Trigger warning: this story contains the mention of suicide. If you need help contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.
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Low self esteem and school bullying led Cameron Lean down a path of drugs leading to severe mental health issues, which ultimately ended in suicide at just 29-years-old.
His mother Carolyn Lean wants to see more alcohol and drug rehabilitation centres built to intervene and save other young adults from the fate her child had.
"The whole story starts with bullying at school, self esteem issues, the need to be accepted, he gravitated towards people who used him before finding weed," Ms Lean said.
"This sent him on a pathway of personality disorder, schizophrenia and paranoia, which destroyed him, our family and his friends.
"People are oblivious to the pain drugs and mental illness causes, whole families are destroyed and it doesn't happen over night, it takes years."
The beginning of the end
After Cameron finished school in Dubbo in NSW's Central West, he accepted a vehicle builder apprenticeship in Newcastle in the state's Hunter region. After four years, he met a man who owned a muffler shop and decided to work for him.
"He was lovely and put Cameron through TAFE and helped him get a motor mechanic licence, then he told Cameron he was going to sell the business and he wanted him to have it," she said.
At 22, Cameron had completed two trades.
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Cameron decided to start his own business, building up his shop, buying all the equipment he would need for it. Employing staff and putting them through TAFE apprenticeships.
"Then all the 'rev heads' of Newcastle thought he seemed like a good person to know because he had a big heart, but out of nowhere he was smoking weed all the time, and the shop front became a bit of a shop front," she said.
Cameron advised he smoked weed to cope with the stress.
"That was the beginning of the end really," she said.
"We went into the workshop one day and there was a meth pipe on the bench and other paraphernalia, he didn't expect us to visit but he threw this crazy tantrum, like he mentally lost it and he'd gone over the edge, the anger was scary."
Cameron began exhibiting signs of schizophrenia, brought on by smoking weed.
"He was a very angry paranoid young man," she said.
Cameron then went on to start a second business. But that soon went bust, and he had a violent argument with the man who owned the building.
"We went over to help move equipment out and he was displaying psychosis, he was throwing furniture and breaking things," she said.
"I said to Rick [my husband] he is mentally ill."
For a year, Cameron was supported by his girlfriend at the time and his drugs that he sold. He even had a business plan on how to go about buying and selling drugs.
On one particularly bad evening, Cameron's friends rang Ms Lean saying that he was in the bath, naked, with the shower running and it was icy cold.
"You can't get a mental health team to come and see them, you have to get the police first and then they call in an ambulance or mental health team," she said.
"That's where all these problems arise, when you know they have a mental health issue that's aggravated with the drugs they take."
The police by default, see it as criminal matter.
"We sent the police to do a welfare check, they walked in, and he put on this straight face and said he was okay, but then he would ring us and abuse and threaten to kill us because we sent the police," she said.
Cameron's girlfriend ended up getting a job back in Dubbo, so Ms Lean thought it would be good to get him out of Newcastle.
"He started stalling though, one day he and his mate got a rental truck to bring his possessions over here...he maybe got less than 100 kilometres and then said he was incapable of driving the truck. The truck was taken back to Newcastle," she said.
It was just one trauma after another and we couldn't guide or help him, he was unreachable.
- Carolyn Lean
When Christmas rolled around, Cameron went to his girlfriend's house but by this stage he had developed severe schizophrenia, paranoia. Not uncommon to hear him talking to his voices.
"He stayed inside the car with his dog (2J) and didn't go inside the house the whole time," she said.
The car, a silver Lexus, was to be his and 2J's home for the next six months, living in and around Newcastle.
On New Year Eve, Cameron wanted his parents to come over to Newcastle to see him and they agreed to meet him on the street.
"He was walking down the street and he looked like a stereotypical addict with a hoodie, a bag slung over his shoulder, and he had what I call a meth agitation walk," she said.
"He got out a can of deodorant and an electric lighter and he was spraying himself, trying to light himself on fire the whole time we were trying to talk with him."
His parents rang the police for assistance, but they were a no show. Eventually, they had to abandon him there, as he would not accept any assistance from them.
"That's our only child," she said.
Mental health ward
His parents tried multiple times to get Cameron into a mental health ward but every time they tried something went wrong.
"The time he was lying on the railway track, the ambulance and police finally put him in a Newcastle mental health ward and he had a meeting with the now retired head of psychiatry in Newcastle but he didn't say a word," Ms Lean said.
While talking with the Daily Liberal, Ms Lean re-enacted what happened next.
Creating finger guns, Ms Lean explained, "he pointed at us and whispered, 'I'm going to shoot you and you."
"He used to call us shit stains," Ms Lean said.
According to Ms Lean, Cameron was set on killing them.
"He would send us messages saying he was going to set our house on fire, but one minute he wanted to cuddle and the next he wanted to stab us," she explained.
After speaking with the head of psychiatry, Ms Lean walked away horrified.
"She said to us, 'what we are dealing with here is a spoilt, naughty little boy, he will be released back to the police to deal with'," she said.
At this stage Cameron had been heavily addicted to drugs for two years.
"...and she just called him a naughty boy," she said.
For years after this Ms Lean continued to try and get Cameron into the mental health ward and rehab centres. He would resist the Rehab centres as he believed he was not an addict.
When Cameron was living in his car, he had an Apprehended Violence Order put out on him for sending messages to his girlfriend claiming he would come to her work and kill her.
"The cops came around to our place and Cameron called in their presence, we had nine minutes to get out of the house he said, and because the police heard the threat, they put an AVO on him," she said.
Nothing worked
It wasn't long before Cameron broke the AVO too.
