Here’s the least ‘newsy’ news story that you should read today.

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-15/mental-health-system-leaving-regional-australians-behind/12414988?nw=0&pfmredir=sm

Rural & regional Australians are 40 per cent more likely to suicide.
The mental health health system is failing them.
As one ABC editor asked: “yeah yeah but what’s new?”
Give me a thread...

Nothing’s new. That’s the point.
I don’t blame you if your eyes glaze over at the stats - I’ve been reporting a variation of this headline for a decade.
But an outreach worker in rural Vic is sick of the bloody stats.
He wants you to listen to the people behind them.

Like the Mildura man who had the courage to speak up three times - first to @beyondblue, then to a GP receptionist and finally to the doctor himself.
Only to be sent away because that doctor didn’t have time for a mental health chat.
“Make a double appointment.”

Or the mother who was so relieved her 19-year-old son told her he was suicidal and self-harming, before it was too late.
She had that chance to get help.
Yet it took 10 days of harassment and nine doctors before she found one willing to take her son on as a patient in Horsham.

Or the rural Tasmanian father who was far too vulnerable to interview. He emailed the ABC because there was “no one left to ask for help”.
"I've just given up really after the last GP did nothing again. I'm not really trying anymore and every day just gets harder.”

This is the lived experience of people in rural and regional Australia, where there is no higher prevalence of mental illness.