Sarah Mercer’s Experience Shows What Happens When Mental Health Care is Hours From Home
Sarah Mercer’s life, like most mothers, revolves around her children. School routines, family chaos and milestones you never get back. First steps. First jobs. First heartbreaks.
For Sarah, mental illness took many of those moments away. Distance did the rest.
Over the past two years, Sarah, 45, has spent more than 20 weeks in hospital, three hours away from home, receiving mental health care unavailable in her region. Time spent away from her children and time she can’t recover.
Sarah grew up in Peterborough. Apart from short stints in Adelaide and Kalgoorlie, she always knew she would return. Her parents lived there and she and her husband ran the local butcher shop for 12 years. Their children grew up riding bikes to the skate park, watched over by a town that had known them since birth.
“I love that I know pretty much everyone,” Sarah says. “I have so much family around here. And I love that the kids can just sort of roam.”
About two years ago, her mental health collapsed.
Sarah’s anxiety first appeared more than a decade earlier, when her children were young. She remembers sitting on the couch while they watched Dora the Explorer when her first panic attack hit.
“I thought, oh my God, I can’t breathe. I’m going to be sick,” she says. “I didn’t know what this thing was. I packed the kids in the car, went around to Mum’s and explained it to her. And she said to ‘take some deep breaths and it’ll pass’.”
It didn’t.
She paced the house throughout the night and walked for hours. She says she “just couldn’t sit still”.
When Mental Health Care Was Hours From Home
Specialist mental health care proved hard to reach. To access psychiatric support, Sarah upgraded her private health insurance and waited four months for coverage to begin, while her health continued to decline.
She spent three weeks at the mental health unit at Whyalla Hospital, followed by a month in hospital in Adelaide. Her youngest child was just three years old.
Sarah’s husband and parents stepped in to hold family life together. Medications changed and monthly trips to Adelaide followed. A GP in Jamestown became, as Sarah describes, “the captain of my ship”.
For a time, life went back to normal. Then, in March 2024, it unravelled again.
“My brain just… took leave of my body,” she says. “I fell into a hole.”
“I was so gaunt and lethargic and over life in general. Didn’t want to have a bar of it. I couldn’t make decisions. I just needed someone to look after me.”
Hospital admissions followed, in both Peterborough and Adelaide. Medication trials continued and the side effects were severe.
“At one stage I was on so much medication I could barely see straight,” Sarah says. “I had trouble walking. My legs would give way. I’d pass out in the passage. I couldn’t hold a cup of coffee or a cup of tea in my hand – I had the shakes that much. I would forget everything.”
Sarah stopped driving.
“When you’re in that state, I just couldn’t do it. What if I hurt someone else?” she says.
Her mother began driving the six-hour round trip to Adelaide for psychiatrist appointments. Her husband stayed home to manage work and the children’s routines.
At her sickest, Sarah spent up to seven weeks at a time in hospital. She missed school struggles. First jobs. Friendships and breakups. She wasn’t there when her eldest daughter moved out of home.
“As a mum, that hurts in a way I can’t explain,” she says. “You’re supposed to be there. Hug them. Tell them it’ll be okay.”
“They’d say, ‘we don’t want to worry you, Mum,’” Sarah says. “And that broke me. Your kids should never feel like they have to protect you.”
The Cost Rural Families Keep Paying
Access remains limited and psychiatrists in rural areas are scarce. Visiting psychologists come to the nearest town, an hour away, sometimes only once a month. Wait lists stay full.
Private psychiatric care costs $300 to $400 per hour.
“That’s before petrol, accommodation, time off work and the need for someone to travel with you,” Sarah says. “And even if you get a psychologist who comes to Jamestown, you might not mesh with them – but they’re the only one who comes here. Who else do I talk to?”
Sarah speaks warmly of the Port Pirie community mental health nurses who visit her at home, call, email, and text.
“They remind me I’m not broken,” she says.
She wants better access to consistent mental health care for rural families so parents can recover closer to home and fewer moments slip away.
“Before all this, I felt like quite a young mum,” Sarah says. “But now I feel like I’ve aged 10 years in two years. I’ve missed so much of what my kids have gone through.”
“We’ve got a beautiful doctor’s surgery up here. It’s a beautiful hospital. We have fantastic nurses. We just need doctors.”
This is the fourth story in the From Here to Healthcare series, a grassroots storytelling initiative led by Alex Thomas and supported by Greater SA. The series shares real experiences from country South Australians to show how access to healthcare changes lives and outcomes, based on postcode alone.
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