What I wish I’d known about suicide before my son died
I wish I’d known that in the hours before someone decides to take their own life, they act as if they don’t have a care in the world. I wish I’d known that. My son might still be alive.
I didn’t know anything about suicide before last October. I didn’t know anything until my son took his own life after sextortion demands made on him. Yes, we found the criminal, but it was too late for my son to make a victim’s impact statement. And I was not allowed to give a victim statement on his behalf. That person received a six-month jail sentence. He’d already been in jail for three months and now, he’s out on the streets again. I can’t get distracted by that, though.
Yes, I only wish that on October 23 last year I knew what I know now. If I’d known more, I believe Mac would still be here. I would have known that his happiness, his excitement, at dinner that night, was a sign of what was to come.
That night felt normal in our household. I’d come home about 6.30pm after picking up my daughter from basketball. My wife had made really nice fish and vegetables, and we all sat down to dinner together. Mac was gently kicking his sister under the table, mainly to ridicule my really bad dad jokes. The kids talked about Daisy’s birthday, the following week. Mac told her: “I can’t wait … I’ll take you out.” We did the dishes and then Mac went into his bedroom. He seemed upbeat, really happy. That turns out to be a symptom, an indication that the person about to take his own life has made up his mind. He feels free.
My son was a victim of sextortion. I knew about it. He’d come to me and said: “Hey Dad, I’ve made a mistake.” We talked about what he could do. He’d paid them $500 and then another $500 but still the threats came. He made a statement to police and when the scammer called again, he’d put me on and I’d pretended to be a police officer to warn them off. But the thought of his friends seeing the images he’d sent really rocked him. Nothing I said seemed to help, but then he appeared to be OK. I discovered later that the scammers had tried again two or three weeks after their first attempt.
A few weeks after he died, I looked at his computer and iPad. It was clear he had been planning to take his own life for weeks. He wrote a note saying he was sorry, he was a burden. “Sorry. I just can’t cope in this world any more.”
At Mac’s funeral, there were 700 people. That’s about as many as the number of suicides in Victoria in any one year. And it is hard to get help. Here, where I live in Frankston in outer suburban Melbourne, it’s a five-week wait to get an appointment at Headspace. I could have taken Mac to a counsellor if I had any idea of the signs of suicide to come.
And it’s been hard for me to get help, too. Now I’m seeing a counsellor every week but I’m also counselling people who’ve reached out to me because other people need help. I’m trained now but I wasn’t before.
The best thing is that people have reached out to me, people with knowledge and advice about how I can move forward, but it’s too late for Mac and too late for so many others who’ve died.
I feel like there is not enough money going to suicide prevention services. If there was, there would not be a five-week wait where I live. I hope that whenever the government hands out money to mental health services which actually work, they hand out enough so no one has to wait. No one should have to wait.
If kids were having heart attacks, we’d be teaching parents CPR. We need the same for suicide.
The thing is, it turns out that it’s not enough to ask if someone is OK. They just answer fine. Mac just answered fine and then changed the subject. I had no idea I should have asked more questions. The strangest thing to me is that other people, other parents, say to me this could have been avoided. They say you could have done something.
There’s no doubt about that. But I just didn’t know.
Wayne Holdsworth is a husband and father.