Everything To Live For

More Australian children and young people die from suicide than any other cause. Genevieve Gannon meets a courageous young woman, Molly Koning, who has battled mental health issues all her life and tried to take her own life more than once. For the first time in a long while, she is looking to the future and wants to give others a sense of hope.

- Genevieve Gannon

 Each morning, Sue Koning would get up to leave her Sunshine Coast home for work with sweating hands and a racing heart. The mother of four would tiptoe past the closed bedroom of her youngest child and only daughter, frightened of what could be on the other side but unable to look in. If Molly had been having a bad week, she would lock her door from the inside. But even when the door wasn’t locked, Sue didn’t want to disturb her teenager’s sleep.

As soon as Sue arrived at the business she and her husband Jon owned, she would urgently log into Facebook, her breath catching in her throat.

“I’d have it open on my computer and I’d be looking at it thinking, ‘She’s not on yet, she’s not on yet.’ And then suddenly – thank God – there’s this little light and I’d think, ‘Okay.’ The only way I’d know she was alive was to see if she was on social media ... For a long time there, we thought we were going to lose her.”

Molly Koning is a beautiful 21-year-old with big, inky-blue eyes and a serious, expressive face. She has a warm, open temperament and speaks with conviction about the roles schools can play in helping young people grappling with mental health issues. “That’s when you can catch a lot of the young kids,” she says.