News release

From: New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ)

Equity requires visibility: intellectual disability and Aotearoa New Zealand’s mental health roadmap

In June 2026, Te Hiringa Mahara—Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission released a roadmap describing how mental health, addiction and wellbeing services should improve, with fairness (equity) as a central goal. In this article, we argue that people with intellectual disability—people who have lifelong difficulties with learning, understanding and everyday adaptive skills—are not explicitly recognised in the Roadmap, despite experiencing mental illness more often than the general population and having some of the poorest health outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Their mental health problems may be overlooked or mistaken for their disability, and routine national mental health reporting provides only a partial picture of their experiences, making inequities more difficult to identify and address. Responsibility for their care is often spread across health, disability and social services, leaving families and whānau to navigate fragmented systems, while specialist expertise is concentrated within a small and potentially fragile workforce. Achieving equitable mental healthcare requires people with intellectual disability to be explicitly recognised in mental health policy, data, service planning and workforce development.