When Mission and Identity Will Not Answer the Question - August 2022

23–30 August 2022

By August 2022, I was no longer asking an abstract question about ACU’s mission and identity.

I was asking how that mission applied to me.

I’ve worked at ACU for approximately twenty years, living the values the university publicly professes: dignity of the human person, service, compassion, community, respect for others and the common good.

My family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

And yet, after everything that had happened since I first spoke up locally on 2 July 2019, I was still trying to find somebody — anybody — within the university who would answer a very basic question:

How does what has happened to me reconcile with ACU’s Catholic identity and mission?

That question became particularly confronting in August 2022.

——

I went directly to Mission

I found the university’s Communications Officer (Mission).

The ACU webpage preserved in my records described the Communications Officer (Mission) as the person to contact for comment about the university’s “Catholic identity and mission”, or for comment from areas including ACU Campus Ministry, EthicsFinder and ACU Community Engagement.

That seemed to be precisely where my questions belonged.

So I contacted her.

On 23 August 2022, I left a voice message on her phone. It was a voice message I recorded and sent, due to the creepy nature of all this conduct, and for self-preservation from further harm, like this incident: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/when-safety-is-denied-at-threshold-may.html

I have that recorded message and I have retained the transcript of exactly what I said.

I also sent written communications. The records include the lengthy text message I sent to the Mission communications number. The screenshot preserved in my records shows that message marked “Read.”

I also know that my emails were being received and read.

I wasn’t throwing questions into the ether. I was trying to communicate directly with my university through a position specifically identified by ACU as a contact point for comment about its Catholic identity and mission.

And I was asking for answers.

——

Listen to what I was actually saying

The voice recording is difficult for me to revisit because even through the written transcript, the level of distress is unmistakable.

I spoke about my twenty years at ACU. I spoke about trying to live its mission and values through my work and through the way I supported other people.

I spoke about what had happened after I asked for discrimination, harassment, bullying and privacy violations to stop.

I spoke about my father’s suicide and the impact upon my family.

I spoke about the loss of my financial security.

I spoke about isolation and ostracism.

I spoke about my attempts to get back to my work.

I spoke about workers compensation and the Injury Management Plan.

I spoke about being frightened.

And I kept coming back to the same question:

“So you tell me how all this relates to the mission and to the identity, and ethics and everything that is being promoted, because I lived that.”

That wasn’t a rhetorical flourish.

I wanted an answer, because this had begun with something so much smaller than everything it eventually became.

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries so that I could have a psychosocially safe working environment.

That was it.

I hadn’t asked for my life to become consumed by an institutional battle.

I hadn’t asked to become isolated from my workplace, my colleagues and the support network that should have been part of my recovery.

I hadn’t asked for my family to become caught up in my workplace matter.

I hadn’t asked for their privacy to be implicated, or for members of my family to receive communications that I experienced as attempts to intimidate them into silence.

I hadn’t asked to spend years documenting what was happening because documentation had become one of the few protections I felt I had left.

I had asked for safety.

And this is where the question of dignity becomes impossible for me to separate from everything that followed.

——

The dignity of the human person

My own relationship with ACU extends across approximately twenty years of service, and my family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

It makes what followed - including the involvement of my family in a workplace matter that was mine - all the more difficult to comprehend through the lens of the dignity of the human person.

This isn’t an abstract phrase to me.

It’s not something that belongs only in a mission statement.

It has to mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

It has to mean something when that human being becomes vulnerable.

It has to mean something when an employee says: I am frightened.

It has to mean something when she says: I need this conduct to stop.

It has to mean something when she asks for a safe work environment.

It has to mean something when her family is drawn into something that began as her workplace matter.

And it has to mean something when the person asking the question has given approximately twenty years of her working life to the institution.

That’s why I keep returning to Mission and Identity.

How is any of this reconciled with the dignity of the human person?

Not as an abstract Catholic principle.

Not as words on a university website.

As something that must mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

——

The contradiction 

This wasn’t just any employer.

ACU is a nationally registered, publicly funded Australian university. It operates across Australia and has a presence in Rome.

It publicly identifies itself through an explicitly Catholic mission and identity.

That makes the question of institutional conduct more important.

• What does dignity of the human person require when an employee says she’s being harmed?

• What does the common good mean when a staff member repeatedly asks for a psychosocially safe workplace?

• What does community engagement mean when an employee and members of her family experience the institution very differently, under current leadership, from the values being publicly communicated?

