A PINJARRA woman says COPMI was her safety net when dealing with mental illness in the family and fears the discontinuation of the service will leave others without support.
When Kylie Fryer’s children were impacted by her multiple hospitalisations, due to a mental illness, she said the national support initiative held her family together.
“I cried when I found out about the services discontinuation, it’s tragic,” she said.
Ms Fryer and her family had been accessing the online resources, which were part of the national initiative, to help her children cope with her illness.
One of Ms Fryer’s biggest concerns is that clinicians will struggle to support families without the online resources.
“Because it is national it means it’s consistent wherever you are and families can use them throughout all of Australia,” she said.
“I know for a fact it has built significant resilience in my children so they have been able to handle mental health crisis with other friends and with a different level of maturity and understanding.”
Ms Fryer’s son Liam Burnheim-Foster, 15, said the online resources taught him how to cope with and understand his mum’s mental illness.
“I was quite confused and also a bit scared because it was an unknown thing to me,” he said.
“I had no idea what it was about but COPMI helped me understand and I felt a lot better and more comfortable.
Liam said the program helped him realise his family wasn’t the only one suffering and there were a lot of others.
“I now really enjoy volunteering with the program and other mental health suicide prevention programs,” he said.
