Mr Johnson described his brother as a “jokester and very funny character” who he would read ghost stories with as a child.<\/p>\n
“I felt, as his brother, that he could always talk to me, because I knew that I could always talk to him,” he said.<\/p>\n
However, in 2016, Mark Johnson died at the age of 31, having faced financial problems he hid from his family.<\/p>\n
“If he’d had just spoke to somebody about it, then it wouldn’t have happened and he wouldn’t have taken his own life,” his brother said, admitting that the past 10 years have been difficult to deal with.<\/p>\n
By starting a new support group, Mr Johnson hopes he can create a community of support to save people in similar circumstances to his late brother.<\/p>\n
“If we catch a problem early, it’s easily solved; if we don’t catch that problem, if we don’t discuss that problem, it will evolve, it will fester and it will become something unmanageable,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mr Johnson described his brother as a “jokester and very funny character” who he would read ghost stories…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-204729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}