• What does compassion mean when somebody is telling you that she’s frightened?

• What does ethics mean if policies and values exist beautifully on websites and in public communications, but the person asking how those principles apply to her, cannot obtain an answer?

• And what does Catholic Identity mean if the difficult questions about institutional conduct are the questions nobody wants to answer?

They require answers.

——

“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people”

A week later, on 30 August 2022, I wrote again.

My email again asked how what I was experiencing, could be reconciled with the university’s:

“mission, values, ethos, community engagement, code of conduct and compliance of Australian laws”

By then, I was explicitly connecting what had happened to me with the broader public conversation about mental health and mentally healthy workplaces.

I wrote:

“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people.”

This captures the problem for me.

An institution can have excellent policies.

It can publish beautiful statements about dignity.

It can speak about compassion, wellbeing, inclusion, ethics, social justice and the common good.

It can employ people specifically to communicate its mission.

But eventually those principles have to encounter an actual human being.

They have to mean something when that human being is distressed, injured, frightened, persistent or asking questions the institution would rather not answer.

Otherwise, what do they mean?

——

I can only speak for myself

There were broader concerns in my communications. I was beginning to ask questions about regulators, governments, workplace mental health and what appeared to me to be much larger systemic problems.

Those questions remain important.

But here I want to be careful.

I can speak for myself.

I can speak about what happened to me.

I can speak about the records I kept.

I can speak about the communications I sent.

I can speak about the voice message I left and recorded.

I can speak about the text messages.

I can speak about the emails.

I can speak about asking for help.

I can speak about asking for safety.

And I can speak about repeatedly asking how the conduct I was experiencing could possibly be reconciled with the values my employer professed.

The text message preserved in my records ends with words that are painful for me to read now:

“I’ve begged and begged and begged. No more indignity and exploitation of the human person.”

That was August 2022.

More than three years after I first asked for a safe work environment. 

——

So what’s the answer?

That is the question I am left with.

• What was the answer from Mission and Identity?

• How was what was happening to me consistent with the dignity of the human person?

• How was ignoring repeated requests for a safe work environment consistent with the common good?

• How was involving my family in something that began as my workplace matter consistent with respect for human dignity?

• How was my prolonged isolation from my workplace consistent with an institution professing community?

• How was the level of fear and distress I was communicating consistent with a commitment to wellbeing?

How could I be telling the university, repeatedly and in increasingly vulnerable language:

I am frightened.

I need support.

I want to get back to my work.

Please listen to me.

- while the public language of mission, compassion, dignity and mental health continued around me?

I wasn’t asking the Communications Officer (Mission) personally to resolve everything that had happened.

I was asking a question that the very purpose of that position made particularly important:

What does ACU’s mission require the institution to do when its own employee is telling it that the institution’s conduct towards her is causing profound harm?

And if what I documented was consistent with ACU’s mission and identity, then explain to me how.

If it was not consistent with that mission and identity, another question follows.

Why did nobody intervene?

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries for a psychosocially safe work environment.

Look at where it went from there.

That’s the question I was asking in August 2022.

And it is the question these records still leave unanswered.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 460-462.

Part 3: Strategies and Support Organisations - Preventing Suicide Means Preventing Harm

In Part 1 of this series, I looked at cases and personal stories. In Part 2, I looked at what the research tells us about work-related suicide and the relationship between harmful working conditions, psychological injury, employment circumstances and suicidal distress.

Part 3 turns to prevention.

What are governments, workplaces and communities supposed to do with what we now know? What strategies are being developed? What support exists? And, particularly in the workplace, what does meaningful suicide prevention actually require?

Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2025–2035 provides an important answer. Its significance is that it moves suicide prevention beyond an approach centred predominantly on an individual’s mental health or their response once they are already in crisis.

It asks us to look further upstream.

The Strategy recognises that suicidal distress is complex and is influenced by the circumstances in which people live their lives — including income, employment, job security, working conditions, housing, social inclusion, discrimination, trauma and access to health care. It states that approaches which address only individual factors, or treat suicide solely as a mental-health issue, are likely to be inadequate.

That has profound implications for workplace mental health.

If working conditions can contribute to distress, then suicide prevention cannot be confined to telling workers to seek help when those conditions have already harmed them.

Prevention must also address the conditions themselves.

