"He would light up the room,'' Liane Drummond said.

"He was funny, he was energetic, he was quite charismatic. He was like the sun, radiating energy.''

Liane and her husband Tony have been in Canberra this week, meeting with federal politicians about funding shortfalls for mental health.

Mrs Dummond's beautiful son, David, - "Sunshine" - took his own life in Melbourne on October 9, 2016.  He was 28. Her only child.

Mrs Drummond and her husband Tony, with whom she has two step-children, decided to channel their grief into action. On October 9 last year, on the first anniversary of David's death, they set off from their home in Chillingham in northern NSW, planning to walk 10,000km, ending in Melbourne.

Their "Walk for Sunshine" included advertising on their support bus the number of days they had been walking and the number of estimated suicides as each day of their year passed.

By the time they reached Melbourne on the second anniversary of David's death earlier this month, there would have been an estimated 3128 deaths by suicide in Australia during the year.

"We wanted to do the walk to raise awareness to the broader community around what the numbers are for those who didn't know and to just hear stories, to just hear what other experiences were. And we didn't have to go looking for them," she said.

"People would come up to us whether we had the van at a supermarket or a free camp or a caravan park. We've heard an enormous amount of stories.''

Mrs Drummond, a nurse, said David had his first mental health episode when he was 14 when he needed a term off school, saw health professionals and went on medication.

"He was quite vocal about not wanting to be here, even then,'' she said.

"I sought services straight away and he seemed to do well and got off the anti-depressants and was engaged with life. And then at age 23 he rang me and said he needed help. He had had a suicide attempt and failed.''

The family assumed someone in that situation would receive immediate help. But what they quickly discovered was a severe lack of in-patient beds for people facing a mental health crisis. David would instead have to be supervised around-the-clock at home by his parents for two weeks, with twice daily visits by medical professionals. After that finished, David attempted to take his life again. He was admitted as a mental health patient and discharged a day later. He never accessed the public health system again.

The Drummonds met in Canberra this week with Health Minister Greg Hunt, shadow health minister Julie Collins, the Greens mental health spokeswoman Rachel Siewert and Assistant Minister for Health Ken Wyatt. They hope the approach to mental health funding can be bipartisan and the blame for any shortfalls not bounced between states and the Commonwealth.

"There's a $90 billion health budget - mental health gets five per cent and yet it's 15 per cent of the burden of our mental health system. I want to know why," Mrs Drummond, 56, said.

"Immediately, I think we need more inpatient beds. They can do that tomorrow. They actually need to chose to put the money in there.

"In the meantime, they can be working out the models of care to bridge that gap. But there needs to be that service delivery so the crisis patients have somewhere to go. Because there is nowhere. There is nowhere."

Mrs Drummond said she heard many heartbreaking stories on their trip of people whose lives had been shattered by the suicide of a loved one.

"But I've also heard good stories. I've heard stories about people who have had appropriate, timely intervention and they are so glad that they are so here. This is after a suicide attempt. They are so glad to be here. And I've heard that time and time again."

Two days after her son's death, Mrs Drummond suffered a heart attack. She tells that story "not so people feel sorry for me" but because she received excellent immediate medical care that wasn't available to her son who was facing an equally life-threatening condition.

"We're failing. We're failing them," she said.

"