THE Ballan Neighbourhood House tonight hosts a suicide awareness talk by Victorian sports administrator Wayne Holdsworth, who lost his seventeen-year-old son Mac in October last year.<\/p>\n
Mr Holdsworth was the one who found Mac’s body on 24 October when he hadn’t appeared at breakfast.<\/p>\n
The teenager, who normally rose at 6.30am, had taken his own life after a sextortion incident.<\/p>\n
Physically and mentally devastated, Mr Holdsworth sought counselling to get through the pain but, three months later, decided he had a responsibility to help other families avoid the anguish his own was dealing with.<\/p>\n
The result was Smac<\/strong>kTalk, a registered charity through which Mr Holdsworth travels the country to tell his story and promote suicide prevention.<\/p>\n Tonight’s event takes place from 6.30pm to 7.30pm at the neighbourhood house in Inglis Street.<\/p>\n “I think it’s important to note that starting Smac<\/strong>kTalk wasn’t done on a whim,” Mr Holdsworth said. “And while it was only formed some three months after Mac passed away, which many would say was too soon, it was done with the support of weekly grief counselling.”<\/p>\n Mr Holdsworth said he wanted Mac to have a legacy “because at 17, he hadn’t really left one.”<\/p>\n “I also wanted to use his death as a catalyst to do more around suicide prevention and also assist people with seeing the signs that kids and people show, before it’s too late,” he said.<\/p>\n