——

From crisis response to prevention

When the draft National Suicide Prevention Strategy was released in September 2024, ABC journalists Katherine Gregory and Stephanie Dalzell described its emphasis on compassion and hope.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the Strategy was intended to establish a long-term national approach to suicide prevention. He spoke of a collective responsibility to support one another so that people don’t feel alone or forced to carry unbearable burdens by themselves.

But something else in the article particularly stood out to me.

People with lived experience had identified a lack of compassion as a potential driver of suicidal distress.

That’s an extraordinarily important point.

Compassion is sometimes treated as something soft or optional — a kindness offered after the important administrative, organisational or institutional work has been done.

The Strategy treats it very differently.

Its support framework includes a specific objective of creating a “culture of compassion”. It recognises that people experiencing suicidal distress can encounter stigma, judgement and dismissive responses, and that these experiences can become barriers to seeking or receiving support.

It also recognises that suicide-prevention capability needs to extend beyond traditional health services. People may come into contact with employment, financial, legal, education and social-support services while experiencing the circumstances that are contributing to their distress. Those services therefore need the capacity to recognise distress, respond compassionately and connect people with appropriate support.

This moves us away from the idea that suicide prevention belongs only in hospitals, psychologists’ offices or crisis telephone services.

It belongs wherever people encounter the circumstances that can cause or intensify overwhelming distress.

And that includes workplaces.

——

Situational distress: asking what happened, not simply what is wrong

Another of the references I selected for this part is an ABC News article by Rhiannon Lucas, published on 17 June 2026, examining calls for greater attention to situational distress in men’s suicide prevention.

That concept is particularly important to this series.

It directs attention towards the circumstances surrounding a person’s distress — what’s happened in their life, what pressures they are experiencing and what might need to change — rather than assuming that suicidal distress can always be understood primarily through a diagnosis of mental illness.

That’s consistent with the National Strategy itself.

The Strategy describes suicidal distress as a human response to overwhelming suffering. It recognises the interaction between individual circumstances and social determinants such as employment, housing, income, safety and social inclusion.

That changes the question.

Instead of asking only:

What is wrong with this person?

we also need to ask:

What has happened to this person?

What circumstances are they living through?

What has made them feel unsafe?

What have they lost?

What’s happened to their income, employment, housing, relationships or sense of belonging?

What institutional or organisational processes are they confronting?

And - crucially - which of those circumstances can actually be changed?

For workplace suicide prevention, that distinction matters enormously.

——

The workplace is part of suicide prevention

The National Strategy is explicit about workplace risk.

Under its objective of Safety and Security, it identifies workplace bullying as a risk to personal safety. It reports that bullying and harassment at work have been associated with an increased risk of suicidal thoughts — some research suggesting between 1.5 and 2 times the risk, generally alongside other psychologically stressful employment conditions. It also notes that one-third of workers’ compensation claims for mental stress relate to bullying and harassment.

The Strategy doesn’t respond to that evidence simply by recommending more counselling.

One of its recommended actions is:

“build the capability of employers to comply with their duty to manage psychosocial hazards at work”

consistent with the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2023–2033.

That is prevention.

Mental-health awareness campaigns have a place. Employee Assistance Programs have a place. Encouraging people to talk has a place.

But none of those things removes a psychosocial hazard.

If bullying is occurring, prevent the bullying.

If a workplace system is psychologically unsafe, make it safe.

If organisational practices are creating intolerable insecurity or distress, examine those practices.

If somebody reports that they are being harmed, listen and respond.

And if somebody has already sustained a psychological injury, preventing further harm must surely include ensuring that the systems supposedly designed to support recovery don’t compound that injury.

——

Safe, meaningful and secure work

The Strategy’s focus on economic security is equally important.

It describes economic security as giving people not simply the capacity to purchase necessities but also purpose, social engagement, choice and control over important aspects of their lives. Its recommendations include strengthening equitable access to safe, meaningful and secure work and ensuring workplaces are psychologically safe, inclusive and affirming.

The Strategy also draws attention to what happens when that security disappears.

It reports that unemployed people are about twice as likely to die by suicide as employed people; that the risk increases with the duration of unemployment; that income uncertainty is associated with greater suicide risk; and that low income and economic disadvantage can substantially increase vulnerability.

It also recognises work changes as potentially dangerous life transitions. People who leave the labour force because of injury, or who retire involuntarily, can face increased risks of suicidal thoughts and behaviours.

These are not peripheral economic issues unrelated to mental health.

