'No one sets out to cause such pain'

IT WAS with a heavy heart I woke to the news that London nurse Jacintha Saldanha had died in a suspected suicide.

The 46-year-old mother-of-two was on the end of a childish and seemingly harmless radio prank that astonished everyone.

Her only sin was to believe Australian radio duo Mel Greig and Michael Christian, who made a hoax call pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles.

I feel for Ms Saldanha's family. There are so many questions and what-ifs when it comes to suicide.

But I also feel for the two radio hosts. No one sets out in search of such an outcome.

Yet in the face of such a tragedy, the blame game begins.

I'm not going to sit in judgment, nor do I want to sound like an apologist. But I will say that suicide leaves everyone gutted and searching around for answers. There is no way such a silly prank should lead to such a tragic outcome, but the radio duo will blame themselves - and there will be plenty of haters ready to fan such thoughts.

As a human being, I feel for the pair because I have been there.

Fifteen years ago I did a story for A Current Affair on a television repairman who was overcharging for work not done.

It goes down as one of the most despicable pieces of journalism in Australia because of its outcome.

It was the weekend promotion for A Current Affair and it ran on the Monday of that week.

This man committed suicide several days later.

I can't begin to fathom the pain his family has been through, although I have met with them and cried with them. I will forever blame myself for walking into the newsroom that day and being assigned that story and not seeing the disaster that was coming.

Those consumer protection stories were daily fodder for nightly television current affairs, and still are.

The shame and humiliation this man obviously felt were quickly my shame and humiliation as well.

The then-host of Media Watch, Stuart Littlemore, called me an "unspeakable bastard" and, of course, I agreed with Littlemore.

In fact, I agreed with every aspect of the criticism.

There was no justification for the outcome, but the event tore my life apart too.

I can now write that for years I did not sleep, I woke with nightmares, I stifled panic attacks in media conferences when all my colleagues were there, perhaps casting a judgmental eye. I threw myself into the most dangerous pursuits in journalism - coups, wars, you name it - to regain some of the credibility I had lost.

A few years later, I finally sought help for the post-traumatic stress disorder I had developed.

I simply couldn't breathe.

In the boiler room that was A Current Affair back then, I couldn't even tell the boss, or seek support, because exposing a soft underbelly in that joint would have done nothing but invite derision for such a "weakness".

Later, when my firstborn son died at the age of eight months from complication of his premature birth, I blamed myself.

Surely, I thought, on some karmic level, this child was taken from me as a result of my part in that story.

It is not rational of course, but it is how your heart feels in the face of such incomprehensible loss.

We all search for answers. We like to attribute blame.

I tell this story because, apart from psychopaths, no one ever intends to cause such harm to a person.

Certainly Mel and Michael did not intend for anyone to die as a result of their prank.

It is cruel to blame them.

But the media, in all their forms, can and do exacerbate things.

Suicide never happens in isolation. There is almost always a depressive illness, diagnosed or not, simmering in the background. Only in hindsight do the pieces fit together.

That is the true tragedy.

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