There is a lovely humility at the heart of permaculture. Before you change anything, you observe. You notice where the sun falls, where water gathers, what is already growing, what is struggling, what is connected to what. You do not begin by imposing a perfect design from above. You begin by paying attention.
That feels like a pretty good place to start when thinking about mental health in Aotearoa.
Permaculture is often described as a design system for sustainable living, shaped by principles such as “observe and interact,” “integrate rather than segregate,” “use small and slow solutions,” “use and value diversity,” and “creatively use and respond to change.” Although it is often associated with gardens, food forests and regenerative land use, its deeper invitation is broader: design systems that work with life, rather than against it.
In Aotearoa, any conversation about living systems, land, wellbeing and relationality also needs to sit carefully alongside mātauranga Māori. Mātauranga Māori is not simply a set of “traditional facts” that can be lifted out of context and added to Western systems. It is a taonga, a Māori way of viewing and knowing the world, grounded in whakapapa, whenua, tikanga, te reo, relationships, observation and experience across generations. So, when we talk about intersections between permaculture and mātauranga Māori, we need to be cautious. They are not the same thing. Permaculture does not “discover” what Indigenous peoples have long known. But there are resonances: attention to relationships, reciprocity, place, interdependence, stewardship, cycles, diversity, and the understanding that wellbeing is never just individual.
This matters deeply for mental health.
Much of our current mental health system is designed like a factory. People enter through referral pathways, are assessed, triaged, treated, discharged. The language is often clinical, linear and deficit-focused. Of course, there is important skill, care and expertise within that system. Medication, therapy, crisis care and specialist services can be lifesaving. But the system can still feel as though it is organised around episodes of illness rather than conditions for life.
A permaculture-informed, mātauranga-honouring mental health system would ask different questions.
Not only: “What is wrong, and how do we treat it?”
But also: “What conditions allow this person and their whānau to flourish?”
“What relationships need strengthening?”
“What has been depleted?”
“What is already present in this person, whānau, community and place that can be nurtured?”
“What would recovery look like if it included tinana, hinengaro, wairua, whānau and whenua?”
These are questions that we try to work towards through this website and the wider kaupapa. It is not only about symptom reduction. It is a project that supports people living with psychosis to lead holistically healthy lives, using person-centred, participatory, co-design and co-creation approaches. That is already a shift away from the factory and toward the garden.
The Te Hekenga Whaiora programme is a good example. As a 12-week wellbeing programme for rangatahi whaiora within Early Intervention Services in Wellington, it involved physical activity, art, time in nature and visits to māra kai. That is not just “adding activities” to clinical care. It is changing the soil. It recognises that young people experiencing psychosis need more than appointments. They need places to belong, safe opportunities to move, create, connect, contribute, rest, laugh, make mistakes and be seen as whole people. And to evaluate any outcomes in a mana-enhancing way, without extracting information and data.
In permaculture terms, this is “integrate rather than segregate.” Mental health is not separated from physical health, social connection, culture, food, creativity, nature or identity. It is woven through all of them.
It is also “use and value diversity.” A mental health system that honoured this way of working would not assume that one model of care fits everyone. It would make room for clinical knowledge, mātauranga Māori (where applicable), peer support, whānau knowledge, youth voice, community organisations, artists, movement practitioners, māra kai, kaupapa Māori providers, schools, workplaces and local places of belonging. It would understand that monocultures are fragile. Diverse ecosystems are more resilient.
It would also take seriously the principle of “small and slow solutions.” In mental health, we are often pulled toward scale, speed and standardisation. Roll out the model. Hit the target. Reduce the waitlist. Count the outputs. But many of the things that change people’s lives are slow, relational and cumulative: trust built over weeks; a young person turning up again; a shared meal; a walk where someone talks for the first time; a facilitator remembering what matters to someone; whānau feeling less alone.
These things can look small from a spreadsheet. In real life, they can be enormous.
A system shaped by these principles would fund the relational work, not just the acute response. It would invest upstream, before crisis. It would create porous boundaries between services and communities. It would allow local adaptation rather than forcing every region into the same template. It would treat feedback from rangatahi, whānau and communities as intelligence, not as an optional satisfaction measure. It would design with people, not for them.
And crucially, in Aotearoa, it would honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi not as a compliance statement, but as a design foundation. That means Māori governance, Māori data sovereignty, Māori provider leadership, protection and normalisation of te reo and tikanga, and a willingness for non-Māori systems to change shape rather than simply invite Māori participation into unchanged structures.
The same challenge applies to academia.
Universities often like the language of innovation, impact and interdisciplinarity. But academic systems are frequently monocultures too. They reward individual productivity, competition, speed, publication metrics, grant capture and neatly bounded expertise. Knowledge is often extracted from communities, processed into outputs, and returned—if at all—in forms that are inaccessible or not especially useful.
What would academia look like if it worked more like a healthy ecosystem?
First, it would observe and interact before designing research questions. Researchers would spend more time listening, building relationships and understanding context before deciding what the “problem” is. Community priorities would not be decorative; they would shape the work from the beginning.
Second, it would obtain a yield—but define yield differently. A journal article might be one yield, but not the only one. A useful resource for whānau, a stronger partnership, a youth-led exhibition, a changed service pathway, a new shared language, or a rangatahi advisory group that continues beyond the project could all count as meaningful harvests.
Third, it would produce no waste. Too much research energy disappears into reports no one reads, datasets no one uses, and relationships that end when funding ends. A regenerative academic system would ask: what can be reused, returned, translated, gifted back, or grown further? How can each project leave behind capacity, not just findings?
Fourth, it would value edges. In permaculture, edges—where forest meets field, or land meets water—are often places of richness. In academia, the richest work often happens at the edges too: between university and community, clinical service and lived experience, mātauranga Māori and Western science, art and evidence, rangatahi and decision-makers. Moving With Psychosis sits in this kind of edge space: research, co-design, early psychosis care, physical activity, creativity and public-facing resources meeting in one place.
Finally, academia would accept feedback and self-regulate. Not just through peer review, but through accountability to the people most affected by the work. Were we useful? Did we uphold mana? Did we share power? Did we make the system easier to navigate? Did we leave relationships stronger than we found them?
None of this is simple. There is always a risk of romanticising nature, oversimplifying indigenous knowledge, or using words like “regenerative” while leaving power untouched. But perhaps that is why the first principle matters so much: observe and interact.
Start by paying attention.
To people. To place. To whakapapa. To what is already growing. To what has been harmed. To what might be possible if mental health systems and academic systems stopped behaving like machines and started behaving more like living ecosystems.
Because people do not recover in isolation. Knowledge does not grow in isolation. Hauora does not live in isolation.
Everything is connected.
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