26–27 August 2022
In August 2022, Australia was still responding to the devastating death of former NRL player and premiership-winning coach Paul Green.
His death prompted an outpouring of public discussion about suicide, mental health, connection and the importance of reaching out. The messages were compassionate and well-intentioned: talk to someone. Ask for help. Check on people. Remind people that they matter.
I understood those messages.
But sitting where I was in August 2022, living through the consequences of a workplace psychological injury caused by my large publicly funded university employer’s retaliation for requesting a safe work environment, and what had followed, I was hearing them very differently.
Because I had reached out.
I had spoken.
I had asked for help.
I had documented what was happening.
And I was still trying to get somebody with the power and responsibility to do something to actually listen - within the very system that was meant to protect me from further harm.
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Peter Overton: What happens after someone reaches out?
Nine News presenter Peter Overton was among those who responded publicly following Paul Green’s death. In an emotional on-air message reported by news.com.au, he encouraged people experiencing difficulty to seek help and pointed viewers towards available support. One quote was, “You’re not alone.”
On 26 August 2022, I wrote an email to my family that I disagreed with him.
Not because people shouldn’t reach out.
Not because crisis services don’t have an important place.
I disagreed because the message didn’t describe the reality I was living.
I wrote:
“I disagree with Peter Overton. I’m being mobbed and ostracised and socially isolated by a university who has a legal obligation to ensure my safety and well-being and boasts community engagement, empathy, and a mission of the dignity of the human person.”
The public conversation placed so much emphasis on what the distressed individual should do.
Speak. Reach out. Call. Ask for help.
But what happens when that person has already done those things?
What happens when somebody is repeatedly saying: This is harming me. This is what I need. Please listen to me.
What responsibility then falls upon the people and institutions receiving those words?
I spoke up. I escalated to regulators, pleading for help, when university leaders ignored me. The response was victim blaming, deflection and I was repeatedly abandoned, even by the very agencies who had a regulatory responsibility to act.
I was left alone in this WHS crisis for years.
——
John Brogden: “People care”
Another response to Paul Green’s death came from John Brogden.
The headline of his Daily Telegraph opinion piece expressed its central message:
“Paul Green’s death shows us just when we think no-one cares, we do.”
Again, I understood the sentiment.
But my immediate response, recorded in my email on 26 August 2022, was stark:
“I disagree with John Brogden that people care. The university has a legal duty of care to actually care, and the negligence and mobbing is frightening and creepy. And I’ve been systematically abused.”
I was confronting the gulf between saying that people care and experiencing care when it actually matters.
For me, “care” couldn’t simply be a comforting sentiment expressed after a tragedy.
I was dealing with a workplace that had obligations concerning my health and safety. I was trying to navigate workers’ compensation. I was asking for assistance with circumstances that were continuing to cause me psychological and financial harm.
In that context, care had to become something tangible.
Care meant listening.
Care meant taking reported harm seriously.
Care meant respecting my voice in decisions affecting my own health and recovery.
Care meant addressing the circumstances causing the harm rather than continually placing the burden of surviving those circumstances back onto me.
And where legal duties existed, care had to mean fulfilling those duties.
That was why the public messages following Paul Green’s death affected me so deeply.
I was hearing society say, We care. Please reach out.
And inside my own life, I felt as though I was saying:
I already have. Where is everybody?
——
I didn’t need another slogan. I needed human support.
I was increasingly frustrated by a public discussion of suicide prevention that seemed to culminate in crisis telephone numbers.
I understood why those services existed. I wasn’t arguing that they shouldn’t.
I was asking a different question.
Could a crisis-line volunteer restore my employment circumstances, that’s the legal and governance responsibility of a powerful nationally registered publicly funded university with a Vice Chancellor on a $1 million salary?
Could a crisis-line volunteer compel regulators to actually regulate?
Could they return the employment entitlements stolen?
Could they enforce the workplace and workers’ compensation statutory obligations I had spent so long trying to have recognised?
Could they restore the financial security that allowed me to pay my mortgage and bills, take a holiday, participate in ordinary life and enjoy what I had spent decades working to build?
