Family tells of heartbreaking fight to save their daughter from suicide with no support
After Ally O’Donoghue’s mental health took a terrifying nosedive, her desperate parents thought turning to Victoria’s youth mental health services could help save the 16-year-old. Instead, our chaotic, underfunded system only made things worse.
Victoria
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A Victorian family has been forced to watch over their teenage daughter every night — so she doesn’t take her own life.
Shannon and Chris O’Donoghue have told the Herald Sun of their heartbreaking fight to keep their 16 year-old daughter alive, in the hope it may save another life.
“We were on suicide watch constantly,” Ally’s mum, Shannon, said.
“For a long time we were taking it in turns sleeping with her … and then, when she wanted to try sleeping by herself, we would set the alarm to go off every hour to check on her, to make sure she was safe.”
After eight months of being denied the mental health care she pleaded for, and two suicide attempts, Ally is finally getting the help and medication she needs.
Suicidal thoughts now come once or twice a day, rather than “every minute of every day”, she said.
And her parents are finally able to consider relaxing the nightly suicide watches, a private hell they have endured in their Geelong home since April.
Now, for the O’Donoghue family, there is hope.
But the road has been torturous and by Ally’s own admission, she would not be alive today if not for her parents and school, Clonard College, which helped her navigate a hopelessly overrun and underfunded youth mental health system.
Ally’s fight to quiet the voices in her head — telling her she’s worthless and should die — has also been her family’s fight.
Her story officially starts in February this year, with Ally running away from home, believing the house and her family were the root of her unease.
But probably, she concedes, it actually starts earlier – in October last year – when dark thoughts started to creep into her brain.
Leaving home raised red flags with her family, school and friends that something was seriously wrong, and help from youth mental health agency headspace was urgently sought.
Ally was placed on a 12 week waiting list for counselling, but didn’t make it to the start date.
Plagued by irrational fears that people were following her and trying to kill her, Ally left her home in the dead of night on April 26, with a plan and the means to end her life.
“I thought, ‘I’ve asked for help but what’s the point, because I can’t get it,’” she said. “It will never be any different … I might as well just kill myself and get it over … I was exhausted.”
Police doing routine patrols found Ally and called her parents, who took her straight to the local hospital emergency department.
The follow-up with the health service’s swamped youth mental health team was as disorganised and unhelpful as the family’s experience with headspace, Shannon said.
Scheduled appointments often failed to eventuate, and, when they did, sometimes lasted for less than 10 minutes when they were meant to go for an hour, she said.
“It was such an ongoing battle … I kept thinking ‘surely this isn’t what youth mental health help is meant to look like?’ I thought there had to be more help available than what Ally was receiving.”
When a clinician from the acute care mental health service finally did call Ally, it was to tell her she was no longer a patient because she was no longer deemed to be ‘in crisis’.
“I said ‘no, no, I am still in crisis’,” Ally said. “But that was it. They didn’t call mum and dad or even tell me where I should go or what I should do next.”
Attempts to secure appointments with private specialists were also unsuccessful, with similar waiting times to those in the public system, Shannon said.
Fearing another suicide attempt was imminent, and on the advice of the Clonard College wellbeing officer, the family took Ally to the Royal Children’s Hospital in mid-June.
There, they were told she was acutely suicidal and needed inpatient treatment, but there were no mental health beds available for a 16 year-old girl anywhere in the State that night.
“They advised us to stay at the hospital overnight in the hope a bed would open up for Ally the next day … the doctor said ‘if you take her home now, she won’t be alive tomorrow’,” Shannon said.
“They kept saying ‘we are so sorry Ally has fallen through the cracks’.”
A bed did become available at the RCH’s Banksia mental health unit the next day, and Ally received the vital help she needed, followed by better, and more consistent, care when she returned home to Geelong later that month.
There was another suicide attempt a fortnight after her release from Banksia, and a second admission, but her state-of-mind has steadily improved over the last few weeks and she is again engaged in school.
International mental health expert and former Australian of the Year Professor Pat McGorry said Ally’s story of three-month waits for headspace counselling and specialist appointments, of clinicians repeatedly failing to call at scheduled times and a revolving door of health professionals was “extremely common”, and the story of too many young people.
Also head of Melbourne’s Orygen youth mental health service, Prof McGorry said the system was hopelessly fractured and needed “billions” more Federal and State government dollars to even begin to meet the huge, and growing, need.
Ally’s experience spoke to a dire lack of youth mental health services and beds, in not just Geelong but the entire State, and of a system buckling under pressure and in urgent need of resources, he said.
“In the State-run part of my service, we are turning away three out of every four young people every day … the system is basically overwhelmed … and the underfunding is gross,” Prof McGorry said, adding the problem predated the COVID-19 pandemic.
Twelve Victorian schoolchildren have suicided so far this year, with similar numbers in recent years.
“Contrast what is happening to young people right now to a middle-aged man seeking help from a doctor or an emergency department for chest pain,” Prof McGorry said.
“There’s no way that man would be turned away, a way would be found to help him … but at the moment we are turning away, to nothing, young people who have serious mental health problems.
“We need to build a youth mental system that’s fit for purpose … because we are only responding to a minority of the level of need at the moment.”
Asked if more funding would be forthcoming, a Victorian Government spokesman said its submission to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System nominated child and youth mental health as one of six priority areas for reform. Some initiatives were already being implemented.
A Federal Government spokesman said Health Minister Greg Hunt “deeply and strongly” encouraged the Victorian Government to build youth mental health beds in Geelong. “This is a passionate, personal commitment,” he said.
The Federal Government had promised $740.6 million to boost mental health services in its 2019-20 Budget, including $375 million to expand the headspace network and reduce wait times, he said.
If you or someone you know is struggling mentally and at risk of suicide call Lifeline on 13 11 14
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