When former MP John McGrath went to see who was banging on the door of his electoral office late one night, he received some news that would not only change his life but the lives of many others battling mental illness.
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At the door stood John’s daughter, Karen.
The colour was drained from her face and he instantly knew something was radically wrong. She had to tell her father that his son Shane had taken his own life. That was April 16, 1993. Only days earlier, Shane had been released from hospital where he was being treated for a mental health condition.
“It wasn’t long after that, that I made up my mind that I probably needed to do something else with my life,” said John, wanting something other than being Warrnambool’s representative in State Parliament.
That something was devoting countless hours to improving mental health services for people who needed help. For more than two decades, that has meant travelling the world sharing his story in the hope that it may just save someone’s life – or, in his words, a family’s sanity.
While he was talked into staying in politics longer than he planned, he stepped up his involvement in mental health issues.
“Your 100 hours a week then as an MP became about 130 with your mental health stuff on top of that. It was a pretty hectic time,” he said.
But it was when he finally retired from politics in 1999 his involvement “really started”. By 2008 his work in key roles with organisations such as beyondblue, Headspace, Crisis Support Services and The Mental Health Professionals Network – to name just a few – was recognised with a Queen’s Birthday award.
Shane had become unwell around the time John won the seat of Warrnambool from the sitting Liberal member Adam Kempton in 1985.
Life as a National Party member of the Kennett Government came with some safety concerns – not that John was aware of it at the time. He said he was surprised to find himself being given a police escort back to his car after a “volatile” meeting public rally over the privatisation of the railways.
But there were times where the power of political influence could lead to heartwarming stories.
“I remember helping a couple adopt a little girl from overseas and the department were being terribly obnoxious about it all,” he said.
John intervened. He said he would never forget the day the family visited his office to say thank you.
If you ask John about his life, he will probably tell you has had a “fantastic” one.
“I was a little skinny freckled-faced kid on a farm in Killarney that left school in grade 9 and ended up doing all of these amazing things,” he said.
“I started on the farm, ended up in a factory, drove a truck, ended up a company manager and then went into small business for myself for 15 years, (then) Parliament and then travelled Australia and the world as an advocate of mental health. I mean, how good is that?”
John had grown up on a dairy farm with his two older sisters, Mary and Cath.
“My mum had a very challenging life because she lost three babies full-term,” John said. “Each of them had the cord around their neck and they strangled. The cord was also around my neck, but they were able to successfully remove the cord.”
His mum, John said, was soft, gentle and nurturing – the kind of person who was the first to visit a neighbour who had just had a baby despite having lost her third baby just days before.
“I even get a bit emotional today, that must have been so hard,” he said.
Life on the farm was relentless – there were never any holidays and his dad worked hard both on and off the farm.
“There was very much a work ethic. It was great. We weren’t rich. We never wanted for anything,” John said.
His mum died of throat cancer in 1972 – 13 years after he lost his dad to a heart attack when John was just 20.
“I look at my life, and yes, Shane’s death in ’93 was an absolute bugger. It was just the bottom of the tree,” he said.
“Around all of that some amazing things have happened for me and I just feel so grateful. Yeah, I have some health issues today, but I have a great life.”
Those health issues include heart surgery and inoperable prostate cancer, and while the cancer is now outside the prostate, it is being successfully treated.
So after decades working to improve mental health services, John is about to officially retire – even though that, too, has taken longer than he says it should have.
He and wife Lyn have recently moved to Adelaide, at the end of June retired from Headspace where he spent 10 years as a board member, and plans to soon step away from his role as the chair of The Mental Health Professionals Network – but not before he secures funding for the continuation of the project.
He may have stepped down as a founding board member of the beyondblue board in 2010 but he is still an ambassador.
“There’s just so much to do,” he said. “It affects a huge part of the community. Suicide, sadly, kills more people a year than the road toll yet we spend so much money on the road toll and we hear the word suicide and we run for cover. Some of the so-called experts today still think you shouldn’t talk about and I just say, ‘that’s rubbish’.
“We have to talk about it. It’s a fact of life and it’s not something to be ashamed of. We need to talk about it and have people try and understand it, but you’ll never fully understand it.”
John’s son Shane was a good-looking, intelligent young man with a great personality, “but life handed him a bum roll and he just couldn’t cope with it”.
“Why I get so bloody angry is we finally got him into hospital on Easter Sunday night, only after a GP came and spent time with us and they finally admitted him. He went in as a voluntary patient and discharged himself on the Wednesday,” he said.
When Shane told John on the Tuesday night that he was getting out the next day John, seeing that his son was not well enough, pleaded with hospital staff not to let him out. But on Wednesday Shane was allowed to leave and by Friday came that knock on John’s door.
“I don’t know, if they’d kept him in there for another few days... But maybe it mightn’t have made any difference. But that just makes me angry,” he said.
In the mid-80s when Shane became unwell, there was not much information available, John said. Shane had gone from being a good student to failing his HSC and his life after that was a roller-coaster ride.
It had a significant impact on the whole family – his mum and dad and his siblings Darren, Sherry, Karen and Joanne, John said.
Looking for answers, the family went to an information night at the former Brierly – the mental health facility.
“That drive down that driveway back to Moore Street from the Lewana clinic that night was the darkest, most soul-destroying drive of my life because what they told us that night was nearly to the point of hopeless,” John said.
“That’s when I decided to get involved. The more I got involved, the more I could see what needed to be done.
“I could see that trying to shake the tree from Warrnambool wasn’t going to work. You had to get on the bigger stage if you were going to do any good.
“In the bottom of my gut I am still angry that my son died because he never got the services that he should have – which is different to my eldest son Darren, who, today, lives with a mental health condition but with services that work for him. He’s a fully functioning, tax paying member of the community and that’s the way it should be for everybody. But it’s still not.
“That’s what, from time to time, fires me.”
John has never hesitated talking openly about suicide and mental illness, knowing that it’s what Shane would have wanted. Both Shane and Darren had spoken out about mental illness on TV.
“They said it was time people started talking about this,” he said.
So when he lost Shane, John made the difficult decision to give a moving speech to Parliament about his son. But talking about it is not always easy, and comes at a cost. It hit home when he was forced to spend nine hours waiting for a flight home from remote Western Australia after giving a speech.
“It was tough, but I did it. That’s the longest nine hours I ever spent in my life,” he said. “I said ‘I just can’t keep doing this. This is going to eventually destroy me’. Before you’d speak, you’d stiffen yourself and you’d do it but, by hell, you’d pay when you were finished.”
John said he likes to think that his family, in some way, by speaking out has helped to improve and bring about change in mental health services for others.
If you or someone you know needs help contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.