"Rick had gone to work and Cameron arrived, just standing against the wall in front of my house, paranoid," she said.
"He asked if I was going to let him in and he was dancing up and down for about ten minutes totally paranoid and agitated the whole time."
Despite telling Cameron he was breaking his AVO, he didn't care. His mother sat with him until her husband came home at 5pm.
"After a little while he got up and broke a back scratcher with his legs, I said 'anymore behaviour like that and you're out, if you can't control behaviour you can't stay here'," she said.
"Rick came home and saw his car and nearly had a heart attack, he said he didn't know what he'd see, thought there would be blood everywhere and I'd be dead.
"That's the sort of boy our son had become."
Since Cameron had come home, that indicated to Ms Lean he wanted help but didn't know how to ask for it.
"He said he wanted McDonald's so I said 'Alright, as long as I can take you up to the hospital so that someone can see you and give you medication to help your feelings'," she said.
The two of them went up to the hospital and Ms Lean managed to get a doctor to come down and talk to Cameron in the car.
Six minutes later the doctor hopped out of the car and said Cameron needed to be admitted immediately because he was "psychotic".
"I said good luck with that, if that happens I've betrayed his trust, so he came back home and stayed the night," she said.
The next day Cameron exploded telling his mother he was going to do something drastic.
"He stormed out of the house, and he shouldn't have been driving but he kicked Rick's car before getting into his own and driving it up the street and back into my garden at the front of the house," she said.
"He started swearing at me, so I rang the police and then they went on a police chase, I don't know how he never wrapped himself around a tree."
Cameron managed to evade police to go and buy a packet of different coloured knives.
"He pulled up in front of Rick who was on the street and asked him what colour he wanted, his voice would just go demonic," she said.
Eventually with the help of her husband the police were able to get a jump on Cameron and get him into the Dubbo mental health ward.
According to Ms Lean Cameron's goal in this adventure was suicide by cop.
System failure
Cameron was put into the mental health ward for 11 days to be medicated and made stable enough to return to police custody.
He was also going back and forth to different court dates.
"Cameron had a community correction order, part of which was to stay with his parents and seek medical help," she said.
This is the time when he should have been sent to a rehab facility.
"The biggest missed opportunity," she said.
Cameron was heavily sedated and would spend most of his days sleeping, watching television or going for drives with his parents. No access to illegal drugs
"We would go and see the psychiatrist but Cameron wouldn't do any talking," she said.
After six months Cameron started to come good, but it soon came crashing down again.
"He wanted to put in his resume and I was so happy for him, he was a clever boy who could do anything with a car," she said.
Cameron soon got a job at a motor mechanics, where he started on a Monday.
By Wednesday lunch time he had called Ms Lean yelling expletives and claiming that they were asking him to do things he could no longer perform.
"His memory was shot," she said.
After the "worst nine months" of his life, in Cameron's words, he got a job, accommodation and moved back to Newcastle.
Within three months he was back on weed, and other drugs, lost his job, accommodation and living in storm water drains.
Court did nothing
With a string of court cases in Dubbo and Newcastle, Ms Lean believes he should have been heard in a drug court.
"There wasn't one here in Dubbo, even a solicitor said he was a loose canon. At one court date, Cameron told me he was going out the front of the court to jump into oncoming traffic so I told the police who stopped him," she said.
"He then screamed that you can't trust your family in front of everyone."
Having a drug court is the first step into getting help.
- Carolyn Lean
Ms Lean said that potentially some of this could have been stopped if just one magistrate had said he needed to be put in rehab and get clean.
"I wrote to a Newcastle magistrate seeking his assistance at Cameron's court appearance to address his mental health issues, but he never acknowledged my letter," she said.
Cameron never made that trial.
"To constantly see your child deteriorating to the point of no return, I thought going through court system would get help for him, but it was the wrong court system," she said.
"Having a drug court is the first step into getting help."
In 2018 Cameron made a plan to sell his Lexus for cash, before purchasing drugs and selling them to the people in Cobar.
"He said they needed them, he was unstable mentally, and he wrote the plans on paper, and some of the words were just illegible," she said.
By this time, Cameron appeared not to be on drugs, but his mental state was of great concern.
He came to Dubbo to sell the car, so he spent most of the day getting it up and running.
"He drove it like a frustrated angry person, and someone reported him to the police. When they arrived, the prospective purchaser freaked out and left," she said.
"That was the icing on the cake."
Final moments
Ms Lean was in Taree after her mother had died when she got a call from her husband that Cameron was staying at a friend's property out of town.
"We didn't even know he was in town," she said.
A family friend went to check on Cameron but was too afraid to enter the property, seeing him running around the house.
At 4.36pm, Cameron killed himself.
Ms Lean knows that specific time because Cameron recorded the event on his phone.
Mr Lean decided to attend the property to check up on his son, keeping his wife on the phone for safety.
"He's done it, that's what my husband was saying, he's done it," she said.
"I was five hours away and couldn't help, I don't even remember driving back here."
The Newcastle Coroner's report advised there were no drugs or alcohol in Cameron's system at the time of his death.
Dubbo needs a rehab
Ms Lean said she was happy people were finally speaking out about getting the rehabilitation centre.
"Without support from people who can help, you are left wandering in the dark, we knocked on doors, we kicked doors down to get there but we couldn't get in," she said.
"These rehab centres need to be controlled and people don't want to go to rehab, but they will go if it's a court order."
Ms Lean said that getting over addiction needs to come from the person, because "you can't stop them being an addict".
"There are so many flaws in the system, and no one else should ever go through what we went through."