Andrew Robb - Depression Disclosure

Depression Disclosure

On the 19th of September 2009, in Laurie Oakes’s column in The Australian Newspaper, Robb disclosed that he was stepping down from the opposition front bench for three months to address a form of depression brought on by Diurnal Variation, which is typically experienced as positive mood variation (PMV - mood being worse upon waking and better in the evening). Robb disclosed that, since adolescence, he had suffered depression for several hours each day in the morning.

The following week, Robb said in an interview with 3AW's Neil Mitchell that he had found "doing things increasingly more difficult, I could be taking on more responsibilities especially in a public sense and decided to confront it a few weeks ago. Rang Jeff Kennett and within three days he had me in front one of the best professionals in the state and this guy said you know you’ve had a problem for fifty years, you’ve had it for fifty years but he said it was fixable, which was fantastic." Robb was publicly praised as doing a brave thing for revealing a private matter and personalising it, thus sending messages to the community that if they might be going through a similar thing it could be addressed.