That was what dignity meant to me. And salvation.
In the same email, I wrote:
“But I need moral support. I’m begging for it.”
And:
“No one should be forced to suffer alone.”
Those weren’t abstract statements about mental health.
They were requests for human beings to stand beside another human being while she tried to navigate systems she could no longer safely navigate alone.
——
A mentally healthy workplace is more than a mental-health campaign
The timing made the contradiction even more striking.
Only weeks earlier, on 29 July 2022, I had received a newsletter from the Australian Government’s National Mental Health Commission announcing an updated Blueprint for Mentally Healthy Workplaces.
The Commission explained that the revised Blueprint made organisations’ legislated requirements clearer.
Feedback on the earlier Blueprint had specifically called for a clearer distinction between legal requirements and aspirational features of mentally healthy workplaces. It recommended orienting organisations towards their legislated responsibilities first.
The Blueprint also considered the broader conditions that create mentally healthy workplaces.
That mattered to me.
Workplace mental health cannot simply mean teaching workers how to become more resilient to harmful environments (while allowing the workplace harm to continue, especially when it’s the senior executives engaging in harmful conduct “on behalf of the university.”)
It cannot mean providing wellbeing resources while ignoring the conditions creating the distress.
And it cannot mean waiting until somebody is overwhelmed and then directing them towards a helpline.
See also http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/when-government-mentally-healthy.html
——
Prevention has to mean something.
Duty of care has to mean something.
Psychosocial safety has to mean something.
Listening has to mean something.
——
“No one should ever have to prove resilience like this.”
By August 2022, I was exhausted by the language of resilience.
I wrote:
“No one should ever have to prove resilience like this. But the battle scars of trauma are real.”
There’s something deeply troubling about celebrating a person’s resilience while continuing to expose them to circumstances requiring extraordinary resilience merely to survive.
The better question isn’t always:
How resilient is this person?
Sometimes it needs to be:
Why are we requiring this person to be so resilient in the first place?
And who has the power and responsibility to change the conditions causing the harm?
——
Reaching out only works if somebody listens
The death of Paul Green generated an enormous public conversation about speaking up, reaching out and caring for one another.
But from where I stood, there was another side to that conversation that desperately needed to be heard.
When someone reaches out, somebody has to receive that reach.
When someone says they’re being harmed, somebody has to listen.
When we tell somebody, “people care,” those words need to be followed by people who demonstrate that care when it’s asked of them.
When a worker identifies workplace conditions affecting their psychological safety, those with responsibility cannot simply convert the problem into an individual mental-health problem and send that person elsewhere.
And when somebody explains what they need in order to recover, their voice shouldn’t disappear from their own recovery.
I wrote a sentence in correspondence that perhaps best captures what I was trying to say:
“A voice in my health and recovery is my human right. It’s a matter of respect and dignity for the human person.”
That remains the point.
Suicide prevention cannot begin and end with telling vulnerable people to reach out.
Nor can “people care” remain something we say after somebody has died.
We also have to ask what happens while somebody is still here, reaching out and asking to be heard.
Who listens?
Who acts?
Who stands beside them?
Who accepts responsibility when circumstances contributing to their distress are within someone’s power — or legal responsibility — to address?
A society genuinely committed to preventing psychological harm cannot place the entire burden on the person already carrying it.
Sometimes the person has already spoken.
Sometimes they have spoken over and over again.
Sometimes they’re not asking society to guess what they need.
They are telling us.
The failure isn’t always that somebody didn’t reach out.
Sometimes the failure is that they reached out — and the people with the power and responsibility to respond did not listen.
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 454.
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References
new.com.au, NRL 2022: Paul Green death — Peter Overton’s on-air message, August 2022.
John Brogden, “Paul Green’s death shows us just when we think no-one cares, we do”, The Daily Telegraph, August 2022.
Australian Government, National Mental Health Commission, National Workplace Initiative sNewsletter, 29 July 2022, including Release 2 of the Blueprint for Mentally Healthy Workplaces. [Received via email E-newsletter].
General website: https://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov.au/projects/mentally-healthy-work
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