenotypic plasticity can also be seen in the animal world, Camilleri says. For example what a honeybee is fed will determine if it becomes a worker or a queen. Some of those phenotypic changes can then be passed on to descendants, for example the body of stickleback fish can change to make it more difficult for predators to eat them. And this result can sometimes last for many generations when it is then cued by environmental factors like nutrients and hormones that regulate those responses. Camilleri says her own research with fruit flies found different nutrition and diet changes could result in different effects for different generations. One diet fed to both parents and their children resulted in the parents living longer but the offspring living shorter lives, whereas a different diet of more protein resulted in both grandmothers and granddaughters producing more offspring. The effects of transgenerational trauma can skip generations, and there are also actions we can take to mediate its effects, Camilleri says. "It's not always set in stone ... when we look at this research we don't see what we would call very predictable effects - it can change all the time. These epigenetic changes are what we call plastic, so they don't necessarily have to be permanent, and they are changing all the time throughout our lifetime all of the time. "So there are several things we can do to mediate it, to ensure that we might be able to break the cycle - but certainly even without intervention, our genetics are always talking to our environment. Our biology and our environment are always interacting with our social systems and our culture, so it's such a complicated mix of things that it's not always set in stone." Photo: (Pixabay Public Domain) Studies have found that how much of a parents' experiences result in factors affecting their children depends on which parent was affected, she says. Including one landmark study of cortisol (a stress hormone) in the children of holocaust survivors with PTSD. It found the children of mothers who were holocaust survivors were more likely to have cortisol dysregulation that made it more difficult to calm down from a stress response, compared to children of fathers who were holocaust survivors. "They are more predisposed to these baseline cortisol levels not being able to return to normal and keeping the body in ... a more prolonged stress state." Research has also found that breaking the cycle is more successful when the onus does not just fall on the individual, she says. "There are personal strategies. Obviously therapy, seeing a psychologist, building supportive relationships and learning to regulate our stress and emotion, it definitely helps and it's definitely very valuable - and that is where the emphasis is now, in society, it's sort of on the individual. "And I think what is changing is that we're realising that those personal strategies that we can do are most effective when other solutions address wider systems that people live in, so that means tackling the social, the economic and the environmental conditions that keep stress or inequity high... large-scale events, war, colonialisation. "Supporting things like cultural-led healing, community-led things by the people. Especially for these wide large-scale events - the people who've experienced these they need to lead these. Those voices need to be heard and listened to, so that it restores this sense of connection and identity and acknowledgement. Because it's about people feeling safe within the systems that they live in. "So when we change things at those broader levels we can reduce the load on individuals, and create those conditions where those individual strategies will be more likely to effect recovery and therefore affect subsequent generations."