They are suicide-prevention issues.

A person’s work, income, home, health, identity, independence, relationships and sense of future do not exist in separate compartments.

Harm in one area can cascade through the others.

——

Human rights, dignity and safety

This is perhaps most clearly expressed in an explainer about the National Strategy by Anna Traurig, Karen R. Fisher and Alan Woodward for the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW.

They begin from a human-rights position:

“Every person has the right to life, health, dignity and safety.”

They argue that when preventable barriers push people towards despair, those human rights are placed at risk.

And they make an observation that brings together so much of what I have been exploring throughout this series:

“A person’s risk of suicide may depend on whether they have a safe home, a secure income, a sense of belonging, and a supportive community.”

When I read those words - safe home, secure income, belonging, supportive community, dignity and safety - I cannot separate them from my own experience.

I have worked for ACU for approximately twenty years. I have repeatedly questioned how what I have experienced, after raising concerns about my safety at work, can be reconciled with an institution whose stated identity is grounded in Catholic mission, human dignity and the common good.

I ask that question again here, but now in the context of Australia’s emerging approach to suicide prevention:

How does conduct that a worker says has undermined her safety, health, financial security, employment security and sense of belonging align with the University’s Mission, Identity, Ethos and Values?

The National Suicide Prevention Strategy is telling us that these things matter.

Safety matters.

Economic security matters.

Employment matters.

Social connection matters.

Dignity matters.

Compassion matters.

They’re not incidental to suicide prevention. They’re among its foundations.

Traurig, Fisher and Woodward conclude that, with appropriate funding, coordination and commitment, the Strategy has the potential not only to save lives but to change how Australia understands suicide prevention - towards creating the social conditions in which people can live with dignity, safety and hope.

That’s a vision of prevention I understand.

——

Reaching into workplaces

The Productivity Commission’s 2025 review of the National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement provides a practical example of what taking suicide prevention into workplaces can look like.

It discusses MATES in Construction, established in Queensland in 2008 in response to high levels of suicide in the construction industry.

Rather than waiting for construction workers to enter the health system, MATES brings mental-health and suicide-prevention support into employment settings. Its model includes training for workers and supervisors, peer-to-peer support, a 24-hour helpline and workplace mental-health and suicide-prevention resources.

The Productivity Commission cites evidence from Deakin University’s Faculty of Health that suicide rates among male construction workers have declined nationally at a greater rate than among other working males. The submission attributed the strength of the model to its combination of peer support, mental-health literacy and stigma reduction within the workplace, alongside continuing evaluation. 

The Commission described it as demonstrating:

“the value of embedding suicide prevention in everyday work environments.”

That’s significant.

It tells us that the workplace doesn’t simply have to be considered a potential source of risk.

It can also become a place of prevention, connection and support.

——

Breaking stigma in construction

The construction industry also features in Liam Twyford’s November 2023 ABC News article about a former construction worker campaigning to change the industry’s attitudes towards mental health.

I included this article because strategies and policies ultimately have to reach real workplaces and real people.

Workplace cultures matter.

If workers believe admitting that they’re struggling will make them appear weak, unreliable or incapable of doing their job, an organisation can have every mental-health policy imaginable sitting on its intranet and still fail the people who need support.

Changing workplace mental health therefore means changing culture as well as providing services.

People must be able to speak.

Managers and colleagues must know how to listen.

Workers must not fear punishment, humiliation or exclusion for disclosing psychological distress.

And mental-health initiatives need credibility. Employees have to believe that when an organisation tells them to speak up, somebody will actually listen - and that speaking up will make them safer rather than placing them at greater risk.

——

Support must be connected, not fragmented

The Productivity Commission’s review makes another important point: Australia’s mental-health and suicide-prevention systems require better coordination and clearer accountability.

It describes suicide prevention as necessarily involving a wide range of supports because many factors can contribute to suicidal distress.

It also recognises that the suicide-prevention workforce extends well beyond occupations traditionally associated with mental-health care.

This complements the National Strategy’s call to develop suicide-prevention capability across the community and among non-health services.

That matters because a person experiencing overwhelming distress may simultaneously be dealing with a workplace, employer, insurer, financial service, lawyer, government agency, health professional or social-support organisation.

A fragmented response can require that person to explain their trauma repeatedly while navigating systems they may barely have the capacity to manage.

A genuinely preventive system should instead ask:

How do we reduce the burden on the person?

