Mental Health, Wairua & Survival: A Māori Perspective We Need to Hear with Tui Taurua

There are conversations that leave something behind long after they have ended. Not because they provide easy answers, but because they gently disrupt something we have long taken for granted. My conversation with Tui Taurua was one of those moments. It stayed with me, not simply because of the depth of her lived experience, but because of the way she quietly challenged one of the most dominant ideas we hold about mental health: the belief that healing must mean being cured.

For many of us, healing has been shaped by a familiar script. Something goes wrong. We struggle. We seek help. We receive a diagnosis, medication, perhaps therapy, and somewhere at the end of that journey lies an expectation that one day we will become “better.” Perhaps even more than that, we will somehow return to who we were before the pain.

Yet what happens when life does not unfold that way?

What happens when medication helps in some ways but not in others? When functioning returns, but something inside still feels fractured? What happens when a person appears to be coping on the outside while carrying unbearable pain beneath the surface?

Tui spoke candidly about spending much of her life feeling broken. Even while working full-time and navigating everyday life, she described a deep internal struggle that remained largely unseen. From the outside, she appeared to be participating in society. Yet internally, she was still carrying childhood trauma, grief, confusion, hopelessness, and emotional pain that had never truly been understood. She reflected that many people within psychiatric systems are often seen as “healed” because they take medication and appear functional, while internally they may still feel deeply lost.

There was something profoundly honest in her reflection that she had always believed healing meant being cured. It is a belief many people quietly carry — the assumption that if treatment is working, the pain should eventually disappear. Yet when it does not, people often begin blaming themselves. If others are getting better, why am I still struggling? Why do I still feel overwhelmed? Why does the sadness return? Why do I still feel disconnected from myself?

Tui’s story reveals the emotional weight of that misunderstanding. She described experiences of self-harm and the ways systems often responded to behaviour without understanding what sat underneath it. She recalled being labelled “non-compliant,” judged, and misunderstood, while few people paused to ask a much deeper question: What pain is this person carrying? Rather than seeing distress as communication, systems often interpreted it as dysfunction. Yet behind many behaviours there are stories of survival, grief, trauma, fear, and unmet need. As Tui explained, at times the emotional pain became so immense that physical pain felt easier to understand — as though somehow the pain inside could leave the body if it had somewhere to go.

Listening to her, I found myself reflecting on how often mental health systems become organised around managing symptoms rather than understanding suffering. We become focused on risk, diagnosis, behaviour, compliance, and treatment plans, but are less skilled at asking what happened to the person standing in front of us. We become interested in what is visible, but not always in what remains hidden.

For Tui, a turning point came through two seemingly simple but deeply significant ideas. The first emerged through The Blueprint in the 1990s, where she encountered the concept of learning to live in the presence of mental illness rather than endlessly waiting to be cured. The second came through Te Whare Tapa Whā, particularly the dimension of Wairua, which slowly opened another way of understanding herself and her experiences. At the time, she did not fully know what to do with these ideas, but something in them stayed with her. A seed had been planted.

Years later, after reaching a place of increasing desperation, Tui stepped away from work and began searching for another way forward. She described a period where she knew that if nothing changed, she feared suicide might eventually become inevitable. What struck me most was not the despair itself, but the honesty of someone recognising they needed to find a way to live differently. Rather than giving up, she began searching.

That search eventually led her back toward Mātauranga Māori, toward whenua, toward Wairua, and toward reconnecting with something deeper than the language of illness. She began walking daily, starting with just a few minutes and gradually building to hours of movement. She connected with Papatūānuku and Ranginui — Mother Earth and Sky Father — speaking, listening, and slowly finding a sense of relationship with the world around her. She reflected on the importance of becoming a “warrior” in her own healing, not in the sense of fighting against herself, but in learning how to understand herself more deeply. Healing became about curiosity, reflection, and asking difficult questions about her own behaviours, patterns, and pain. Why was she reacting this way? What was happening underneath? What is needed is understanding, not punishment?

What resonated deeply for me was the idea that healing was not something done to her. It became something she participated in. She stopped waiting for someone else to rescue her and instead began becoming an active participant in her own life. This does not mean she rejected support or dismissed the role of clinical care. In fact, Tui acknowledges that medication and psychiatric systems have an important role, particularly in keeping people safe. But her reflection invites a deeper question: what else is needed alongside safety?

Where is culture?

Where is belonging?

Where is identity?

Where are the spaces where people are helped to understand trauma, meaning, and their relationship with themselves?

Where are the voices of people who have lived through darkness and can speak not from theory, but from knowing?

Perhaps one of the strongest messages emerging from Tui’s story is that healing cannot be separated from culture, spirituality, and identity. For her, Wairua became central to making sense of experiences that clinical language alone could not fully explain. Healing became relational — with ancestors, whenua, stories, community, movement, and spirit. It became less about eliminating struggle and more about understanding how to live alongside it differently.

There is something profoundly human in this shift. It asks us to reconsider whether healing must always mean the absence of struggle. Perhaps healing is not about returning to some untouched version of ourselves before pain entered our lives. Perhaps healing is about learning how to carry ourselves through life with greater understanding, compassion, and connection to who we are.

Tui’s story also quietly challenges institutions to think differently about expertise. Lived experience is often welcomed symbolically, but not always genuinely valued. Yet the knowledge held by people who have walked through trauma, survived despair, and rebuilt meaning in their lives carries something important—an understanding of suffering that cannot be taught in textbooks alone. It offers insight into what helps, what harms, and what systems continue to overlook.

Perhaps what stayed with me most after speaking with Tui was not an answer, but a different kind of question.

Instead of asking, When will I finally be cured?

What if we asked:

How do I learn to live?

And perhaps somewhere in that quieter, more compassionate question, healing begins.

Full Podcast: Mental Health, Wairua & Survival: A Māori Perspective We Need to Hear with Tui Taurua