Grace Curtis still has flashbacks to the time she found her father dead

Warning: This story contains details of suicide.

When her father suicided in 2020, Grace Curtis sank into a paralysing depression that felt permanent.

Now the young Wellingtonian sees how getting back on her feet after that unimaginable trauma led to her calling - supporting other Kiwis through mental health struggles and the suicide of a loved one.

Curtis writes about hope, healing and her mission to destigmatise depression in the new book The Best is Yet to Come.

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Curtis can still remember the weird “feeling in her guts” she had on the day she went home to discover her father's body.

The 22-year-old knew that something wasn't right and also felt certain she had to be the first person to discover - alone - what that was.

“I just knew something was terribly, terribly wrong, and part of me didn't want anyone else to be alongside me… whatever it was I was walking into.”

Although Curtis says she's the “softest” one in her family, she often wonders if she was the person somehow “meant” to discover her beloved dad's body.

“I just I felt like it was on me to deal with that.”

Even soon after the traumatic experience of discovering him, Curtis knew that one day she would want to remember the details, so made notes.

“I knew I wouldn't be able to have an authentic representation of what happened if I didn't document it in the moment, because of the trauma.”

While images of discovering his body still flash into her head occasionally, in the subsequent weeks they were "relentless", she says, flooding in hundreds of times a day.

Although the trauma of her father's suicide was "all-consuming" for Curtis and her family, the mental health support they were offered in the aftermath - a text message six days later and a single visit from a counsellor two weeks after that - was far from adequate, she says.

“I don't think that the support we had was anywhere near what we could have benefited from.”

In the months that followed, bedridden with depression, Curtis thought, "This is it for me. I'm stuck like this forever… I just lay there and was prepared to lie there for the rest of my days, to be honest.”

She now accepts that PTSD, anxiety and depression will reappear at different times, and when they do can remind herself that even the very toughest moments are temporary.

When Curtis or her partner spot warning signs that her mental health is slipping, she takes action by focusing on sleep and “filling her cup” to find some joy.

Putting her energy into mental health advocacy is another powerful way that Curtis gets herself through tough times these days.

She supports other people tackling mental health struggles and processing suicide via the advocacy platform Cool Change and is also an ambassador for the men's mental health charity Movember.

“Advocacy is what gets me out of bed in the morning.”

To anyone struggling with their mental health, Curtis's message is "I see you and I hear you, and I've been there".

While it’s easy to feel like no-one else could understand your pain and isolation, she says that’s just not true.

"As soon as you open up that conversation with someone that you trust, that's where it all starts and that's where you can start finding solutions.

“You work on it with someone else, and you don't have to do it all by yourself.”