How do services communicate appropriately?

How do we provide continuity?

How do we preserve agency and dignity?

How do we recognise trauma?

And how do we ensure that a system created to provide assistance does not become another source of distress?

——

Support after suicide

Prevention also includes what happens to those left behind.

The National Strategy recognises the profound and continuing effects of suicide on families, carers, kin and communities.

That’s why specialist bereavement services matter.

Conversations Matter provides resources designed to support safe conversations about suicide, including resources specifically for people bereaved by suicide.

StandBy Support After Suicide provides support following suicide and is also recognised within the Productivity Commission’s review as part of Australia’s suicide-prevention landscape. The Commission records StandBy’s observation that suicide prevention involves a distinctive and broad workforce requiring appropriate support and policy attention.

I have also included the White Wreath Association’s personal stories and Roses in the Ocean, including Di White’s Musing, among the resources accompanying this post.

There’s a reason for including lived experience.

Policies tell us what systems intend to do.

Statistics tell us about scale and patterns.

Research tells us about risk and intervention.

But people’s stories tell us what those experiences actually mean in a human life.

The National Strategy itself was deliberately shaped by lived and living experience. That should continue to influence how suicide-prevention policy is designed, implemented and evaluated.

——

Prevention cannot begin only at crisis point

Across these three parts, I have moved from people’s stories, to research, and finally to strategies and support.

What strikes me most strongly is how far the contemporary understanding of suicide prevention has moved beyond the simple message to “reach out”.

Reaching out remains important.

Lifeline matters. Crisis services matter. Mental-health professionals matter. Friends, families, colleagues and compassionate strangers matter.

But Australia’s own National Suicide Prevention Strategy now tells us that prevention has to start much earlier.

It asks us to address safety and security, health, economic security, social inclusion and difficult life transitions before distress reaches crisis point.

It asks employers to manage psychosocial hazards.

It recognises workplace bullying.

It recognises employment and working conditions.

It recognises income uncertainty.

It recognises the importance of belonging.

It recognises compassion.

And it recognises that suicide prevention belongs beyond the health system.

So perhaps the question with which I began this series needs to be turned around.

Instead of asking only why a distressed person didn’t reach out, we should also ask:

Who reached in?

Who listened?

Who recognised what was happening?

Who had the power to remove the source of harm?

Who acted?

And, when somebody said they were unsafe, distressed or being harmed, did the institutions around them respond with the compassion, dignity and safety that our national suicide-prevention strategy now says are so important?

There’ll always be a place for encouraging people to ask for help.

But “reach out” cannot become a way of transferring responsibility for suicide prevention onto the person who is already suffering.

Sometimes prevention means listening.

Sometimes it means supporting.

Sometimes it means connecting somebody with specialist help.

And sometimes it means recognising that the environment itself is causing harm - and having the courage and responsibility to change it.

That’s where workplace suicide prevention must begin.

——

References

Gregory, K. & Dalzell, S. (2024, 10 September). ‘Compassion and hope the keys to draft new National Suicide Prevention Strategy.’ ABC News. [Online] : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-10/national-suicide-prevention-strategy-draft-2024/104329824

Lucas, R. (2026, 17 June). ‘More support urged for men's suicide prevention as advocates call for greater focus on situational distress.’ ABC News. [Online] : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-17/male-suicide-travelling-memorial-zero-suicide-awareness/106499132

NSPO (2025). ‘The National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2025-2035.’ [Online]: https://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov.au/nspo/publications/download-national-suicide-prevention-strategy

Productivity Commission. (2025, 16 October). ‘Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement Review. Inquiry Report. No. 108.’ [Online]: https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries-and-research/mental-health-review/report/

Traurig, A., Fisher, K.R. and Woodward, A. (nd). ‘Explainer: What is the National Suicide Prevention Strategy and why does it matter?’ Australian Human Rights Institute. [Online] : https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/research/commentary/explainer-national-suicide-prevention-strategy 

Twyford, L. (2023, 4 November). ‘Former construction worker pushing to change the stigma around mental health in the industry.’ ABC News. [Online] : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-04/suicide-construction-workers-foremind-mental-health-platform/103062958 

Other resources:

https://conversationsmatter.org.au/resources/those-bereaved-by-suicide/

https://standbysupport.com.au

https://www.whitewreath.org.au/articles/personal-stories/

Musing by Di White

https://rosesintheocean.com.au/musing/