Knowing how to reach out when a troubled loved one needs your help

You don’t see suicide coming until it’s too late — especially when it comes to kids. If you did, you would do something, say something, remind the person that they’re loved.

Noeliesha Young with her son Matteo in Darwin. Picture: Amos Aikman

You don’t see suicide coming until it’s too late, especially when it involves children.

If you did, you would do something, say something, remind the person that they’re loved.

Noeliesha Young and Matteo Lee were like two peas in a pod. “We both had the same interests, both listened to the same music, both disliked frogs and were both scared of the frigging dark,” Ms Young, 21, recalls.

In 2018, they each had their lives before them. Matteo had struggled after Year 12 to find good employment, but, after the loss of two close friends, he was becoming involved in suicide prevention work. Ms Young was pregnant to an absent father, and Matteo, as her best friend, was preparing to help her raise the child.

“When Matteo was here, it was always Noeliesha and Matteo,” says Jana Harmer, Ms Young’s mother. Both families have ties to Darwin’s Stolen Generations.

Then one day, while Ms Young was on holiday on the Gold Coast, she got a call. It was Matteo’s mother: she had found him “too late” and described the harrowing scene.

“You are not the same person after losing someone to suicide,” Ms Young says. “I didn’t cry at his funeral; ­people thought there was something wrong with me. Everyone thought I had moved past it, but while I was pregnant, I ignored the fact that it had happened. I grieved in my own way.”

Noeliesha Young and Matteo Lee.

She experienced her own crisis around the anniversary of Matteo’s death, when her son (named after him) was about four months old. Fortunately, she received help.

Ms Harmer says the Darwin community lost at least five young people to suicide in 2018 and 2019, adding that “every single one (was) connected to my kids”.

“From a grassroots perspective, we all knew it was a bit of a ripple effect, but no one was doing anything about it,” she says.

“I know as a mum — because I’ve got seven children — that my kids are going to talk to each other, to their cousins or other relatives, before they come and talk to me.”

She and Ms Young are now ­involved with the Darwin Youth Suicide Prevention Network, a community-based initiative aimed at equipping young people to support each other and contact appropriate services.

They are critical of “gatekeeper” agencies that interfere with community healing on privacy grounds and say helplines are unpopular. “It’s easier to speak to an aunty, an uncle or a friend than to ring up a random,” Ms Young says.

Of all known or suspected child suicides in the Northern Territory since 2010 almost 60 per cent ­occurred in an outback Top End region home to just 20 per cent of the population.

On Tuesday Coroner Greg ­Cavanagh will open the second of two joint ­inquests into the deaths of NT youngsters, this one involving three people from Arnhem Land believed to have been affected by substance abuse.

Ms Harmer, who has worked in suicide prevention in Arnhem Land, says remote residents often fear seeking help will take them away from their homes. She believes grassroots support networks could also be effective in the bush. “Suicide prevention is about promoting life,” she says. “It’s about being OK to not be OK and knowing what to do when that happens.”

Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14