Finance Minister Katy Gallagher reveals taking antidepressants after personal tragedy

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher says she took antidepressants and had “serious psychiatric interventions” after the death of her fiance while she was pregnant in the 1990s.

Speaking on former prime minister Julia Gillard’s A Podcast of One’s Own, Gallagher is the first politician currently in office to talk about taking medication for her mental health after Scott Morrison revealed he took anti-depressants while he was prime minister in 2021.

In 1997, a then 27-year-old Gallagher was pregnant with her first child when her fiance, Brett Seaman, was killed while riding his bike when an unlicensed woman in her 80s hit him while driving her car at over 100km/h.

Gallagher told Gillard on the podcast, which was published on Thursday, that the transition was life-changing and the period of piecing her life back together was traumatic.

“[I] had in the end, you know, some pretty serious psychiatric interventions. I really did go into the bottom of the bottom,” she said.

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Gallagher said it took a doctor telling her “you’re going to have a baby in six weeks, and you’re not going to be able to care for it” for her to get “back together”.

“I thought, ‘I can’t now lose the baby’. And so that, that moment just that one line, that clarity. I thought right, this is for real now. I’ve got to get myself back together,” she said.

“I started taking antidepressants, which … pulled me out of the kind of hole I was in, and by the time Abby [Gallagher’s daughter] was born, there was no one who was going to take that baby from me.”